未来眷顾好奇者
The Future Favors the Curious
未来青睐充满好奇心的人
If you’re a designer in the market for a job right now, you probably feel behind the AI wave already, and you’re wondering if the skills you’ve honed in your career are even useful anymore. One of the benefits of being an oldster in this field is that you begin to see patterns in everything, and I’m here to tell you that this pattern has happened many times before and there is a clear way through it as a designer.
如果你现在正是一名正在找工作的设计师，你可能已经感觉自己落后于AI浪潮了，并且你在怀疑自己职业生涯中磨练出的技能是否还有用。在这个领域作为一个老兵的好处之一是，你开始能看到万事万物中的规律，而我在这里要告诉你的是，这种规律以前已经发生过很多次了，而且作为一名设计师，有一条清晰的应对之道。
In 1995, halfway through college, I determined I was going to be a designer. At that time, 99.99% of “professional designers” had no experience designing anything for the internet. You could have tasked some of the most accomplished designers at the time — Jony Ive, Paula Scher, David Carson, Paul Rand, Massimo Vignelli — with creating a simple 468×60 banner ad and none of them would even know what you were talking about.
1995年，大学读到一半时，我决定成为一名设计师。那时，99.99%的“专业设计师”都没有为互联网设计任何东西的经验。你当时可以让一些最杰出的设计师——Jony Ive、Paula Scher、David Carson、Paul Rand、Massimo Vignelli——去制作一个简单的468×60横幅广告，他们中甚至没有人知道你在说什么。
Over the next five years, the world would discover what banner ads and the internet were, but most experienced designers stayed put in print, television, or whatever field they were already comfortable with. The designers who would go on to help shape the internet were from two groups:
在接下来的五年里，世界将逐渐了解横幅广告和互联网是什么，但大多数经验丰富的设计师仍留在印刷、电视或他们已经习惯的任何领域。那些后来帮助塑造互联网的设计师来自两个群体：
- People brand new to the industry
- 刚入行的新人
- People who looked forward to starting over and getting good at something new
- 那些期待重新开始并擅长新事物的人
I was somewhere between the two groups, having spent a few years in print but leaning more into a childhood love for new technology than anything else.
我介于这两类人之间，在印刷行业工作了几年，但更多的是出于对新技术的童年热爱。
Within a few years, the demand for internet-native designers exploded and created the thriving job market we have enjoyed almost uninterrupted until ...