Everybody is a creative now. So what does that make us?

Title inflation is real

Fifteen plus years into this career, I've watched "designer" go from a specific discipline to a vibe. People with six months of Canva call themselves brand strategists. Someone runs an Instagram page for a year and lists "creative director" in their bio. I'm not gatekeeping. I'm noticing a pattern.

When a title is free to claim, the market stops paying for the expertise behind it. I've sat in pitch meetings where a client compared my rate to someone with a fraction of the experience because "they also do branding." On paper, same title. In practice, completely different skill set. But the client can't tell the difference from a title alone, and that's the problem. The title used to signal something. Now it signals availability.

Expertise is invisible

The gap between a 2-year designer and a 15-year designer doesn't show up in one deliverable. It shows up in what they don't do. The typeface they didn't pick. The layout they killed. The client request they pushed back on because it would've hurt the brand six months down the line.

Expertise is mostly restraint. And restraint makes terrible content, so nobody posts about it. Nobody screenshots the email where you talked a client out of a bad idea. Nobody makes a reel about the three hours you spent kerning a headline. The visible part of design, the final mockup, the before-and-after, is maybe 20% of the skill. The other 80% is judgment. And judgment only comes from years of getting it wrong first (I'm not embarrassed to admit I've fallen flat on my face, a countless times in my career 🤦🏽‍♀️).

Simple ways to stay on track

More creatives? Great. It's cool to have more people making things. But I really want more people willing to learn how to make things well. Not just the output. The process. The fundamentals. The boring reps that nobody posts about.

We skipped an entire generation of "learning how to walk" and went straight to running. Straight to the title, the portfolio, the personal brand. And we wonder why the work feels thin. What I want to see is more people who are okay being mentored. More people who seek out the designer with 20 years of experience and say "teach me what you know" instead of "watch what I can do." More people who understand that expertise isn't a weekend workshop or a 30-day challenge.

It's years of chopping wood and carrying water. Doing the unglamorous work over and over until the craft is in your hands, not just your head. The title will come. The recognition will come. But only if the foundation is real. And foundations are built slowly, quietly, one boring rep at a time. We need to make that cool again