How graphic designers can weather an industry on the rocks

Of all the statistics It’s Nice That has encountered on graphic design in recent years, one stopped us in our tracks. According to the 2025 Future of Jobs Report – which surveyed 1,000 employers, representing more than 14 million workers – the World Economic Forum predicts that “graphic designer” will be one of the fastest-declining jobs between 2025 and 2030. (This is a significant change from the 2023 edition of this report, when graphic designers were considered a moderately growing job.)

And it’s not just the job market – uncertainty is rippling across multiple aspects of a designer’s work. Practically speaking, the rise of new digital formats like VR and AR, alongside ever-evolving design programs and AI-driven tools, means designers must constantly expand their skill set to keep up with client and market shifts. But even as a creative practice, uncertainty manifests in design just as strongly. Graphic trends now tear across visual culture with greater speed, leaving designers faced with an additional pressure as they sit down to work: be original, but make sure your work caters to Instagram’s ever-shifting taste.

Today, there is one thing we can be certain of: the design industry itself is on uncertain ground. This is the focus of New Rules: Navigating design’s unfixed future, a collaboration between It’s Nice That and WePresent, and the third instalment of WePresent’s New Rules series, which looks at creative industries in flux.

While embarking on this work together, we asked ourselves: Where is guidance most needed? Which areas are designers typically expected to navigate on their own? For us, these areas lay in the input side of a designer’s workflow – the behind the scenes, often messy process of working things out.

The areas we identified were: research, exploring what ‘good’ research looks like in an era where social media serves as our collective reference library; trends, investigating how to stay abreast of them; and new roles, offering designers some insights into navigating an evolving job market.

Then, we took these topics to the experts. For job advice, we could think of no better career counsellor than Erik Carter, the graphic design force who has art-directed for The New York Times, designed for MTV, and continues to work across digital art, book design and teaching. For insights into staying trend-proof and safeguarding originality, we spoke to Brent David Freaney, founder of Special Offer, the studio behind Brat, one of the buzziest design moments of 2024. We even collaborated with graphic designer and art director Shamma Buhazza to create a Venn diagram on surviving self-doubt in the age of trend culture.

On the research front, we had the privilege of exploring the references of three of our favourite design studios – House of Gül, Wedge and Little Troop – to better understand how research informs their final outputs. Meanwhile, a Q&A with Maya Man delves into how designers can find meaningful visual references in the digital era.

The result, we hope, functions almost like a manual. The idea is not to condense topics that are nuanced and complex, but to gain concrete advice on basic questions in a moment of great change. By looking closely at how leading designers work, we also invite you to interrogate their processes, to follow in the footsteps of the rule-breakers featured and ask one of the most fundamental questions for designers working in the industry today: what are we all working towards?