Why I don't care if you're a senior or junior designer

I've been doing this for fourteen years. In that time, I've worked with designers at every level, from people fresh out of university to creative directors with decades on me. And the thing I keep coming back to is that the title on someone's LinkedIn profile tells me almost nothing about what it's like to work with them.

Senior designer. Junior designer. Lead. Associate. Principal. These labels exist for payroll, for org charts, for recruiters who need to filter applications. They serve a purpose. But that purpose has very little to do with the quality of someone's thinking or the standard of their work.

The title is not the work

The word 'amateur' comes from the Latin amator, meaning lover. It describes someone who does the work because they care about it, whether they're paid or not. I think about that a lot. The best designers I've worked with, at every level, had that quality. They were in love with the problem. The worst ones, also at every level, had stopped being curious somewhere along the way and were running on muscle memory.

I've seen designers two years into their career produce cleaner, more considered work than people with ten years of experience. Not because they were more talented in some abstract sense, but because they cared more about the details on that project, on that day. They asked better questions. They pushed back when the brief was vague. They didn't assume their experience would carry them through a problem they hadn't bothered to understand.

I've also seen people with 'Senior' in front of their name coast through projects on autopilot. Decent work, technically fine, but nothing that made you stop and think. The title had become a ceiling, not a floor. Once you've earned it, there's a quiet temptation to stop proving it.

None of this is a rule. Plenty of senior designers are extraordinary. Plenty of junior designers are still finding their feet. But the title alone doesn't tell you which one you're looking at.

What I actually pay attention to

When I work with someone, or when I'm looking at someone's work, three things matter to me far more than where they sit on a career ladder.

The first is the work itself. Not the portfolio highlight reel, but the decisions inside it. Why did they choose that typeface? Why is the layout structured that way? Can they explain the reasoning, or did they just follow a trend? The work tells you how someone thinks, and how someone thinks is the whole game.

And 'good taste' is not the exclusive property of experienced designers. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu spent years studying how taste is formed, and his conclusion was that it's shaped mostly by education, upbringing, and social environment, not by years in the industry. What we call 'good taste' in design is often just familiarity with a certain set of references, passed down through certain schools and certain circles. A designer from a completely different background might see things the rest of us miss, precisely because they weren't trained to look in the same direction.

The second is how they work. Do they communicate clearly? Do they ask for feedback before they need it, or do they disappear for two weeks and come back with something nobody asked for? Do they handle revisions without taking it personally? Process isn't glamorous, but it's what separates someone you want to work with again from someone you don't.

The third is who they are. This one is harder to articulate, but it matters. Are they honest when they don't know something? Do they give credit to other people's ideas? Are they the kind of person who makes a project better just by being in the room? You can't put that on a CV, but you feel it immediately.

Titles create strange behaviour

Here's what I think the real problem is. When you label someone 'junior', you're telling them, and everyone around them, that their opinion carries less weight. When you label someone 'senior', you're telling them their opinion carries more. Both of those things warp how people behave.

A junior designer with a good instinct will hesitate to speak up because they've internalised the idea that they haven't earned the right yet. A senior designer with a bad instinct will push through a weak idea because nobody in the room feels comfortable challenging someone with the title.

The hierarchy is supposed to help. It's supposed to create mentorship, structure, clarity about who makes the final call. Sometimes it does. But just as often it creates a room full of people performing their level instead of doing their best work.

Design professionalism has always functioned as a kind of gatekeeping. From medieval guilds to modern trade associations and design schools, there's been an infrastructure that decides who counts as a 'real' designer: awards, conferences, prestigious education, the right industry connections. That infrastructure has historically excluded far more people than it's included. Seniority titles are a softer version of the same thing. They create an inside and an outside, and the people on the inside stop questioning whether the boundary is in the right place.

And design has always been collaborative. The famous names in design history worked with large teams of assistants, interns, printers, and production staff who rarely got credit. We celebrate the individual, but the work was collective. Titles do something similar in smaller studios: they assign credit unevenly, making it harder to see who actually moved the project forward.

There's another thing happening right now that makes the seniority ladder feel even more fragile. The bottom rungs are disappearing. AI is automating the repetitive tasks that junior designers used to cut their teeth on: retouching, resizing, cropping, producing banner variations. The apprenticeship pipeline that justified the whole junior-to-senior climb is collapsing. If the way people learn the craft is changing this fast, the hierarchy built on top of it needs to change too.

The freelance perspective

I should be honest about where this view comes from. I'm a freelancer. I don't work inside a company with levels and promotion cycles. When a client hires me, they're hiring me for the work, not for a title. Nobody has ever asked me whether I consider myself a senior designer. They look at the portfolio, they talk to me for twenty minutes, and they decide whether they trust me with the project. That's it.

This probably makes me biased. I get that. But I also think it gives me a clearer view of what matters, because I've never had the label to hide behind. Every project is a fresh proof of whether I'm any good. That's uncomfortable sometimes. It's also clarifying.

What I'd say to a junior designer

Stop waiting for permission. If you have an opinion about the work, say it. The worst that happens is someone disagrees, and disagreement is how ideas get better. Your title doesn't determine the quality of your thinking. Your thinking determines the quality of your thinking.

The Design Justice network has a principle I come back to often: everyone is an expert based on their own lived experience, and everyone has something worth bringing to a design process. That applies whether you've been designing for two years or twenty. Your perspective is not less valid because it's newer. In many cases it's more valuable, because you haven't yet learned to ignore the things that experienced designers have stopped seeing.

And find someone who believes in you. Not a mentor in the formal, corporate sense. Just one person who sees what you're capable of before you've proven it publicly. That kind of belief is worth more than any title someone could give you. It opens doors that credentials alone never will.

Also, stop comparing your year two to someone else's year twelve. You're not behind. You're just earlier.

What I'd say to a senior designer

The title is not the finish line. If you've stopped being challenged by your own work, that's not a sign you've made it. It's a sign something has gone flat.

Stay curious. Stay uncomfortable. The moment you start relying on your title to do the talking, the work starts getting quieter.

If you take one thing from this

Moodymann, the Detroit producer Kenny Dixon Jr., has a line I keep coming back to: 'it ain't what you got, it's how you do it'. He was talking about music, about making something real with whatever equipment you have instead of waiting for the perfect setup. But it applies to design just as well. It doesn't matter what title you've got. It matters how you do the work.

Judge people by what they make, how they make it, and who they are while they're making it. Everything else is admin.