September 2025
Designers, Why Do We Accept Being Treated as Children?
How Modern Software Development Demoted Designers to Doodlers
3 min read
Kasper Svenning
Designers, we have to talk. We shouldn’t accept a life of drawing pictures at the expense of real design work. Figma made us feel productive, but it stripped us of authority. It’s time to stop decorating and start building.
Just Make It Pretty
Being a designer in software development is super weird. On one hand, you feel like you’re shaping your product’s future by contributing ideas, refining flows, and boosting aesthetics. On the other, you feel reduced to translating business needs into pixels for grumpy developers to implement.
It’s a strange place to be: caught between product managers, who decide what gets built, and developers, who actually build it. We’re handed problems and told to make them concrete, to apply our craft and give our take. At first glance, that sounds like design. In practice, it’s closer to translation than creation.
They don’t say it out loud, but we all hear it: “Just make it pretty.” We tell ourselves there’s more to the profession, but we accept the role. Everyone knows we don’t dictate the business or touch the code. It’s obvious — we’re not an authority, we’re a tool. We can crank out Figma frames all day, but we’re not defining the product. We’re decorating it. The real design work happens in the hands of developers, who confront the actual challenges.
Your Prototyping is a Lie
The problem is authority. We don’t touch the code, we don’t know how the product is built, and we often don’t understand the business behind it. That’s unique to software. In almost every other field, designers get their hands dirty to strengthen their authority: industrial designers carve foam models to test usability, fashion designers sew to test fit, and architects build scale models to simulate light.
“But I create prototypes all the time,” you might say. But here’s the thing: Figma and Lovable aren’t prototyping tools. They don’t let you make the product — they let you showcase a vision. Prototyping means putting a working version of your product in front of real users and iterating. In software, that work is done by developers. Designers, by contrast, produce silent, static versions of a living product — pictures that can’t speak for themselves.
That’s why the modern software designer is closer to a concept artist than a builder. You’re drawing to inspire or instruct, but you’re not shaping the product firsthand. And without creating, your feedback loop is broken. You can’t truly design an experience without feeling it, testing it, and iterating in the real medium.
How Design Tools Robbed Us of Authority
How did we get here? It wasn’t always this way. Before modern JavaScript frameworks, frontend developers cared about aesthetics and interaction. Designers and developers shared a language and often worked in the same codebase. As frameworks grew more complex, designers were pushed out. The barrier to entry became too high.
Then came design tools — Sketch, Adobe XD, and finally Figma. They promised empowerment but entrenched the divide. Figma doesn’t give designers authority — it pacifies them. It creates a comfortable playground where designers feel productive while their influence shrinks. The “handover” was born: a ritual where designers pass their drawings to developers, who then decide what ships and how it works. No wonder both sides are miserable.
Add to that the buzzwords of design thinking and prototyping, and the confusion deepens. Showing your Figma mockup to a handful of people isn’t prototyping — it’s dress-up. Real prototyping happens when users interact with a working product and you learn from the results. In software, that means building, shipping, and iterating. If you’re not part of that loop, you’re not prototyping — you’re daydreaming.
Reclaim Your Craft
So, how do we fix it? Stop waiting for permission. Designers must reclaim their seat at the table by engaging directly with implementation. That doesn’t mean becoming full-stack engineers, but it does mean taking responsibility for shipping. Use tools that let you build and publish real products — Framer, Webflow, Webstudio, or Nordcraft (which, full disclosure, I co-founded). These platforms collapse the divide between design and development, letting designers own not just the vision, but the execution.
Because here’s the truth: you don’t get a seat at the table — you take it. Influence is always up for grabs, but only if you’re willing to claim it. By building, shipping, and learning firsthand, you close the feedback loop and move from decoration back to design. Real design.
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