5 Reasons Why Blender Is the Ultimate Design Tool of the Future
Once viewed merely as a hobbyist tool, Blender has evolved into a serious competitor among professional creative suites. Most recently it made waves for being the primary tool used to create the film Flow, which won the 2025 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. While big studios are entrenched in legacy workflows, this tool has become a rising star among independent creators and smaller agencies.
I believe that the current 2D-centric content format of the web will be largely subsumed by immersive and gamified experiences.
Imagine the Internet, but everything is a game.
The real potential for Blender in the coming years will stem from the rise of the spatial web and the use of machine learning tools that allow us to generate, manipulate and upscale 3D meshes and environments.
Here is my evolving thesis on why Blender is the design tool of the future and why every designer needs to become familiar with 3D design.
It’s Free and Open Source
The major 3D modeling and visual effects software packages currently used in industry are locked behind sizable paywalls. At the time of this writing, both Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max charge an annual fee of $1,945 per year or $245 per month for a single user. Foundry’s compositing powerhouse Nuke sits at $3,649 per year as the lowest price offering for a single-user, full-version professional license.
While the big studios receive robust technical support as part of the high premiums they pay, support for Blender comes from the developer and artist communities, as well as the source code and documentation. You can see all the behind-the-scenes magic for yourself at any time.
Want to look up how the BVH rendering algorithm is implemented, or Catmull-Clark Subdivision for smoothing meshes? Sure, why not? You can even build your own custom version of the software. Some game development and animation studios do this, but most people prefer to use add-ons or write custom scripts instead.
Customization Is Key
With a little bit of experience in Python you can unlock root access. Whether it’s automation, custom tooling, or anything in between, introducing scripts into your pipeline can help you build more and build faster. To be fair, other software packages allow scripting as well, but with Blender you can drill deep to the core and customize any aspect of the software. If you can see it or click it in the interface, you can modify or hack it with a script. The only limiting factor is the boundary set by the laws of computation.
Machine Learning Is Inevitable
While current LLMs can generate decent Python scripts for Blender, the output is very limited because we don’t have a lot of 3D data available to train on. The amount of data packed into 3D objects is potentially orders of magnitude higher than simple text, especially for complex models and scenes.
Eventually, I believe the true value of Blender will be unlocked when we have some type of LLM-enhanced multi-modal tool that utilizes geometric deep learning in conjunction with a chat interface that has a very long context window and iterative generation capabilities. Ideally, this would allow the user to enter a series of prompts and be able to export a mesh which can then be imported into any standard 3D modeling software and then fine-tuned further.
Overall, text-to-3D is an ongoing area of significant research that shows promise. There are even some rudimentary pipelines using Claude and MCP at the moment, but early adopters report that the process is still time consuming and very limited. End-to-end control of the pipeline is essential for the full manifestation of this vision. The user should be able to manipulate every vertex, edge and face.
The Spatial Web
The ideas behind the spatial web have been popularized in science fiction classics like Neuromancer by William Gibson and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, among others. Coined as “the metaverse” by Stephenson and “the spatial web” by people not wishing to be rug-pulled, it’s a digital realm which is accessed via some type of head-mounted display such as a helmet, glasses or contacts. It includes optional haptic feedback devices which apply sensations to your body that correlate to what’s happening in the digital world. Platforms like VRChat already offer a partial fulfillment of this vision on the web side, whereas Apple and Meta are locked in a bitter covert war that may determine the hardware side.
Apart from the context of full immersion, there is increasing demand for web experiences that feel 3D. It’s still niche but I believe we are trending toward a proliferation of immersive experiences online, with the DOM eventually being replaced in favor of a more 3D-native method of rendering content. Figma and Adobe rule the current 2D design world but a day may be coming when the web will be mostly 3D with mere sprinklings of flat content, for which graphic design principles would, of course, still apply.
Blender, the Everything App
If X is becoming the everything app in terms of media consumption, Blender has the potential to become the everything app for media creation. Besides 3D modeling, Blender can handle animation, visual effects, motion graphics, 2D design, and even video editing. No doubt many of these features are somewhat clunky compared to industry standard tools. However, given the trend of improvement in Blender over the past 5 years, there’s a good chance these capabilities could soon be on par with tools that studios pay big money for. Especially considering that some of the donors to the Blender Development Fund include Epic Games, NVIDIA, and Intel.
These are a handful of reasons why I believe Blender is a software to look out for as a potential game changer not only in terms of design, but also in terms of the web browsing experience itself. Like the software itself, it’s a huge topic. Let this be my first attempt at scratching the surface. I hope you enjoyed it and feel inspired to dig deeper or start experimenting. I would love to see what you create!