This Is the Best Time Ever to Be a Motion Designer, Until AI F*cked It All Up.

I want to take a moment to talk about the state of the motion design industry. It’s fantastic. New apps, plugins, and hardware are emerging every day, making our craft more fun, more efficient, and more rewarding than ever. If only anyone noticed.

Unreal Engine’s real-time rendering is now standard in high-end virtual production. 2D animators have Dreams on iPad, bringing serious capability to the comfort of the sofa. Tools like Rive, Jitter, and Lottie are pulling motion designers into the web-dev conversation. Not to mention Blender, giving artists the rare luxury of learning 3D at no cost.

And yet, all anyone wants to talk about is AI. It’s become a black hole that everything else seems to orbit.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m adopting new AI workflows all the time and I have no doubt they’ll be a meaningful part of my toolset. I just don’t find them particularly interesting to shout about. I miss feeds filled with surprising, inspiring work and the process behind it. At this point, I’d even take a philosophical rant. Anything but this sea of slop, clogging the arteries of every social media platform right now.

Bring back NFTs, that’s what I say, or Bitcoin. Anything but this.

This week, Adobe announced it was cancelling Animate, a decision that felt like a clear signal of how much attention and investment is being redirected towards AI. But something else happened: after strong pushback from the creative community, Adobe reversed the decision. That feels like an important reminder. There’s still time to turn it around. Until the bubble bursts, we need to be even more vocal than ever before.

If we want to inspire the next generation of designers, we need to pay attention to tools that encourage creativity, exploration, and craft, not just prompt generation.

That’s what I plan to focus on, and I hope more of us start doing the same.