Burnout hits designers hard, but why it happens depends heavily on where you work. Freelancers and in-house designers experience creativity, pressure, and exhaustion in totally different ways — and understanding the differences helps us protect our energy, our craft, and our careers. Freelance Designers: Freelancers carry everything on their shoulders: design, marketing, client communication, billing, deadlines, revisions, and boundaries. The freedom is amazing, but the cost can be high. Irregular income creates pressure to say yes to everything. Clients bring unclear briefs, sudden direction changes, and scope creep. And since freelancers often work alone, there’s little feedback or collaboration to recharge inspiration. Burnout shows up as exhaustion, self-doubt, and feeling “on call” 24/7. Autonomy is high — but so is ambiguity. In-House Designers: Company designers have the opposite problem. Work is structured, deadlines are defined, and teams provide stability. But the pace and expectations can drain creative energy fast. Cross-functional pressure, shifting priorities, and the need to support product timelines often lead to overload. Creative direction is shaped by stakeholders, not always designers. Even though there’s more support, meetings, rigid processes, and limited autonomy can make designers feel boxed in. Burnout emerges from repetition, decision fatigue, and not having enough control over the work they’re responsible for. The Core Difference: Freelancers often burn out from too much freedom without structure, while in-house designers burn out from too much structure without freedom. One fights isolation and unpredictability. The other navigates politics and pressure. Burnout isn’t a personal failure — it’s a signal. And when we understand the environment we’re designing in, we can build better habits, boundaries, and systems that support our creativity instead of draining it. I have attached a checklist for you to review.

There's been a lot of discussion on our Community Calls over the past few months about Vibecoding / AI development, and a frequent question or request is for sharing of resources around: 1. Getting started 2. Best practice guidelines Let's use this to share any learnings, useful guidelines or tips about specific tools / agents to use.

Please share the best podcasts to follow (or specific podcast episodes) that you have found most valuable. Tip: Ideally share the YouTube version.

In last week's community call (21 Oct '25) the question was posed "What is the true value of Design?". Chani shared the following resource that can be a valuable reference to answer this: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-business-value-of-design. Exhibits 4a (the value of Design: 4 themes) and 4b (the stats behind the themes) are spot-on. How would you frame the true value of design?

I found this awesome playbook about agentic AI on LinkedIN today - definitely worth bookmarking this if you are ever in need of some use cases for Agentic AI. Some notes: - Agentic AI is not the same as AI agents So what’s the difference? - Think of AI agents as the doers - They’re autonomous digital entities that make decisions, adapt to new info and take action to reach a goal Agentic AI is the bigger picture - It’s the full approach to building systems that behave autonomously, plan across multiple steps and drive toward outcomes, often by coordinating multiple agents working together Put simply: ✅ AI agents are the actors ✅ Agentic AI is the system that enables them to collaborate and stay goal-focused