Elizabeth Goodspeed on the rise of the designer as influencer

Professionally speaking, I’ve managed to avoid my front facing camera for years. Twitter? Fine. Are.na? Of course. But short-form video always felt like a line I was hesitant to cross. Recently, however, It’s Nice That asked me to record a promo clip for one of these columns. I hated it. I was worried about my posture, accidentally doing the millennial pause, and by the end of my fifth take, how to say hello normally. I worried I was overthinking it, which, obviously, I was. When I finally finished, I prayed they would not ask me to do another one.

Unfortunately, my reluctance to film myself is increasingly passé. Today, making work is only half the job of a designer; performing it is the rest. Designers are filming process videos at sunlit workstations, doing unsolicited logo redesigns, and sharing spon-con for Adobe. The audience isn’t just seeing what gets made, but who’s making it, and how. Some of the bigger designer-cum-influencers are still taking client projects, but many don’t need to – they’ve already monetised their audience directly through Patreons, Substacks, monthly print subscriptions, and bespoke templates. Even for designers who aren’t chasing influencer status, there’s still pressure to make themselves part of the package. As Julien Posture wrote in his recent essay The Wisdom of Hot Men Making Shitty Art, “What happens when making an image and becoming one align?”

We all want to believe that the only thing that matters in design is work itself. And for a long time, that was more or less true (or at least easier to believe). In the early 20th century, the work of visual communication was largely split between commercial artists, illustrators, and printers. It wasn’t until the postwar period, driven by mass consumerism and corporate expansion, that graphic design began to solidify into its own discipline. Early modernist figures like Massimo Vignelli, Josef Müller-Brockmann, and Paul Rand (the closest person our industry has to Don Draper), operated within the cultural posture of architects and academics: method-driven system-builders and rational problem-solvers. They were public in a professional sense, via publishing, teaching, or speaking, but not quite public personalities. They could show up in an AIGA Journal photograph, but otherwise mostly stayed behind the curtain.

By the 1980s, the designer and their work were becoming more entangled. In contemporary art, the artist had become the subject. Chris Burden and Marina Abramović used their bodies as instruments in performance, Cindy Sherman staged elaborate self-portraits, and Nan Goldin exhibited photographs of her intimate circle in gallery settings. Meanwhile, celebrity talk shows, lifestyle brands, and self-promotion as entertainment were entering the mainstream. Design absorbed some of that same ethos, giving designers room to position themselves as cultural figures rather than just technicians. Tibor Kalman used Colors magazine to push his personal politics, while April Greiman layered her nude body into an early digital composition for Design Quarterly. If the early modernists sold method and mastery, this next wave began inserting personal stakes more clearly; client briefs still set the parameters, but designers were claiming more space within them.

When Stefan Sagmeister launched Sagmeister Inc. in 1994, he announced it with a photo of himself wearing only socks, plus a black redaction bar which implied that starting his own studio had given him a bigger dick. 1990s misogyny aside, the image captured where design culture was tilting: hiring a designer meant buying into their mythology as well as their output. Five years later, for an AIGA conference poster, Sagmeister had an intern carve the event details directly into his torso with an X-Acto knife and photographed the result. Eat your heart out, April Greiman – this was pure exhibitionism, designed to shock. James Victore built a parallel persona around outlaw bravado and brooding masculine genius; Neville Brody positioned himself as a renegade theorist, merging experimental typography with academic weight. These were auteur figures with a rockstar attitude. The client still signed the check, but the designer’s name was part of the product.

In 2012, when Jessica Walsh joined Sagmeister as partner to form Sagmeister & Walsh, he marked the occasion with another naked photo (quelle surprise). But in 2012, the duo added something new: a 24/7 livestream of their office on the studio website. You could now watch interns eating lunch and designers standing at the plotter in real time. In 2019, Public Works launched a similar livestream project, with a different creative team streaming their workspace each month. The studio itself had become the site of ongoing performance, collapsing personal life, process, and promotion into a self-reinforcing brand.

Other designers ran with similar instincts. 40 Days of Dating, a joint project by Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman created in 2013, was presented as a kind of art-directed relationship experiment: two friends, both single, agreed to date each other for 40 days (40 days being the purported time needed to build a habit). The project was presented through highly polished daily updates with lush photography, motion graphics, custom lettering, and a parade of commissioned work from other artists – all accompanied by alarming candid journal entries from both parties about the dates they were going on. It wasn’t exactly a design project in the traditional sense, but it was unmistakably design-led; the relationship itself was the content, but it was design that made it viral. As with the rise of reality TV in the 2010s, personal disclosure became parasocial currency. And, just as Keeping Up With The Kardashians did for Kim, 40 Days of Dating also launched Walsh into a much larger public spotlight.

Design couple Wade and Leta explored a comparable sensibility in their Complements project in 2015, which restaged cringey couple photos as surreal, hyper-stylised self-portraits. The images’ sharp and clever art direction was second only to the relationship itself. The fact that Wade and Leta were really a couple gave the project its narrative center; the images offered public access to their private life (and, as with Sagmeister, featured a not insignificant amount of nudity).

Elsewhere, personal data itself became fodder for designers. Long before the era of Spotify Wrapped and Strava PRs, information designer Nicholas Felton’s Feltron Reports (2005-2014) tracked his meals, conversations, music choices, and much, much, much more to create multi-page, one man “annual reports.” Dear Data (2015), by Stefanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi, turned that same impulse into a year-long correspondence of hand-drawn postcards documenting small, daily details (everything from laughter to the number of decisions made on a given day). Designers were dabbling in memes, too. Adam J. Kurtz (i.e. AdamJK) built an entire practice around self-aware humour, creative anxiety, and confessional sincerity, further collapsing the line between designer and audience.

