Month-by-month feed of what shifted, who was hiring, and how Starter, Scaler, and Titan teams actually worked.
55 synthesized monthsin the data layer. Stage breakdowns (Starter / Scaler / Titan) are available for 2026 only — earlier months show under the All segment but won’t appear under stage filters until the design-context pipeline runs further back.
Viewing future quarters under the Craft Rebounds worldview. AI fatigue and aesthetic homogeneity create real demand for work that looks and feels human-made. Premium brands pay a visible premium for craft. Artisanal design becomes a market position, not just a nostalgic preference.
Founders pay up for work that looks human-made.
Figma → Midjourney fine-tuned models → traditional type and grid tools
Mid-market teams split: agents for speed, humans for brand.
Figma AI → custom agent pipelines → Framer
Enterprise brand teams become craft guardians, not makers.
proprietary agent orchestration → design ops governance platforms → analog and physical design inputs
One person, full stack, ships everything
Midjourney → Figma → Framer
Vibe-coding closed the gap between design and production; the founder's designer has to live in both or they're half useful.
First real design team, already fighting agent sprawl
Figma → v0 → Runway
At this stage the system is what keeps agent output coherent; the person who owns that system owns every screen the company ships.
Design governance is now a product requirement
Runway → Figma → Storybook
At scale, taste and judgment applied to machine output is the lever — the director who can steer agent work across an org is worth more than any single executor.