Not long ago, a blog I otherwise like a lot included this passage:

Designers have been saying this for years. Cameras don’t take pictures, photographers do. Tools don’t make you a better designer. Now the PM world is arriving at the same conclusion.

I am not linking to the post because I hear this argument from time to time, and I want to comment on the general notion.

I think I understand the sentiment behind it: You’re not a designer because you know all the Figma shortcuts. You’re not a perfect typewriter away from The Next Great American Novel. Mastery of a tool is not mastery of the subject matter. And there is definitely a certain amount of performative pretense of an insta photo of a meticulously arranged desk with a bougie keyboard, going at length about the only correct set of presets and plugins, or an idea that “if only you do this one creative habit, a firehose of creativity will follow.”

But I also disagree. Good tools do make you a better designer.

A good tool can make you go faster and, as a result, let you spend more time doing revs and trying new things. A good tool can make you go slower when needed, practicing a connection with the material underneath.

A good tool will prevent you from shooting yourself in a foot, will teach you new things about what you’re doing – and perhaps even about yourself.

A good tool will value your growth, make you reflect on your growing body of work, and push you to try harder.

A good tool can inspire you. A great tool can make you fall in love. A bad tool can make you walk away, and a horrible tool will make you never want to come back.

A good tool will make you seek out more good tools.

Sure, people wrote books on a BlackBerry. Would you want to? Sure, the best camera is the one you have on you. But wouldn’t you prefer that camera to also be the best camera for whatever it is that makes you tick – a great sensor or glass, an amazing build quality, a friendly user interface, a logo that makes you want to step up, or some particular quirk or sentiment that you can’t even explain, but matters a whole lot to you?

I’m told I should be annoyed if someone’s first reaction to seeing a nice photo I made is “what kind of camera do you use?”, as it diminishes my accomplishments as a photographer. But: I chose the camera, and bolted on the appropriate lens, and realized over the years the aperture priority mode and very precise focus area is what makes my brain happy. I went through other cameras before, and learned I didn’t like them and I liked this one. At some point in my life I even ventured out into the frightening underworld of the settings menu, opened a new browser window, and decided “I will now try to understand all of these terms.” It took years, but I did.

The reason I enjoy scanning and processing old documents is because I invested in my tools. I have a little keypad, a bunch of hard-earned Photoshop actions, and some bespoke Keyboard Maestro combos that boss Photoshop around. This little tool universe doesn’t just make me more efficient, but it also makes me have fun.

I’d go even further. The mastery of the subject matter and the mastery of the tool are both important – but they also have to be joined by fluency with tool choices, and deep understanding of the relationships you have with your tools.

No single writing advice book will give you a perfect recipe, but read ten of them and scan twenty more, and you might compile the right mixtape of practical tidbits for your brain, and inspiration for your soul. Likewise, you have to try out a bunch of tools – some bad ones, a few great ones – to understand what you need. Not just for efficiency, but also for enjoyment, and ambition, and flexibility or maybe rigidity, and this sort of unmeasurable feeling of a tool getting you, or a tool made by someone like you.

Maybe it’s the 1960s typewriter you need, or a newfangled e-ink-based writing implement, or maybe you just have to open TextEdit and close everything else. I’m not going to tell you the novel comes out then. But the novel might never come out if you don’t figure out what tool can help get it out of you.

You also have to recognize the telltale signs when you outgrow the tool, or when the tool starts disappointing you. Over the years, I learned that I hate InDesign, but that I hate LaTeX even more. I switched from Apple Notes to SimpleNote in 2012, went back to Notes in 2017, and just this year moved over to Bear. I once cargo-culted Scrivener for writing and ran away screaming, but I also once cargo-culted DevonThink and still use it today, in awe of its clunkiness and old-fashionedness that match my own.

AI tools are still tools. And generative AI will allow you to build more tools for the solitary audience of just you – but, like elsewhere, it will require some understanding what makes for a good tool and what makes for a good tool for you.

Craig Mod wrote recently about using AI to build his own custom tools:

My situation is pretty unique. I’m dealing with multiple bank accounts in multiple countries. Constantly juggling currencies. Money moves between accounts locally and internationally. I freelance as a writer for clients around the world. I do media work — TV and radio. I make money from book sales paid by Random House via my New York agent, and I make money from book sales sold directly from my Shopify store. […] Simply put: It’s a big mess, and no off-the-shelf accounting software does what I need. So after years of pain, I finally sat down last week and started to build my own.

But I bet Mod knew what tool he needed to build based on his experience with tools that didn’t work for him – and software and design in general.

Elsewhere, Sam Henri Gold in a widely-shared essay that is worth a read, about MacBook Neo and the beginning of the tool journey:

He is going to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can adjust just to see how he likes it. He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it. He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes. He is going to open GarageBand and make something that is not a song. He is going to take screenshots of fonts he likes and put them in a folder called “cool fonts” and not know why. Then he is going to have Blender and GarageBand and Safari and Xcode all open at once, not because he’s working in all of them but because he doesn’t know you’re not supposed to do that, and the machine is going to get hot and slow and he is going to learn what the spinning beachball cursor means. None of this will look, from the outside, like the beginning of anything. But one of those things is going to stick longer than the others. He won’t know which one until later. He’ll just know he keeps opening it.

I am bothered by black-and-white, LinkedIn-ready statements. “Tools don’t make you a better designer” feels like another version of the abused and misunderstood “less is more.”

My camera taught me to be a better photographer. DevonThink told me how to better organize my thoughts. Norton Utilities showed me how to have fun when doing serious things, and Autodesk Animator how to be serious about having fun.

I’m a toolmaker, so perhaps I arrive at this biased. I endured some crappy tools, wrote some okay ones, benefitted from some great ones. I don’t think I would have become a designer without them.