RIP design agency
The anti-design agency manifesto.
Hi friends,
These days, I rarely write essays like this anymore—but I fundamentally believe things are changing, and this is an important one to reflect on and write. My recent conversations have led me to believe this…
The design agency model is dead, whether you agree or not.
Why is nobody talking about how AI is going to kill 90% of design agencies
I hope you read this on (I kept this free—and I'd love to hear your comments).
This will be controversial, but read it with an open mind.
The Anti-Design Agency Manifesto
If you were in design a year ago, you remember the tradeoff. Clients wanted designs that were cheap, fast, and top quality—but you could only “pick two.” That was the rule, the tired cliché of agency decks.
But something has changed.
Today, with AI, that triangle is gone. Figma’s latest AI (alpha) can generate polished UI in seconds. MidJourney and Runway churn out visual concepts at unthinkable speed. Perplexity and ChatGPT help draft copy that doesn’t sound like lorem ipsum.
For the first time in history, clients expect all three—cheap, fast, and high quality. And frankly, so do designers ourselves.
I do too. The old game is over.
The End of the Agency Playbook
Most agencies were built for a pre-AI world. Their playbooks optimized for billable hours, endless revisions, and slow churn. They leaned on gatekeeping: referrals, conferences, and polished case studies hidden behind NDAs.
But talk to designers today, and you’ll hear the same frustration: the agency model is starting to feel like MySpace—still online, but frozen in time.
The Anti-Design Agency flips the script 180.
Speed: The new default
Most agencies take weeks to deliver wireframes, let alone pixel-perfect UIs. They justify it as “craft.” But when a founder can spin up a Notion site in 15 minutes and ship an MVP in Webflow by tomorrow, “craft” becomes a liability.
The Anti-Design Agency embraces AI as co-pilot. What used to take three weeks takes three days. Designers who once feared AI now wield it like Figma wielded Sketch—an accelerant, not a replacement.
Designers who don't flinch
Most agencies are still anti-AI, out of inertia. Their leaders cling to process because process is billable. But the next wave of designers? They grew up remixing TikTok edits with CapCut, prototyping with Framer AI, and tweaking prompts until the output looks better than Dribbble shots.
These designers don’t flinch when AI enters the room. They invite it in. The Anti-Design Agency recruits them first.
Open process, not gatekeeping
The agency model was built on opacity. You never saw the messy drafts—just the glossy case study on Behance. Clients came by word of mouth, and trust was built in closed rooms.
But the Anti-Design Agency is social-first. Design happens in public. IG reels of workflow breakdowns. TikToks showing prompts that went wrong (and then right). Threads dissecting how an MVP went from napkin sketch to app store in two weeks.
Trust is no longer bought with golf outings and referrals. It’s built by showing the work—live, messy, and fast.
A fairer price point
Agencies historically charged eye-watering retainers, justified by overhead and mystery. But with AI handling 60% of the grunt work, margins no longer need to rely on inflated pricing.
The Anti-Design Agency can charge less—without devaluing design—because efficiency creates breathing room. Ironically, this makes it more accessible to the very people who need design the most: early-stage founders, indie hackers, and small teams who’d otherwise be priced out.
The shift already happening
Look around and the cracks are showing. Canva’s enterprise push is eating into agency collateral work. Framer AI is being used by YC founders to bypass “design sprints.” On TikTok, designers with 50K followers are landing clients directly, skipping the agency altogether.
The writing is on the wall: design no longer needs middlemen. It needs speed, transparency, and adaptability.
Is this the future?
Yes. At least, I believe so.
Because the Anti-Design Agency isn’t really an “agency” at all. It’s a new species: a collective of designers who are fluent in AI, fast in delivery, open in process, and fair in pricing.
For startup founders, it means getting design that moves at startup speed. For designers, it means shedding the old agency baggage and working in the open, with tools that multiply output instead of slow it down.
The Anti-Design Agency is not a rejection of design. It’s a rejection of the old way design was sold.
Keep ignoring AI, and here’s what will happen: your timelines will look bloated, your proposals overpriced, and your process irrelevant.
Or—you can flip the script.
p.s. this is a thought piece, thanks, Tim Wijaya for jamming it with me. I’d love to hear your comments… let’s bring conversations into the industry.
(and if you know friends who are opinionated, send them this—get their thoughts).
Felix Lee
I teach young UI/UX designers and try to explain to them that “design” is about creating a product, not about designing an interface. Steve Jobs has a similar quote: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” The focus of what designers do is shifting. AI reduces the time it takes to create UI options, but it does not solve the problem of finding product-market fit. AI cannot resolve conflicts between different stakeholders when creating complex products. Facilitation skills are now much more important than before. The principles of collaborative design, which have been developed since the late 1960s as part of Scandinavian cooperative design, are relevant again: designers help create products or environments, but they are not the sole authors. I think this is the direction in which agency work and the work of designers will shift: less “doing” design, more working as experts, facilitators, and professional researchers.
Figma plugins generate polished UI in seconds.
Sorry but if this is your take then you might be a little detached from the actual design world. I encourage you to try the tools out there and then come back to this manifesto with a sense of what design really is and what it means to create PRODUCTION level design and applications.
Design adapts - If you’re not evolving your habits and processes then you’re not truly designing for the world around you.