Let’s Not Forget About the Joy

By Barbara Croatto • January 2026

Spend five minutes in any designer community right now, and you’ll see the same thing: fatigue, frustration, people wondering what the hell happened to this industry. The landscape feels crowded and noisy. Work is unpredictable. Competition is global. The pace is brutal.

Yeah, we know.

But somewhere in all that noise, we’ve lost track of something that actually matters: the joy of making things.

I’m talking about that moment when something just clicks. You’re sketching, pushing pixels, adjusting a curve, prompting an idea, and suddenly the work comes alive. That little jolt that hits you square in the chest. That’s it. That’s the thing.

And here’s what I keep coming back to: the tool has never mattered.

In 1989, I was hired by an ad agency to figure out their new Mac II. At that point, I had never worked on a computer before. They’d bought the thing and had no idea what to do with it, so I sat down with PageMaker, Freehand, Illustrator 1.1, and the very first Photoshop. It felt like discovering fire. A whole world is opening up.

Fast-forward to 2023, and Adobe Firefly gave me that same feeling. Not because it replaced anything, but because it sparked something, curiosity, experimentation, that “what if I try this?” energy that every designer knows. Then Bing, then eventually Midjourney, Runway, Google Studio, all of it. Same rush. Different decade.

AI, pencils, Procreate, a 4B graphite, layout grids, Wacom tablets, it doesn’t matter. Tools evolve. The creative fever stays exactly the same. The joy doesn’t come from the device. It comes from what the device unlocks.

And that joy matters, especially now. Because here’s what I’m seeing: young designers coming out of college with strong portfolios and solid skills, but struggling to find their footing. The gap between what’s taught in Visual Communication programs and what the market actually needs keeps widening. New tech moves fast, and adapting slowly isn’t really an option anymore. The market doesn’t wait.

That’s the trap, isn’t it? You might be a brilliant typographer, but if you need to eat and pay rent, you end up in a corporate environment that uses just two fonts. That’s a prison sentence if you let it be. But finding joy within those four walls? That’s a skill. Push the boundaries. Open your mind. Invest in yourself. The job doesn’t define your creativity; it’s just a job.

You’re a creative person even when paid work is thin. You’re a creative person, even when the industry shifts faster than you can keep up. And you’re still a creative person when the work isn’t what you imagined it would be.

What matters is the spark, whether it comes from drawing, coding, animating, or prompting an image and feeling your brain light up the same way it did thirty years ago.

The world is noisy. The industry is evolving at warp speed. But the creative spark? It’s still ours. And it still knows how to find you.