The Overlooked Value of Generalists in Design
A look at what's lost when we hire specialists over generalists.
Companies are filtering for specialists - be it when considering agencies to engage or when filtering through applications for internal hiring. Here’s the hidden truth though - that filter is costing them.
It’s become standard practice. A company needs a studio, a designer, a creative partner—and the first thing they look for is category experience. Have you worked in fintech? Do you have a health portfolio? We need someone who knows e-commerce. The brief gets written with vertical expertise as a prerequisite. Everything else comes second.
The instinct makes sense. Familiarity feels like a shortcut. A studio that’s worked in your space already knows the regulatory constraints, the audience expectations, the visual conventions. You spend less time onboarding and more time building. It looks like efficiency.
What it actually produces is more of the same.
When companies hire from within the category, the work converges. Agencies that specialize in a specific industry or subset thereof carry the patterns of every project they’ve done in your space. That experience doesn’t disappear when they start your brief—it shapes it. The visual language they reach for first. The UX assumptions they make before discovery is done. The benchmarks they use to define success. All of it is calibrated to the category. Which means the output looks like the category.
This is not expertise. It’s stagnation.
It’s the same solution repackaged for the next client. A specialist might be able to tell you what works in your industry. They’ve seen what succeeds elsewhere in the space and so they’ll apply it here. But they can’t tell you what your industry hasn’t tried yet. They can’t see the pattern from fintech that your e-commerce brand is missing. They can’t bring the visual logic from defense-tech that would make your health platform feel authoritative instead of clinical. They’re too close to the category to see around it. This inevitably leads to stagnation and the inability to truly compete in your space.
Generalists offer a unique perspective. Generalists become experts in craft — in design, UX, storytelling — and carry that across every category they enter. Discovery may take a bit longer than it would when working with an “expert” within your vertical but that’s because it’s actually being done right - digging deeper and identifying opportunities that your “expert” would overlook.
This is the opportunity, the advantage companies keep filtering out. Cross-industry work builds a different kind of knowledge. Not depth in one lane—breadth across many. And breadth, when it’s backed by precision, is one of the most underrated assets in a design engagement.
Every sector has solved problems that another hasn’t encountered yet. Fintech figured out how to build trust at scale before most industries were asking the question. Consumer brands stress-tested conversion mechanics that B2B companies still ignore. Defense-tech developed visual systems for communicating complex value under constraint—clarity as a functional requirement, not an aesthetic one. These are not sector-specific insights. They’re design principles that travel. A generalist can carry these principles across verticals. A specialist never had them to begin with.
A brief shouldn’t be about the industry. It should be about the gap. When we rebranded Shift5—a defense-tech company operating in one of the most technical, risk-averse markets in the world—we didn’t look to other defense-tech companies for reference. We looked at what the best technology brands had already figured out about communicating complex value to skeptical audiences. We applied visual logic from sectors that had solved for authority and precision before Shift5 needed to. The brand felt native to defense without being trapped by it. Weeks after launch, Shift5 closed a $75M Series C.
Here’s another example from my time prior to NLS. In 2012, working at Rokkan alongside my former mentor, Charles Bae, we redesigned JetBlue.com . We had no prior experience in travel. No airline portfolio. No category expertise to speak of. By the conventional logic of how most companies write a brief, we shouldn’t have been in the room. Here’s the kicker - JetBlue came to us for that very reason. They actually fired their previous agency who did have expertise in the industry because they were just copy pasting the same solutions they had created for other clients.
This is exactly why the redesign worked.
JetBlue was operating in an industry people tolerated, not one they felt anything for. The incumbents had optimized for operational efficiency and forgotten about the person buying the ticket. We came in without that conditioning. No inherited assumptions about what an airline brand was supposed to look like or how it was supposed to behave. We built from a different starting point: how people actually experience an air travel, not how airlines had always presented themselves.
The result was a brand people genuinely loved—in a category where affection was essentially absent. The financials reflected it. Net income grew from $128M in 2012 to over $400M by 2014. The stock hit an all-time high in September 2015. JetBlue didn’t just survive the rebrand — they scaled because of it.
This is what a generalist sees. The shape of a problem before the category it lives in.
The question companies should be asking isn’t “have you worked in our space?” It’s “what do you see that we can’t?”
A studio steeped in your vertical will give you the right answers for your industry. A studio with range will give you the right answer for your company. Those aren’t always the same thing—and the difference is where most design briefs go wrong before they’re even written.
The filter feels safe. But the best work rarely comes from inside the category. It comes from someone who’s seen enough to know what your category is missing.
About Non-Linear Studio
Non-Linear Studio isn’t for everyone. We work with those who value precision, pursue excellence, and push what’s next. For the bold—and the detail-obsessed. No templates. No repetition. Nothing off the shelf.