What Do Designers Create in the Template Era?
Date
Dec 9, 2025
Classification
- Marketing/Branding/Planning/Design
#
- UI/UX Design
"You used a template?" So what? The essence of design is not the 'shell'.
🫑 3-Line Summary
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In an era where Figma and AI tools provide high-quality design resources, the mere fact that one "drew the screen by hand" is no longer a criterion for proving a designer's originality.
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The core of creation has now completely shifted from making visual 'form' to the realm of 'judgment,' which coordinates the user's flow and imbues the screen with order and meaning.
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Templates are tools that elevate the creative process to 'higher-order thinking' rather than hindering it; therefore, you must focus on the 'design' and 'interpretation' capabilities that tools cannot replace.
🥦 Insight
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Do you perhaps think that using templates means a designer is "getting away with the easy way out"? Or do you feel uneasy because you didn't draw it yourself? Not at all. The era of "who can carve the prettier button" is over.
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Lego blocks (templates) are already readily available. What matters is the 'blueprint' for 'what kind of castle' you build with those blocks. Using a template should not be something to be ashamed of; rather, it should signify that you have saved time spent on creating the form and dedicated it more to contemplating 'business logic' and 'user experience (UX).'
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From now on, if you answer "Because the template is pretty" to the question "Why did you design it this way?", you are an amateur; if you answer "Because this structure provides the optimal flow to prevent user drop-off," you are a professional. Even if you borrow the shell, fill it with your own 'soul (intention).'
— View original —
The role of the person who still remains
These days, both those just starting out in design and those with professional backgrounds are likely facing similar concerns.
These are issues such as exactly where what I created ends and what the tools created begins, and by what standard a designer can say they have 'created' something in an environment where templates and automation are increasingly prevalent.
In the past, the process of directly drawing the screen composition, assembling the structure, and designing interactions to match the flow would have naturally been considered creation. However, now that most UI patterns are already well-established and tools like Figma and Framer provide a certain level of quality as a default, the boundary between what I create and what the tool generates for me has become much more blurred than before.
The influence of templates is particularly significant. Regardless of the service structure, if you open a template, a suitable direction is already provided, and if necessary, you can quickly create a visually appealing screen simply by dragging and dropping components.
In an era like this, the phrase 'creating something new' does not merely mean differences in screen form or style, as it did in the past.
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