EDIT: Title updated to better reflect viewpoint of the article.

As we approach the release of The Grid, a brand new tool that claims to produce "websites that design themselves" with little to no human interaction, there's been a lot of buzz in the web design community about how good it's really going to be. Is it going to put us out of a job? Is it going to make clients more design aware? Is it going to be useful for us?

Reactions have ranged from excitement and curiosity to complete skepticism, and some of the more negative ones reiterated the point that a machine will never be as good a designer as a human designer is. While that might be true (we can't know yet), I'd like to show why for the client, and for the client's bottom line, that doesn't matter at all.

1. It's Not About What The Grid Is, It's About What It Represents

The main reason I suspect so many designers are getting up in arms about The Grid is the fact that it represents a bold, aggressive effort on part of a few designers and developers towards something that, if perfect, would immediately put us all out of a job. It also represents a large step in the direction that started rearing its head some three or four years ago, when the first high-quality Wordpress website templates started popping up on ThemeForest. To this day there are designers who hate on the templates, arguing that originality is king when it comes to web design. But is it?

Too many designers often forget that interaction design is all about familiarity, and that the ultimate goal is ease of use. The reason why high-quality website templates thrived is that, for the first time, a client could invest a fraction of the price of a hand-coded website and get a high-quality product that would look familiar to the user and require no learning curve to navigate. Some designers and agencies embraced it and immediately starting adopting the templates, taking a pay cut per project but getting more projects with the saved time, but others foolishly tried to argue that artisanal code was, for some reason, "better".

If this sounds familiar, it's because it is. Henry Ford showed us decades ago that, when products and services become commodities, standardization becomes the new grail. We've been seeing a clear "Fordization" of websites, and although so many of them started to look the same (partly due to trends as well), they all looked great. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, a good number of small businesses were now able to afford a website for the first time.

But from a designer's standpoint, that transition also marked the beginning of the end of our chokehold on clients on the grounds of technical expertise. I say beginning because, for the most part, a client still had to pay a designer and/or developer to customize a Wordpress template into a professional, branded website. That might no longer be the case, and for us it means that...

2. We Have To Step Up Our Game

I've recently read an article about The Grid on a web design blog. It reeked of desperation but it did make one good point: The Grid doesn't know (or claim to know, in spite of what that writer might think) how to strategize. It can't define your goals for you. A Grid website can't know by itself if it even has a reason to exist, from the business' perspective.

The rise of The Grid is a wake-up call for every web designer that is still holding on to software and execution. We can no longer afford to be technicians, we have to once and for all become problem solvers. The next item on every web designer's to-do list should be to become a marketer as soon as possible, before the floodgates are opened and 90% of our client base no longer needs us.

The Grid doesn't know a website's audience as we do. We have to strategically know what tone to set, we have to know what results our design needs to bring and why they matter, so that we can set the machine off in the right direction. Should The Grid live up to its promise, all our HTML/CSS/JS skills won't save us once the AI is doing the heavy lifting. And it will eventually do all of the heavy lifting, because...

3. The Grid Is Only Going To Get Better

The article I mentioned before went as far as to hilariously preemptively accuse The Grid of probably not outputting good code. This is a classic case of technician's elitism. Why would it matter to a client if a well-designed, search-engine-optimized website has good code underneath the hood or not? Code is a machine language, in a perfect world we wouldn't even have to deal with it at all!

The Grid is very overtly a tool for clients, not for designers. A client doesn't need beautifully W3C-compliant, semantic code. A client needs results. A Grid website (and its code) does not have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough. And most importantly, good-enough Grid websites continually optimize themselves, A/B testing thousands of variables. No human designer can sustainably do that.

But even if The Grid turns out not to live up to its hype, the main takeaway here is that AI designers are only going to get better over time. The Grid will probably be buggy and suffer several growing pains, like all new software does - it doesn't matter, because with continuous use, it's a matter of a few years before technical web designers are no longer needed by the vast majority of our current client base.

I don't blame web designers for being angry - we're watching an entire profession faced with obsolescence before it even had a chance to mature. But it serves us no purpose to huff and puff about it, no more than it served the horses who might have gotten angry about the first cars. Web design has been getting standardized for a while now and we can no longer afford to have our blinders on - if we want to stay relevant, it's time to accept the future and become business specialists, really become the problem solvers we were claiming to be all along.

Are you afraid of The Grid? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.