Will Website Design Be Automated in the Future?

It’s 2021, shouldn’t we have flying cars and hoverboards? Shouldn’t robots be taking over the world by now? (Kidding!!) 

But in all seriousness, it is no secret that AI (artificial intelligence) is improving by leaps and bounds every day. We use AI to spell check, sort our emails, and operate support chats. AI is used to place social media ads, control commonplace apps, and throughout our smart homes. Artificial intelligence plays a huge role in automation and has been sneaking its way into most types of work. 

So what does this mean for website design? Will AI take over the website industry? Let’s explore!

Website Design vs Web Development

It’s important that we distinguish the difference between web design and development before we dive in. We have an entire blog post discussing the difference here: Web Design vs Development 

In a nutshell, web design encompasses colors, fonts, layout, and more while development is the backend coding portion of the website. Some aspects of web design and development are already experiencing automation. 

Site builders or page builder plugins now offer “codeless” web design, which in other words means AI takes care of the coding or “development” portion for us. Site builders handle a lot of the work on the backend and can be a big help with faster turnaround times. Although they are great tools for web designers, they lack human interaction and the ability to create custom designs from scratch. 

Read More: Why Website Design is Important?

Working With a Designer

For website design to be automated in the future, AI would need to become much more specialized and intuitive. Design trends are always rapidly changing, not to mention the creative side of design where trends are meant to be pushed and ideas created. 

With design and creativity, it’s not quite feasible to be recreated via automation. While some aspects can be automated, at the end of the day it’s just not the same!

An article by IBM claims creativity to be “the ultimate moonshot for artificial intelligence.” While algorithms can be tweaked and modified to push creative automation, it is possibly the most difficult human attribute to be recreated by a machine. 

There are certainly interesting projects surrounding the world of automation and AI. For example, this project with paintings created by AI. It’s an interesting idea that we could get all philosophical about, but we’ll move on.

Automation as an aide

At the end of the day, it’s just not feasible for design to be automated at this time. With automation tools being developed to ease the workload of designers, it really is the best of both worlds! AI and creativity is still a pretty extravagant concept likely not well understood by most individuals. 

We foresee automated design and development tools being used more so than automation replacing designers altogether. This makes the process faster and more efficient all while reducing costs. Humans have been and always will be the experts when it comes to the tastes and trends of other humans. This is the way culture and society work! 

As designers ourselves, we may have differing opinions than others – so we’d love to know, what do you think? Do you think creativity and innovation can be replicated and embodied by AI and automation? Let us know what you think!