Where the design jobs are in 2025
Generative AI—and the velocity of its evolution—is forcing every breed of designer to contemplate a future without them. Will Midjourney and DALL-E eliminate the need for graphic designers? Will Claude and Gemini obviate the UX lead? What happens to motion artists in a world where Sora supposedly becomes the newest auteur? We’re no sages. And we’re certainly not clairvoyant. But we can comfortably say that, even if an AI-driven design industry apocalypse is coming, it hasn’t arrived yet. Our second annual report on the state of the design industry draws from a dataset of 176,000 job listings we’ve gathered on Google Jobs (which consolidates listings from across the internet, including Indeed, LinkedIn, and regional job boards) from October 2023 to February 2025. They span several design disciplines: graphic, interior, game, urban, UX, product, and architectural. The clearest and perhaps most reassuring takeaway this year? Designers are still needed. Graphic and UX design job postings are flat from last year, game design postings are up, and urban design postings are way up. Only architects and product designers saw a dip, with postings for the latter down 24% from last year. So it’s not time yet to abandon that art or architecture degree in order to become a prompt engineer. Still, several things have definitely changed since our last report. Austin has become less of a magnet for architects and urban designers. Canva, software that had initially been met with skepticism among professionals in the industry even just a few years ago, is becoming a mainstay in the graphic designer’s arsenal. And UX designers are—hallelujah—gaining a bit more job security. Here’s what Fast Company found. MethodologyWe extracted jobs from the Google Jobs search module monthly from October 2023 to February 2025, resulting in 26,624 jobs when duplicates were removed. We used a combination of Gemini and manual tech token search to extract information on salary, company type, and software tool usage. The categorization of jobs as full-time or contract/internship and their geographic locations were contained as separate structured fields in Google’s data. Monthly and hourly salaries were standardized to yearly rates by multiplying the rate by 12 for monthly salaries, and by 2,080 for hourly salaries.This article is part of Fast Company‘s continuing coverage of where the design jobs are.
Generative AI—and the velocity of its evolution—is forcing every breed of designer to contemplate a future without them. Will Midjourney and DALL-E eliminate the need for graphic designers? Will Claude and Gemini obviate the UX lead? What happens to motion artists in a world where Sora supposedly becomes the newest auteur?
We’re no sages. And we’re certainly not clairvoyant. But we can comfortably say that, even if an AI-driven design industry apocalypse is coming, it hasn’t arrived yet.
Our second annual report on the state of the design industry draws from a dataset of 176,000 job listings we’ve gathered on Google Jobs (which consolidates listings from across the internet, including Indeed, LinkedIn, and regional job boards) from October 2023 to February 2025. They span several design disciplines: graphic, interior, game, urban, UX, product, and architectural.
The clearest and perhaps most reassuring takeaway this year? Designers are still needed. Graphic and UX design job postings are flat from last year, game design postings are up, and urban design postings are way up. Only architects and product designers saw a dip, with postings for the latter down 24% from last year. So it’s not time yet to abandon that art or architecture degree in order to become a prompt engineer.
Still, several things have definitely changed since our last report. Austin has become less of a magnet for architects and urban designers. Canva, software that had initially been met with skepticism among professionals in the industry even just a few years ago, is becoming a mainstay in the graphic designer’s arsenal. And UX designers are—hallelujah—gaining a bit more job security. Here’s what Fast Company found.
Methodology
We extracted jobs from the Google Jobs search module monthly from October 2023 to February 2025, resulting in 26,624 jobs when duplicates were removed. We used a combination of Gemini and manual tech token search to extract information on salary, company type, and software tool usage. The categorization of jobs as full-time or contract/internship and their geographic locations were contained as separate structured fields in Google’s data. Monthly and hourly salaries were standardized to yearly rates by multiplying the rate by 12 for monthly salaries, and by 2,080 for hourly salaries.
This article is part of Fast Company‘s continuing coverage of where the design jobs are.
