Matt Morse is 54 and has been a digital designer for 30 years. He is now freelancing for the third or fourth time in his career, and his own site, a play on Morse code, went up as a holding page the week of this interview. Nothing like a deadline, he says.

Made redundant in his fifties

For six years he was digital manager at a publishing house that ran interior design and architecture magazines, all of it on WordPress. Then the company ran out of money and folded. He found himself back on the market with a question he could not shake.

“Who’s going to hire a designer in their fifties? What am I going to do?”

The job ads did not help. They wanted Figma and Webflow, two tools he had never heard of. His whole career had been the Adobe suite, and the industry had moved on while he was managing a website instead of designing one.

One tool instead of two

He went to YouTube to work out what to learn, and the algorithm did the rest. Framer ads kept appearing, then videos from Ryan and others, until it felt like the tool was slamming him in the face. The maths was simple. Figma plus Webflow meant two pieces of software to master. Framer meant one, and he could design, build and publish in it.

He taught himself on a one-page landing site for a client, then learned by pulling apart a template for another. Self-taught, job by job.

From anti-AI to the Agent Masterclass

Then a full site landed with a six-week turnaround, for a chartered surveyor building a system that tracks people through buildings, something fire services could use. Matt would normally take two or three months on a site like that.

He had been firmly anti-AI. Coming back after six years away, it felt like one more thing stacked against him: new software to learn, and AI coming for the job anyway. But Framer had just shipped agents, and he needed speed. He took the Framer Agent Masterclass to fast-track it.

It was all new. First time using Claude. First time opening Terminal. First time connecting an MCP. Then straight into the client project, learning as he went.

The designer and the dev at the same desk

He started out expecting AI to design for him, generating subpages from his home page. He moved away from that quickly. Now he designs every page himself in Figma, explains to Claude what the page needs to do in Framer, and designs the next page while Claude builds the last one.

“I’m the designer, I’ve got my AI dev sitting next to me at my desk, and we just bat ideas back and forwards and build things together.”

He still reviews every build in Framer and fixes what is not right, especially across breakpoints, then tells Claude what he changed. Knowing the fundamentals, he says, is still core. Watching a live stream with Jesse Showalter, he realised his workflow matched one of the best in the industry. He is not behind the curve anymore. He is catching up to it.

The poster experiment

To test the limits, he asked three AI tools to design a poster for a member of the GB climbing team, working from a sketch he had already drawn. The output was terrible. He designed it himself, and it settled the question: creativity stays with the designer.

Advice for the old Matt

“Be patient, embrace the change and learn the new stuff, because you can teach an old dog new tricks.”