In a new article for Design Week, Paul Melcher, AI Strategy Advisor of Santa Cruz Software, explores how generative AI is changing one of the most fundamental concepts in design: the source file.
As designers increasingly move between traditional layered files, automated derivative workflows, and AI-generated assets with no persistent source file at all, long-standing assumptions around ownership, editability, provenance, and archiving are starting to break down.
Paul looks at what this shift means for designers and design operations teams, and the practical steps organizations can take to make sure today’s work can still be accessed, understood, and reused years from now.
Read “What’s Your Source File?” on Design Week.
Below is an excerpt from the article by Paul Melcher:
It is a harder question than it used to be.
The custody problem is old. Every working designer has been called back three years after a campaign to find the source is on a decommissioned server, the fonts were licensed to a colleague who left, and the stock library has been sunset. Losing your ability to reopen your own work has been a design-operations story since the first digital layout, long before any model wrote a prompt. What generative AI has done is make the problem more acute, on more axes, faster.
What has changed structurally is the number of shapes the work now takes. For four decades, “the design” and “the source file” were the same object. INDD, PSD, AI, or a Figma frame: one canonical thing, with derivatives flowing out of it. That equivalence held long enough that the industry built its contracts, DAMs, archives, and handoff practices on top of it.
That equivalence no longer holds cleanly. The source file has become one of several production modes running in parallel, sometimes inside the same job. The infrastructure has not caught up with the range.