The argument that editorial design is dead usually comes from people who have confused editorial design with print. Print has contracted. Editorial design has not. If anything, it has expanded — because the principles that make a page readable, that create hierarchy and rhythm and the sense that someone has made decisions about what matters, are more necessary now than they have ever been.
The problem with most digital content is not that it is digital. It is that it has no editor. No one has decided what goes where and why. No one has thought about the relationship between this element and that one, about what the reader encounters first and what they discover later. The grid is absent. The hierarchy is absent. The sense that someone is in conversation with the reader — making choices on their behalf — is absent.
Editorial design is fundamentally about that conversation. It is the designer saying: I have read this, I have thought about it, and I have made decisions about how to present it so that you can receive it without friction. It is an act of hospitality.
We design newsletters for organisations that could simply send a wall of text. We design journals that could publish in a standard academic template. We design books that could use the publisher's default settings. We do not do these things because the alternative is always a missed opportunity — to make the reader feel that someone cared enough to think about their experience.
That care is not dead. It is, if anything, rarer than it used to be — which means it is worth more.