The Demise of Surface Supremacy
I wrote this a while back and didn’t publish. Is it saying anything new and interesting? Worth sharing more widely or better burying it?
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The Studio Ghibli debacle, unlike anything before, starkly demonstrated the speed and precision of AI’s ability to plagiarise original work. In case you missed it, in March, OpenAI image generator upgrade had clearly chewed through the studios many creations, enabling perfect renditions of their very distinct visual style to be turned to any request. Ten thousand meems later and most of us started getting that icky feeling that even the most exquisite, crafted artistic work of the highest merit was now subjects to the great liquidiser of AI. It made visible the final step in a long progression, an erosion of the value and need for the intricate craft required for design practice over the last few hundred years. This shift has accelerated in recent decades, first with desktop publishing, then with tools like Photoshop and CGI, Illustrator, and others. Even now, designers are still expected to master complex software, workflows, and production processes to operate professionally. But that need and expectation is now rapidly evaporating.
Today, AI systems are used not just for ideation, but also for compiling, setting, and delivering publish-ready assets. The requirement for deep technical knowledge is diminishing as we’re seeing in new features of AI like vibe coding, and with it, the market value of that knowledge and expertise. Where once fluency in these tools was a hallmark of a professional, now it’s becoming the domain of anyone with a browser.
For years, great visual craft itself was a signal of brand power. If you could afford the best studios to produce the slickest work, that in itself had cultural value, proof of budget, focus, and organisational muscle. The biggest brands could afford this kind of polish, and so they maintained an edge. AI threatens this entire model: not just the production techniques and specialist knowledge across the chain, but the very notion of visual superiority as a proxy for power. When AI allows anyoneto produce hyper-polished, fantastical, high, production value work, then production quality stops being a differentiator. It’s no longer a wedge between global enterprise and the local corner shop.
Whenever I’ve talked about design in my businesses, I’ve tried to emphasise expression, a word that seems obvious, but which so many companies, leaders, and teams still overlook. Design, in my mind, is about connecting a consumer with the intention of a company. It communicates that intention through form, colour, language, composition and gesture etc, so that the user understands what the product or brand means. Great design deftly marries this intention with expressive execution. Think of the iPod, the VW Beatle, Concorde, The Chopper, or the Sydney Opera House: iconic, special, differentiated. Each of these designs clearly summons an intention. And yet, looking at most of what surrounds us today, it’s clear that few designs achieve this. Most treat design as superficial styling, a thin film of paint for marketing to apply, not a foundational tool for building long, term brand equity and the subsequent enterprise value.
That’s one of the chief complaints from designers: that clients and agencies treat design transactionally. They respond to surface, level briefs: “Make one like that other successful thing.” Because design isn’t integrated into business thinking, it’s often just spread on top. Up until now, the easiest “spread” has been slick, expensive production, whether in industrial design, print, or film. It’s what CMO’s have been taught at marketing school and what you get patted on the back for at Cannes. We’ve known for a long time how slickness is often irrelevant to today’s consumers and how in the search for authenticity a new anti-design vernacular has emerged, particularly on social platforms where conventional marketing collateral just exacerbates the alienation. I enjoyed watching Ben Jones’s presentations of Unskippable Labs (google), demonstrating that through rigorous scientific variant testing he could prove how consumers sought authenticity over aspirational, high production ads. (Ben has now gone alone and set up
https://sundogs.io/
) So slick has been on a slow, death trajectory anyway, but now with AI that decline is accelerating.
So yes, AI may level the playing field. It may make it easy for anyone to produce slick, competent design. Some may see that as the death of the profession. But I see it differently. I see a renewed opportunity to double down on intention and in crafting that expression, albeit with a radically different approach to the actual making. If the tools make execution easy, then it becomes even more important to ask the questions that precede design: What is this product or service for? What are our values? How are we different? What makes us special, desirable, memorable? How can we bake that into a system that can deliver continuity AND flexibility, to create a constant thread to anchor the brand in the market, but leave enough space for perpetual renewal and upgrade?
Poke, the agency I cofounded in 2001 worked with Orange for over ten years, activating their brand in myriad ways through interactive digital media. We made a never ending web page (the world’s first public iteration, before web pages ended which gen Z’ers might find quite quaint!), a balloon race across the internet, a graphical, animating discussion board, a live, streamed “Spot the Bull” competition and the largest tagged photo of all time up until that point (Glastonbury). These projects were all in some way a response to prevailing tech and cultural trends and what gave us the flexibility to shape-shift so dramatically was that Orange as a brand had been engineered to provide the bandwidth for this constant reinvention. The foundation of Orange was a will to bend the new exciting world of mobile telephony to serve the people on their terms. To humanise technology. The simplicity, distinctiveness and discipline of Orange gave it enormous latitude and freedom. I think brands need to approach these times learning these valuable lessons from the past. If the surface means nothing then you have to dig deeper.
If we can crystallise these foundational principles and wield the new tools with purpose, then we unlock their full power without sacrificing distinctiveness. We can’t rely on superficial cues anymore, they’ll be replicated and outpaced in weeks. Instead, we’ll need to embrace continual reinvention. But as long as that reinvention is rooted in something meaningful, it can build more brand equity, not less.
In fact, I’d argue that with the right configuration, clear intentions, distinctive ideas, agile expression, we’ll build brand equity faster than ever. The cost and complexity of craft has historically absorbed so much attention and budget. As that cost drops, we have both the space and the imperative to go deeper, to ask better questions, and create work that means something.
I feel for those who’ve built their careers crafting amazing things. By embracing these technologies we are sacrificing a lot in what we’ve come to think of as “design”. But design is not dead. In fact the need to corral its power and curate its’ every expression is now more business critical than ever now that there’s ever greater firepower at our collective disposal. The companies that see this opportunity will do well, and the designers that themselves perform a successful shape-shift will be critical collaborators in this mission.