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\n At the beginning of the summer, Figma, the popular design platform, hosted a funeral for design. \u201cCome pay your respects,\u201d the company posted<\/a> on X, inviting visitors to a pop-up on Rivington Street in New York City. Attendees found a site adorned with funereal flower arrangements and received black hats that read \u201cDesign Is Dead.\u201d On Instagram, the company posted, \u201cwe mourn design\u2014killed, according to X, approximately 847 times this year alone.\u201d\u00a0\n <\/p>\n \n The pop-up, part of a larger advertising campaign from Figma, came (at least in part) as a response to Claude Design<\/a>, Anthropic\u2019s new tool for creating visuals from presentation slides to interface prototypes. Before the release, Mike Krieger, Anthropic\u2019s chief product officer, resigned from Figma\u2019s board, putting the two companies on a collision course. (Anthropic\u2019s launch prompted a temporary 7% decrease in Figma\u2019s market cap.)\n <\/p>\n \n The \u201cIs this the end\u201d narrative has followed Figma, now considered an incumbent in the design tooling world, since its 2025 initial public offering. Despite 48% year-over-year revenue growth, its stock is still down roughly 80% from its all-time high, underscoring the uncertainty around how designers will work\u2014and with what tools\u2014in the AI<\/a> era.\n <\/p>\n \n Design has always been a strangely insecure profession, and Figma\u2019s tongue-in-cheek response tapped directly into the uncertainty around what the future of design looks like.\n <\/p>\n \n The existential dread started in earnest in 2021 when OpenAI launched DALL-E<\/a>, an image generator that could create realistic images from simple text prompts. DALL-E opened the floodgates and was quickly followed by other image generator products, from Midjourney to Adobe Firefly<\/a>.\u00a0\n <\/p>\n \n With each new advancement in AI, it can feel to designers like they are steadily marching toward the end of .\u00a0.\u00a0. something. If we\u2019re to believe the doomsday narrative, AI seems to signal not just the end of our jobs, but the end of design itself.\n <\/p>\n \n Yet as I\u2019ve spoken to leaders across design and AI over the past few months, the future of design feels less dire than our doomerist thinking leads us to believe. Besides, design has survived technological innovation many times before. Is this time really any different?\n <\/p>\n \n Read more on Fast Company Premium.<\/a>\n <\/p>\n \n A Fast Company Premium subscription offers readers full access to subscriber-only stories including exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design.\n <\/p>\n