I recently listened to a podcast about ageing designers. It reminded me of a conversation I had months ago over a glass of wine with a fellow designer. The topic stayed on my mind longer than expected, perhaps because it touches a question familiar to many designers of my generation.

We admire things that age well. Wine, furniture, even architecture gain value through time. Yet in the creative industry, ageing often feels like a disadvantage. Somewhere along the way, designers begin to sense an invisible expiration date, as if creativity were tied to youth.

At first glance, the reason seems obvious. The tools change quickly. Younger designers adapt faster, move effortlessly between platforms, and present their work with fluency across channels that did not exist when many of us started. Speed and visibility have become part of the profession itself.

But the podcast suggested something more uncomfortable: perhaps the issue is not age, but what the industry chooses to reward.

Much of what is celebrated today is execution. Speed. Output. Presence. These are visible qualities. They are easy to measure and easy to showcase. Experience is subtler. You notice it later.

Design, at its core, is not only about making things look good. It is about understanding problems before solving them. Over time, the work changes. An experienced designer does not necessarily produce faster, but begins to recognize patterns sooner. Decisions that once required exploration become instinctive. The question shifts from how to design something to whether it needs to exist at all.

This kind of thinking is harder to display. It happens in conversations, in restraint, in choices that remove complexity rather than add to it. Compared to the speed and abundance around it, it can almost go unnoticed.

As tools make everything faster, this kind of value might actually matter more. If tools and AI can generate endless variations, the real skill may no longer be producing options, but making sense of them. Judgment, taste, and context start to matter more than technical mastery alone.

Perhaps designers do not become less relevant with age. Perhaps the role simply evolves. Early in a career, energy and experimentation drive growth. Later, experience offers perspective, the ability to see beyond trends and toward consequences.

The podcast ended with a simple idea: designers do not age out of the industry. They become old only when curiosity stops.

And maybe that is the real question for those of us who have been practicing for decades. Not whether we can keep up with younger designers, but whether we can continue to stay curious enough to keep changing with the work itself.