Design Quick Fire Round - Job Titles, Email Design, and Why AI Made Us Less Proud Of Our Work

Nick's biggest newsletter open rate was fifty percent when his list was small. Now that it's grown, he's happy with thirty, and neither of them can fully explain why.

In this quick-fire episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick answer a stack of rapid questions on product design and careers, each in under five minutes. They cover why email and newsletter design remains such an underrated skill, why designers keep leaving the field entirely to open restaurants and ninja warrior gyms, and how AI has shifted the job from pushing pixels to writing planning documents and doing discovery work.

They also debate the statement "AI has made me faster but less proud of what I create," argue over whether job titles actually matter, and swap their favorite misconceptions people have about product design, before Tyler explains why he's stopped justifying his design decisions to stakeholders altogether.

In this episode you will learn:

🔸 Why email design is underrated, and how newsletter design differs for personal brands versus enterprise brands

🔸 What it means when your open rate drops as your list grows, and why click-through rate might matter more

🔸 Why some designers are leaving tech entirely to open restaurants and gyms, and what carries over with them

🔸 How AI has shifted design work from pushing pixels to planning and discovery

🔸 Whether "AI made me faster but less proud of what I create" is a fair trade

🔸 Why job titles matter more for a freelancer's SEO than for an in-house designer's ego

🔸 Why Tyler doesn't explain his design decisions unless he's pushed on it, and why that works

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