I read a fun thing recently where someone said that the recent flood of designers in our industry learned how to use a specific tool. Now the tool is becoming obsolete, they said, and the designers are, too.

Whether the tool is becoming obsolete isn’t terribly relevant. I personally think there will always be some demand for hands-on making, for craft, for sitting in the thing and pushing pixels a little.

But the long-arc spirit of the argument is true. Tools become obsolete all the time. Do you know of any designers who still do everything in Photoshop? Visio? Right.

Progress comes for every design tool. They change every few years. If you associate design with using a specific tool, you will very shortly cease to be a designer.

Tools matter. They are also fungible. People work with dozens of tools over the course of a career. Because of the current pace of technology and shifts in business models, I suspect the rate of change will only increase over time. I work with five at once right now, and at least two of them are no longer being developed.

That’s because learning design has nothing to do with tools at all. It has everything to do with knowing the basic principles of color, typography, usability, layout, and cognitive science. When you learn those things, you can move from tool to tool with ease. In fact, you can learn how to learn a new tool.

I’m sure many of my readers have been around here for a long time and have been through many tools. But many others reading this have used one tool, period. If that sounds like you, and you were trained to believe that design means that thing, then it’s not too late to learn the fundamentals of design. We teach it, and there are books, too. Start now – so when the ground shifts, you’ll know how to move.