COOKED
The bulk of this job — wireframes, mockups, responsive layouts, component variants, hero images, HTML/CSS front-end assembly, design-system upkeep — is exactly the screen-and-pattern work generative tools now produce at usable quality and near-zero marginal cost. What resists is upstream: framing what the product should do, running usability research on real users, arbitrating between stakeholders, and owning conversion or accessibility outcomes. The modal worker here is a production designer on a marketing or product site, and that tier is compressing fastest; the strategy/research tier is smaller than the current headcount.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Producing a Figma mockup, generating component variants against an existing design system, hand-coding a responsive landing page from a comp, and cutting image assets are all now single-prompt or near-single-prompt operations, which is why this lands at 8 rather than mid-teens — the residual defensible work is moderated usability sessions, information-architecture decisions from ambiguous business goals, and WCAG remediation that requires testing with a screen reader on real content.
Fully desk- and screen-based. Everything happens in Figma, a browser, and a code editor; the only physical acts are handing a laptop to a participant during a usability test or checking a layout on a physical phone or tablet, which is why this is 2 and not 0.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no licence, no registration board, and no statutory sign-off — a client can hire an unlicensed contractor off a marketplace for the same deliverable, and even ADA/Section 508 accessibility exposure lands on the site owner or the agency's contract, not on the designer who drew the screen.
Some relationship component. Freelancers and agency leads with a book of repeat clients do sell the relationship, and stakeholder trust earned across design reviews is real, but the in-house production designer's Figma files get inherited by whoever is next and the work is judged on the artifact, not the author — hence 9 rather than the 14+ of a named consultant.
Meaningful discretion. Choosing a navigation model, deciding what gets cut from a checkout flow, or trading visual polish against page weight are genuine calls with revenue consequences, but they are made inside a brief, a brand system, and a PM's priority stack, and get overruled in review — real discretion, bounded scope, so 10.
Has AI actually changed your work?