Hiring a design studio may become a status symbol

Like what is happening to the code engineering industry, the grunt work that helped new designer right out of college learn how to be part of a design studio — to see how the sausage was made and to even learn a little along the way while helping to make it — might be going away.

Production design, which basically means following the style guides and templates that a senior designer created, rather mindlessly, I might add, can be done effectively by A.I. In fact, this is an almost perfect use case, as the guidelines and guardrails are there. Very few new decisions need to be made, it more that images need to be optimally cropped and places and new headlines and variations need to be flowed. Advanced ad-network-delivery systems do much of this work already, varying the call-to-action language dynamically based on the ad buy audience specifications. “Production” design has long been declining in favor of systems that can do it faster and cheaper and at a scale that would require many expensive humans.

The author posits a similar idea, but likens hiring a Design Studio to hiring a tailor to make a custom garment. “Off the rack” works for most businesses (in this metaphor off the rack refers to ideas generated by A.I.) but when a business becomes large enough, or influential enough, off-the-rack stops being good enough. Something tailored and bespoke is needed instead.

What’s more interesting is the idea around Design Studios becoming places that have a point of view, a signature style, and therefore, an audience of attractors and detractors — for visual opinions to matter again. If A.I. provides only the bland, the safe, and the “good enough,” does room for a human-led Design Studio grow? Might it even be a necessity?

In a market where AI-generated design is everywhere, could deeply idiosyncratic, human-led design become the advantage? Not simply fulfilling a necessity, but a more emotive and powerful and visible choice?

It makes me remember — with much fondness — the design influencers of the late 90s, when I was in college. Tomato, Funny Garbage, David Carson, Neville Brody, Obey, Emigre… these designers had influence and opinions. They were not for everyone, and that was the point. They got more work like the work they made, which led to more work. With distance, I see them more as artists than designers, but their art was partially commercially motivated and partially personal.

There was something of them in the work, therefore, the work was undeniably human.

I’d like to think that now is the time to return to that notion. Not to create and foster the idea of Celebrity or “Star” designers, but to continue to push the boundaries of what “good” design can look like.