Access Is Not the Same as Expertise

What Adobe Express inside ChatGPT clarifies about graphic design, judgment, and value

Before I was a strategist, a fractional lead, or anything else, I was—and still am—a graphic designer.

That means type, layout, hierarchy, pacing, and restraint. It means knowing how something will be read, where the eye will land, and what will feel intentional versus accidental. It means understanding not just how to make something, but how it behaves once it’s released into the world.

Adobe Express, being embedded inside ChatGPT, will help a lot of people make usable visuals very quickly. Social posts. Flyers. Slides. Fixes. And that’s fine. That’s not new. Canva did the same. So did Squarespace. So did every “democratized” tool before it. Those users were never going to hire a designer anyway. They needed access, not partnership.

That distinction matters.

What these tools are good at is output. But they do not have judgment.

They don’t feel when a layout is technically correct but emotionally wrong. They don’t recognize when a type choice quietly erodes credibility. They can’t tell when something “works” but creates confusion over time. They don’t know when to pause, simplify, or say nothing at all.

That knowledge comes from training—and from experience.

As a graphic designer, my value was never that I could produce files. It was that I could decide: what matters, what doesn’t, what should carry weight, and what should disappear. Later, as a fractional designer, that same instinct scaled into systems, continuity, and long-term coherence—but the muscle is the same.

Adobe Express inside ChatGPT will be excellent for people who need something now. It will not replace designers who understand why things keep needing to be made “now” in the first place.

If anything, this moment sharpens the line.

Designers who last won’t be the ones gatekeeping tools and information. They’ll be the ones who can articulate thinking—who can explain not just what to make, but why, when, and for whom.

Graphic design has always been more than execution.

This doesn’t change that.