Design giant Neville Brody once proclaimed that "graphic design is dead;" when asked to clarify, he made the astute observation that to be a designer is to be “post-discipline.” In other words, in the fast paced digital age, a designer has to be capable of switching mediums and fields based on what best fits the task, and thus there is no single identity of a designer anymore.

This certainly matches with my experience. On the one hand, not only are designers expected to do more tasks, but the tasks are increasingly multi-disciplinary themselves. While working with clients, I've done logo design, motion graphics, web design, and more. This makes it hard to identify as a "designer;" what exactly does a designer necessarily do, after all? But on the other hand, while designers must know more tools, those tools are more accessible due to their the increased speed and ease of use. This means that designers can do more, and provide more value to clients with the same amount of time and energy. A designer today can design social content, build a website, and populate it with animations; before computers, it would have taken a similar amount of time to manually kern type with metal letters. Ultimately, advances in technology don’t make the designer obsolete, but rather make them faster, more effective, and a better deal for the clients.