Designers were doing the work long before anyone called them that. People drew posters, set type and decided what machines should look like, and the titles came later, usually right after something changed in how things were made.

In 1913 Ford started its moving assembly line, and factories could suddenly make thousands of the same thing. Someone had to decide what that thing should look like, and the words "industrial designer" turn up the same year. The pattern keeps coming back: the first computers with windows and icons, then the web, then ChatGPT. Each time people started doing new work first, and a title for it followed soon after.

Calling yourself a designer was the easy part. In 1930 twelve commercial artists met at the Café Royal in London and set up a society, because they wanted to be taken as seriously as architects and engineers. The profession had to be argued for.

Around 1920 there were two design job titles on this map. Today there are more than thirty, and some of the old ones have quietly disappeared. Commercial artists became graphic designers. The webmaster, who once ran a whole website alone, split into developers, search specialists and content teams.

Long before anyone said UX, people were studying why operators made mistakes with wartime equipment. Information architecture got its name in 1976 and service design in 1982, before most of what we now call digital design existed.