The Creative Director in the Age of Luxury Software
How auteur designers create competitive advantage in the software industry, and why the future belongs to them
It’s the summer of 2009. Airbnb is a struggling startup, making $200 per week, split between 3 co-founders.
Desperate, founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia get on a 6-hour flight to New York and book stays with 24 different Airbnb hosts to experience the user experience and figure it out.
They have wasted their money. There’s nothing wrong with the homes, and nothing wrong with the hosts. The problem, according to Gebbia, is the “Craigslist-quality” photos of the homes on their app — shot by landlords with cameraphones from 2009.
But now, they are already in New York. Chesky and Gebbia – both designers – rent a $5,000 camera and take the matter into their own hands. By the end of the month, the listings they photograph have doubled their revenue. Airbnb as we know it is born.
Luxury Software
In many industries, design is an external service used to create packaging and marketing materials. In software, design is a core competence for product development, and inevitably featured on the product itself. This will not change, as long as software is used by humans — we have relied on our eyes to navigate our world for millions of years, and we’re not evolving new organs anytime soon.
On the other hand, we are evolving new ways to build software, extremely fast. We have come from punch cards and Assembly language to high-level languages like Python and JavaScript. Software becomes easier and easier to create, as each generation’s engineering knowledge is embedded in the next generation’s tooling. AI is the ultimate example of this.
In short: the engineering competence we need to create useful software is always diminishing, but the design competence does not. If anything, as technology scales, we expect more from designers.
This is why the early generation of computing startups like Apple, Microsoft, HP, and Intel defined themselves (at first) through engineering and sales. Today, design-driven startups are common: Airbnb, Uber, Vercel, and Linear reap significant competitive advantages from investing in design as a first-class citizen.
This is well-known in economics and psychology: In commoditized categories – clothes, software, and stays – consumers crave “scarcity, craft, and story.” It is not enough that the product is functional, usable and reliable. To be preferred, the product must provide pride, status, flex, and aesthetic experience.
Steve Jobs knew this well. He built Apple as an engineering company first, then came back and rebuilt it as a status symbol.
Auteurs
The software industry is maturing rapidly to resemble another mature industry: Fashion. The factors of production are commoditized, and the barriers to entry are low. Ask any software founder in 2024, and they will tell you that sales, marketing, and customer satisfaction are what keeps them up at night — not code.
My point:
In this landscape, the people positioned to create the most extraordinary value are auteurs — individuals with a distinctive approach and wide-ranging control over every aspect of the product and company experience.
In generations of software companies until now, despite the elevated status of design thinking and process, the impact of the individual designer was attenuated. This did not happen because engineers and salespeople conspired behind closed doors, around the mythical “table” where designers were not allowed a seat. Rather, it happened because engineering and market challenges were in fact more challenging and critical, compared to design. But what happens now, as building and selling become easy, and design is still hard?
I’m pleased to predict that many of the next generation of software companies we look up to will be led by auteur designers at the helm, working with small teams of engineers, and standing for a cohesive vision that permeates everything they touch. The most coveted job in tech will be the Creative Director.
Creative Directors
Today, it might seem that we don’t have prominent creative directors leading tech companies, in the same way that we do in fashion. This is actually not true.
In the fashion industry, the Creative Director often takes on business responsibilities that might eclipse the creative work. Tom Ford, for instance, not only revitalized Gucci's aesthetic during the 1990s, but turned the entire business around from near-bankruptcy to a $4 billion valuation, before going on to build and sell his own label – which was profitable from day one – in a transaction where he personally netted $1.1 billion. At Louis Vuitton, the succession of Virgil Abloh by cultural icon Pharrell Williams was clearly motivated by his cultural influence and market understanding, rather than traditional design skills.
Similarly, the Creative Director role is already taking root in tech, in the form of designer-founders and founding designers who are creating market advantage from distinctive aesthetics and experiences:
Airbnb co-founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia met at the Rhode Island School of Design and applied Design Thinking to create a beloved product. Airbnb still invests massively in design, including a multi-year collaboration with Jony Ive’s consultancy LoveFrom.
At Vercel, designer Nicolas Garro (aka Evil Rabbit) created a distinctive visual identity to underpin a luxurious user experience, making it the preferred platform for millions of developers, including yours truly.
Linear, co-founded by Karri Saarinen, stands out among project management tools with high-end aesthetics and experience design. (Saarinen was previously a designer at Airbnb.)
Cosmos won market share from established competitors like Pinterest with its curated library and creamy interaction design that clearly follows from its founders’ impeccable taste.
Fey, with designer Thiago Costa among its founders, positions itself as the quintessential “luxury software”, catering a polished, artistically-driven interface to investors with the resources to pay for it.
Andy Allen’s Apple Design Award-winning Not Boring Software builds essentials like timer, calculator, and weather apps to the highest level of playfulness and aesthetic experience.
Markets
The Creative Director role is a trend to watch in tech. But not every software company will benefit from the auteur approach. I expect the auteur role and the concept of “luxury software” to mature together, in very particular markets.
The lowest hanging fruit for auteurs, counterintuitively, are the most saturated markets. For the design auteur, established incumbents, commoditized products, and fierce competition are not challenges — these are the signs of a healthy and hungry market, ready to receive the auteur’s creative vision. “Boring” categories like email, calendars, browsers, and weather are bustling bazaars where an already-critical mass of customers are actively looking for something exciting and luxurious. (See: Superhuman, Amie, Arc, and Not Boring Weather.)
Another great category for auteurs and luxury software is professional tools, specifically, those aimed at freelancers, startups, small businesses, and other use cases where the user and the buyer are the same person. You can count on people who make money using your product to spend money on a better money-making experience. See: Linear, Cosmos, Rize, Midday, and Screen Studio.
And as the auteur speaks the language of design, they can speak beyond consumers, to the job market — attracting talent to a culture and lifestyle that situate the auteur’s aesthetics.
Brand
I love this soundbite from auteur designer Vadik Marmeladov:
Brand itself is the most interesting thing to me… Any brand can create any product. Then it's like, becomes like a human. You have to find the characters.
Imagine, if all brands are doing all products, same products… Every brand can build a speaker. Every brand can do cosmetics. Every brand can do a t-shirt. Every brand can do a car. Then how you would make them different?
It only comes to narrative design. The story. And that's the most interesting to me… From the beginning, imagine that any brand is not focused on one thing, but focused on all things, and how to tell the story using those products…
The narrative, usually, it comes from founders — their background, and what they're trying to say.
As the cost of building software approaches zero, brand and human creativity will be the differentiator and success factor for software products.
The typical software founder today is an engineer. The archetype for the next generation of tech founders will be the Designer.
Thanks to Thiago Costa, Mert Düzgün, Will Thomson, and Mohammed Yarroum for improving this article with their comments.
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