Non-designers are doing design work, and gatekeeping does not work in 2026. The job is to teach, in a specific order: function first, form second, scale third. What gets shared is the access. What gets kept is the bar.
There is a thing happening in companies right now that nobody has a polite name for. Non-designers are doing design work. They are using Figma, badly. They are using Make, hopefully. They are using whatever new tool dropped this week. And they are presenting things in review meetings that look almost like the designs that designers used to present, except slightly worse, and built without going through the process designers would have run through, the one that gets you from “what should this thing do” to “what should this thing look like” to “how does this thing live and grow.”
I have a working name for these people, and I want to use it gently. The cosplaying designer. The phrase is affectionate. I have done it myself, in adjacent disciplines. I have cosplayed as an engineer (badly), as a researcher (very badly), and as a finance person (do not ask). The cosplaying designer is, in fact, the protagonist of this article, and the villain (if there is one) is the design org that has not figured out how to teach.
The traditional design response to the cosplay phenomenon is to gatekeep. Slow down the access, raise the bar, demand the credentials, complain in Slack. I have done this too. It does not work in 2026, and it will work even less in 2027, because the tools are getting good fast and the organization has decided, correctly, that more people doing design-shaped work is a feature of the modern company. The job, then, is to teach.
Here is the order of operations I have come to believe in, and which I will call the Power Share Paradigm because I have a slight problem and we have already established that. The order is function, then form, then scale. You teach function first. What does this thing do, who is it for, what is the smallest version of it that delivers value, what is the friction point it removes. Most cosplaying designers skip this step. They go straight to form (which is the fun part) and produce a beautifully rendered solution to a problem that does not exist. The first thing you teach is the discipline of not falling in love with form before function is settled.
You teach form second. Composition, hierarchy, type, color, motion, accessibility, all of it. You do not water this down. The cosplaying designer, when held to the actual bar, is capable of more than design organizations usually credit. The trick is making the bar legible. A short Loom on type hierarchy will travel further than a sixty-page guideline document, and a fifteen-minute office hour will travel further than both.
You teach scale last. How does this design live in a system, how does it evolve, what breaks when you add the seventh use case, what happens when accessibility requirements change, what happens when the brand updates, what happens when the underlying product strategy pivots. This is the part that separates designers from people who can produce a single good screen. It is also the part the cosplaying designer most needs help with, and most rarely gets, because design organizations rarely make their scale thinking visible to anyone outside the practice.
The “power share” framing matters because it names what is being given away and what is being kept. What gets shared is the tools, the vocabulary, the function-form-scale sequence, and the access itself. What gets kept (and this is where the framing earns its name) is the bar. The cosplaying designer gets the same critique as the designer. Same questions, same expectations, same standards. This is the move that prevents the practice from being diluted. You let more people in, and you raise the floor by holding everyone to the same ceiling.
There is a graffiti analogy here, also of course, because by now you should be expecting them. When I started writing my name on walls in Denver in middle school, the older writers did not gatekeep. They corrected. The bar was the bar. Your tag either had flow or it did not, your letters either fit together or they did not, your handstyle either had a voice or it was someone else’s voice borrowed badly. The pedagogy was harsh. It was also fair, in the way pedagogy can only be fair when the people teaching are still doing the work themselves. That is the actual model. The design org of 2026 is a graffiti crew with better lighting.