From Press to Prompt - How GPT-5 Is Changing the Rules for Web Designers

Five hundred years ago, a wooden press changed the world. It took words that once lived only in the hands of a few and gave them to everyone. Ideas began to travel faster than the people who wrote them. Whole communities could share the same stories, the same knowledge, the same spark.

Now, it’s happening again. Only this time, the press is made of algorithms… and for web designers, your workshop isn’t filled with ink and type. It’s inside Squarespace, where AI can turn a blank page into a polished site faster than you can pour a coffee.

And just like today with AI, there were fears. The press would drown the world in sloppy words. It would cheapen the guild and erase the craft. Others whispered the opposite. Books for ordinary people. Ideas that could cross borders without a horse or a ship. The truth landed somewhere less dramatic and more durable. The printing press did not end writing. It scaled it. It pushed knowledge into the square and made hoarding it embarrassing. Historians like Elizabeth Eisenstein have called print an “agent of change,” the spark behind cultural shifts we now take for granted.

Jump to now. A laptop glow at midnight. Too many tabs. A text box that says “write your prompt.” The machine returns a headline, a paragraph, a plan. It is decent and fast. You feel two things at once. The thrill of saving time and the worry that time just saved you.

This week the drum beat got louder. OpenAI launched ChatGPT 5 on 7th August 2025, and put it into the hands of free and paid users. Coverage from across the tech press focused on fewer hallucinations, stronger reasoning, better coding, and smart routing so the model can decide when to go fast and when to think more deeply.

For a web designer working in Squarespace, this shift is tangible. AI is no longer just a novelty for generating a blog post. Now it can write first-draft copy for service pages, suggest layouts based on user behavior data, produce alt text for every portfolio image, create SEO-friendly product descriptions in bulk, and even generate custom code snippets. The speed is impressive, but speed is not the whole story.

Just like the early printing years, the first outputs are not perfect. AI sometimes suggests design ideas that miss the brand feel, or code that needs tweaking to work within Squarespace’s framework. That is where human craft makes the difference…. refining ideas, adjusting execution, and ensuring the result is intentional.

The link between the press and AI is clear.

Tools do not end the party.

They move the furniture.

The printing press multiplied voices and made mistakes public enough to argue with. AI is multiplying drafts and making iteration cheap. The floor rises because the obvious becomes free. The ceiling rises for anyone who brings context, conviction and a point of view.

Picture the shop again. Stacks of broadsheets. Ink on wrists. Plates resetting. Messy, alive, productive. Now picture your Squarespace editor. Multiple drafts. Layout variations. AI suggestions that appear in seconds. Same song in a new key. Write, design, test, publish, listen, revise. Tell the machine what you want. Tell the client what you believe.

Some will say the machine is the author now.

It is not.

It is a mirror.

It throws back a shape. You decide if that shape is worth showing. You choose what to cut, what to risk, and where to stand.

So here we are.

The clank of a wooden press. The quiet hum of a laptop fan. Two turning points separated by centuries but bound by the same truth. When the tools change, so do the people who dare to use them.

The printing press did not erase storytellers. It gave them a bigger stage.

AI will not erase designers. It gives you more space to create, to refine, to ship ideas that matter.

Your edge is not the speed of the tool. It is the clarity of your vision. It is the way you turn a template into a brand, a layout into a story, a site into an experience someone remembers.

Let the machine carry the weight of repetition. You carry the craft. And when you hit publish, remember you are part of the same long line of makers who took the leap when the world shifted beneath their feet.

This is your press. This is your moment. Build and create something worth printing.