AI Has Democratized Design, but Taste Remains Priceless
When Everyone Can Design, Design Matters More
Article Synopsis
- AI is making it easier and cheaper than ever for anyone to create websites, images, copy and brands.
- But access to powerful design tools doesn’t make someone a designer, just as the Macintosh, Canva and social media didn’t eliminate the need for creative judgment.
- As AI-generated work becomes more common, sameness and “design slop” become greater risks for brands.
- The value of design is shifting from production to judgment: knowing what to create, why it matters and how to make it distinctive.
- Great brands from Anthropic to Ferrari to Coca-Cola demonstrate that meaningful differentiation still requires a strong human point of view.
- When the cost of making things approaches zero, knowing what is worth making becomes one of the most valuable creative skills.
The Problem With Good Enough
It seems like a new AI tool launches every week. This week, for me, it was the Stockholm-based Lovable. Designed to generate functional websites and apps from natural language descriptions, the tool just hit a valuation of $13 billion. I was discussing the platform with a colleague, spent fifteen minutes playing with it and just like that, made myself a serviceable website.
Although the speed was astounding and the website functioned as intended, its design was undistinguished. AI can be a handy solution for transforming your inchoate idea into reality, but when it comes time to compete in IRL, you need to stand apart and above the herd. Loveable, like all AI tools of its ilk, still don’t.
As someone who has worked in branding for decades who is also an enthusiastic early adopter and active user of AI and other automation tools, I’ve seen this dynamic play out time and time again. My latest experience with Loveable reinforces how, paradoxically, design matters more than ever when everyone can create design with a few prompts.
The Macintosh: Design, Democratized 1.0
The Macintosh was one of the first great design democratizers. PageMaker allowed amateurs to reproduce typography, layout and image manipulation that once couldn’t have happened without professional equipment and production expertise. But this shift created a key distinction that we would see play out over and over again as new technologies came to prominence: operating a Mac didn’t make someone a designer. The Mac output had the appearance of being finished, but upon closer examination, simply looked the same as everything else.
In the world of web design, tools like Squarespace and Wix meant that ordinary people could make their own sites without needing to program HTML, CSS or JavaScript. Canva took things a step further, allowing users to create a variety of social media solutions that looked professionally designed. The result? Easy access to personal branding that rely on templates and preset formatting, resulting in sites and solutions that again look complete but at at the same time fail to stand out.
The iPhone, another Apple creation, turned everyone into a photographer, then Instagram turned everyone into a publisher and social media turned everyone into a publishing company. The result? An essential aesthetic conformity that gave rise to the much discussed West Village girl and viral photos of the so-called “Gen Z uniform.” Generative AI brings this sameness to its apogee. ChatGPT can write the copy. Claude can develop the concept. AI image generators can create photography (albeit sometimes still with an extra finger or two) and illustration. AI website builders can generate the site.
This takes us back to the Mac paradox: being able to use design tools doesn’t make you a designer any more than knowing how to concatenate grammatically coherent clauses makes you an effective communicator, let alone a virtuoso Cyrano. Knowing what could be made doesn’t give you any deeper insight into what should be made. While the tools have become easier to use and more powerful in their output, design itself has not become easier. Quite the opposite: the easier it becomes to produce serviceable, competent work, the more valuable distinctive design has become.
Sophistication vs. Slop
As we’ve seen in this tour through the history of design tools, production is only one part of design. The harder part is deciding how design solves a unique expressive challenge. This requires thinking + expertise + experience. That’s why the emergence of AI-generated “slop,” and the rise of tools designed to identify it, reveal something important about design: it still needs the human touch. In a world where anyone can create a brand, having the know-how and experience to tell what makes smart brand design actually work is more valuable than ever before.
Ironically, Anthropic serves as the perfect case study perfect example of proprietary brand design in a post AI world. Claude is a remarkably sophisticated tool, but Anthropic didn’t enlist it to create its brand identity and presence. Working with leading brand design agencies like Geist and Mother allows the company to create a sophisticated and nuanced brand identity that encourages users to think beyond the slop.
Outside of the world of AI, Ferrari is an iconic example of sophisticated branding in action. Ferrari designed and developed its first electric car, the Luce, in collaboration with design firm and creative collective LoveFrom. The design generated controversy when it was first released, but this week, a one-off Luce sold for $40 million, making it the most expensive new car ever sold at auction. The Luce is polarizing, but that’s the point. Great design feels distinct. It doesn’t work for everyone. It doesn’t use the familiar language of what a Ferrari “should be” like an AI design might. Instead, it boldly steps into the opportunity to create something new vs. bland sameness. When Coca-Cola created its signature contour bottle, it was instantly and relentlessly pilloried as impractical by bottlers and for appearing distinct from all other bottles using straight glass. Over the years, however, it earned the sobriquets “hobbleskirt bottle” (after a popular fashion at the time of launch) and Mae West bottle, but most significantly, simply the “Coke bottle” to assert preemptive brand ownership of the perfect liquid wrapper in perpetuity. 111 years later, it remains among the most celebrated and instantly identifiable examples of industrial design of the 20th century, so much so that it remains recognizable even when shattered on the ground.
In a landmark study of the business value of design, consulting firm McKinsey studied the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies over a five-year period. The result? The companies that McKinsey placed in the top quarter of their Design Index generated substantially stronger revenue growth and total shareholder returns. Good design is not simply about making something beautiful; it is about creating something more relevant, more functional, more coherent, more distinctive and yes, more aesthetically excellent. In other words, design is a business discipline for making choices. And the ability to make meaningful choices becomes more valuable when the cost of making things without making any choices at all approaches zero.
Reimagining a Renaissance of Human Design
For decades, technology has shifted creative capabilities from the few to the many. Many design and branding professionals see this as something to fear, but it’s not. New technologies always change things as they gain widespread use. The art of typesetting gave way to the Macintosh. Waiting for the “Kodak One-Hour” photo lab to return your vacation pictures gave way to the instant gratification of Instagram, AI might bring the largest wave of this DIY spirit yet, but it still can’t change that lack of true, resonant intentional quality. Because when everyone can produce almost anything, discerning what’s actually worth producing is the most valuable creative skill of all.
As the next era of branding begins, everyone will enjoy the ease and lowered costs AI brings. More brands will even go it alone without enlisting human designers. The results will emulate the approach perfectly captured in the Krusty the Clown Brand Seal of Approval: “It’s not just good. It’s good enough.” The differentiator will remain the same: does your brand have something unique to assert and express. That requires a deeper understanding of the brand than simply creating a logo, selecting a color palette or designing a collection of templates. It requires a uniquely human point of view. AI doesn’t eliminate the need for human judgment. It makes human judgment more essential.
Smart brand design will endure, but not because designers will always be better at pushing pixels, drawing layouts or choosing fonts. Smart brand design will endure because the greatest brands have never been built from pixels alone. They are built from ideas. And successful ideas, unlike tools, no matter how whizbang, still require the professional human touch to be brought to fruition.
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