As someone who was in art school during the 2010s, it’s hard for me to overstate how much the website Dribbble, launched in 2009 as a kind of invite-only social network for designers to share work-in-progress, impacted the scene as well (NB: it’s now yet another portfolio hub). Users’ close crops of lettering and cutesy iconography normalised another kind of performance: process as public content. WIP was now a kind of soft production, and uploading half-baked concepts and early explorations became a genre in itself. The finished product – if it was made at all – mattered less than the ongoing stream of updates.

Back in 2025, that stream of updates has turned into a deluge. Carefully curated voyeurism has given way to casual self-exposure. Designers film themselves in their bedrooms and running errands, narrating design decisions and venting about clients along the way. Just as remote work expects us to perform constant busyness, design influencing demands a continuous performance of creative output. Influencing may technically be less private now (there’s less dick pics, at least) but the pressure to turn oneself into constant content can be more invasive in the way that it chips away at the boundary between person and practice. Brands have jumped in on the trend, too. Where once a designer might have been hired to create packaging or campaigns behind the scenes, many are now brought forward as faces of collaborations – they’re photographed in their studios and interviewed about their process as part of launch. The designer’s body, personality, and public profile become a commercial asset. Like the long-running observation about dogs resembling their owners, designers are seemingly expected to even look like their output – to have a cohesive “personal brand”. Take Wade and Leta, now producing large-scale sculpture, who often appear in the documentation of their installations, coordinated in outfits that match the work itself. A designer’s clothing, home, and even children (see also: every posts where people refer to their unborn child as “their new intern”) are potentially on display – fair game to be enmeshed with one's professional identity.

Of course, there’s a reason so many designers are filming themselves mid-project: visibility pays! Client budgets have shrunk, AI has automated production, and entry-level jobs are harder to land. A public presence can help attract clients, as well as open the door to additional revenue streams that aren’t tied to anyone else’s brief. Having a public voice helps position a designer to hold onto the parts of the field AI hasn’t eaten yet; judgment, taste, and opinion are all harder to automate (though plenty of people are certainly trying!) For many, especially younger designers or those without a formal pedigree or multi-page resume, public-facing content can act as bootstrapped credentials. This, however, also creates obvious openings for grifters. Many “designer” influencers barely do, or show, any actual design work at all. Instead, they build credibility by performing proximity to design, like posting brand guidelines from major rebrands or reacting to industry news like a hovering art director. Online, it’s easy to look like an authority on design without making very much of it.

Influencing can seem like a good, low-lift side-hustle at first. Most designers already have tons of unused work and in-progress sketches to share. Why not just post it and see what happens? But anyone who’s ever had to write captions or cut reels knows that making content is, in fact, harder than it looks. The more energy that goes into showcasing work, the less time there is to actually make work, even if you want to. “Influencing” can quickly become a time suck. After all, the platforms are built to pull you in that direction. We’ve all seen designers apologise for tacking selfies onto work announcements to boost engagement; algorithms prioritize faces, not fonts. The more you perform, the more visible you become, and the more performance the system demands (ad infinitum).

Often, there isn’t even much audience to perform for. Designers narrate process updates to a few hundred followers, hoping visibility will eventually turn into work. Everyone is nudged into micro-influencing, even when the audience barely exists. Besides, the system isn’t neutral. Most algorithms replicate familiar structural biases around race, gender, language, class, and desirability – biases well documented across all social media. The tools that amplify visibility often reproduce the very inequities they pretend to flatten. For some designers, showing more of themselves creates opportunity. For others, it invites harassment and tokenisation. The model favours people who are extroverted, fluent in English, or simply more willing and able to aestheticise their offices, their homes, and themselves. For international designers in the US, the stakes can be even higher: visa applications often hinge on awards, press, and public recognition. When it comes to the O-1 rubric, visibility is table stakes.

Designers aren’t exclusively to blame for any of this. Like chefs on TikTok or therapists posting Instagram reels, we’re simply adapting to the platforms available to us. For many of us, the shift was gradual—when I joined Instagram in 2011, it was a place for friends, not followers. The platform’s slow drift toward commerce and audience-building simply enmeshed our personal and professional presence, whether we intended it or not. Building a recognisable identity across social channels isn’t all bad either; it’s undoubtedly a great way to connect with peers, share what inspires you, and yes, to get hired! As someone who doesn’t live in a major design hub, I understand intimately the benefits of finding community online (case in point: I met my fiancé, an illustrator, on Twitter). But as more circle-building happens in public, the line between community and audience has started to blur in a way that makes me a bit itchy. For younger designers who’ve grown up inside these systems, sharing can feel natural, even expected. But handing over so much of yourself this early comes with stakes that may only become clear later. I already cringe at work I made when I was 20. I can’t imagine having full video commentary of myself explaining those choices still floating around too. For older designers, the pressure can feel even stranger. We’ve already given so much of ourselves to the internet – does it really need our faces, too?

It’s worth asking not just whether to post, but what kinds of exposure feel worth giving. Not every part of the creative process needs to be turned outward. Some of the most durable forms of creative community still happen offline in conversations, studios, classrooms, and in the kind of messy, shared spaces where you’re so engaged that you forget about your phone completely. If influencing has become one kind of professional insurance, protecting one’s creative self may need to become another. In the meantime: please like and subscribe.