I used to think my job was all about design. Lately, I'm not so sure.
That might sound strange coming from someone whose job title has the word "designer" in it.
But the longer I do this work, the more convinced I become that design isn't where great brands begin.
Because here’s the hard truth: design is not an aesthetic wrapper.
Design is the thing you do after you've done the harder work.
The harder work? Slowing down long enough to think. And in a time where speed to market is unprecedented, ‘slow’ feels like rebellion.
After all, why spend time manually mapping out a creative strategy when you could generate one instantly?
The ease is real, and for the most part, passable. But it's quietly creating a problem nobody asked for:
The faster we can make something, the easier it is to stop asking whether it's actually worth making.
Creativity is not an output
Somewhere along the way, we've started conflating output with creativity.
They're not the same thing.
To illustrate this, I point to a commercial from mental health app Calm during the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election Night coverage. While gruesome political ads dominated the airwaves, Calm ran 30 seconds of silence, turning a high-anxiety moment for a nation into a positive brand touchpoint.
The results followed. Calm was named the brand winner of the night. X mentions for Calm increased by 248%.
The output: 30-seconds of silence on a plain background.
The creativity informing the ad: unparalleled.
Creativity isn't a deliverable. It isn't something you can summon because a deadline says you should.
It's a mindset.
For me, creativity starts with curiosity. It starts with getting excited about a problem instead of rushing to solve it. More often than not, it shows up when my mind is calm enough to notice something unexpected.
Unfortunately, that makes creativity incredibly inconvenient. But the tradeoff for that inconvenience is a clarity that makes the design process incredibly straightforward.
I often joke that only about twenty percent of my job is actually designing. The other eighty percent is getting myself into the right mindset to design something worth making.
That doesn't mean sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike. It means researching. Looking at competitors. Understanding the psychology behind visual decisions. Learning about the audience we're actually trying to reach.
Strategy is all of that work.
The Candy Inside the Wrapper
Think about a piece of candy: if your brand’s output is the wrapper, strategy is the candy inside.
You can make a beautiful wrapper. But if what's inside is hollow, people notice.
Strategy exists to simplify something incredibly complex until it feels obvious. It helps you understand where everyone else is standing so you know where you shouldn't.
Creativity takes over from there.
Design is simply the application of that creativity to solve a problem.
In the era of AI, content generation-models skip past that strategy piece to prioritize tactic implementation. They learn from output, and serve it up in staggering quantities quickly.
AI is remarkably good at recognizing patterns. It can scan millions of existing brands, absorb common conventions, and generate something that feels familiar.
That's also its limitation.
Why AI Lives in the Middle
I imagine brand creation as existing on a spectrum. On either end, you have concepts that are clearly unique, employing a blend of design and messaging to produce an irreplicable presence. These concepts have a stance, and they’re unafraid to say it.
Right in the middle is what feels safe. Generic buzz words, boilerplate messaging, flat design.
I call it the ‘Valley of Sameness’.
AI naturally gravitates toward the Valley of Sameness because these models are trained on the outputs of a broader creative strategy–landing pages, layouts, social graphics. They produce work that's recognizable because recognition is how it learns.
Let me be clear: a great brand cannot sustainably exist in the Valley of Sameness.
Great brands earn attention because they're willing to exist closer to the edges, not for the sake of being different, but because they deeply understand the people they're trying to reach.
Different by Design
One of my favorite examples is Betterment. When they launched, traditional financial brands all looked and sounded roughly the same. Conservative. Reserved. Predictable.
Betterment intentionally did the opposite. Bright illustrations. Optimistic language. A visual system built specifically for younger investors who had never felt like traditional financial firms were speaking to them.
That wasn't decoration. It was strategy expressed through creativity.
The same principle shows up in our work daily.
One of my teammates recently created a visual language for a senior care organization that reminded me of wallpaper you'd find in someone's home.
Not because wallpaper was trendy. Because it made a scared, vulnerable audience feel right at home.
That's the job. The point is not making something that impresses other designers.
It’s about making something that resonates with the people it was created for.
The New Creative Standard
I think we're approaching a tipping point.
There's a fatigue setting in around AI-generated work. You've probably felt it without realizing it. Everything starts looking vaguely familiar. Competent. Polished.
Forgettable.
As more average work floods the world, the value of genuine creative judgment only increases.
Taste becomes more important.
Context becomes more important.
Empathy becomes more important.
None of those things start with a prompt. They start with the courage to slow down, analyze, and prioritize what makes you human.
Design Is a Medium for Delight
In the art world, there’s a saying that great art should make you either laugh or cry.
While I might not go that far in my work, I would argue that the same basic principle holds true for design: every great brand should make someone feel something.
Maybe it's trust. Or excitement. Or curiosity.
Maybe it's simply the feeling that someone understood them.
Because at its core, design is a uniquely human endeavor. It’s a medium for communicating a complex feeling in just a quick glance.
The tools to activate and implement creative strategy will continue to change as the era of AI evolves.
But so long as humans are the final consumers, brands that embrace their own humanity will continue to soar above the noise.
And true creative strategy will underpin them all.
