AI is Replacing Designers. It's Not All Bad.
Where AI delivers, the value of humans (us!), and the enduring importance of art in brand and beyond.
It’s 2014. I can barely believe that I made it from my stay-at-home-mom days, through an emotionally and financially challenging divorce, to founding a boutique branding agency, LightLab Studios (2014-18). I worked with designers and web developers and wrote all the copy myself. It was a lot of work, but I was still in founder and creative director heaven. AI was nothing more than a whisper.
As a partner and coach at Conscious Leadership Group from 2018-2024, I solely focused on our brand. After leaving, while building my new brand and website with my former LightLabs partner, Mat Vogels, I was faced with the reality of how central AI has become in the world of brand creation.
I started to wonder in what ways AI has replaced me, in what ways it hasn’t, and the problems and opportunities I see.
In particular, I questioned the value of my brand maps. As is my nature, I extended this question into wondering about my value. Cue many dark weeks with lots of walks on the beach and moaning in between.
After feeling sorry for myself got old, I picked myself back up and found a shard of optimism to build on. I shared my new brand map with Mat, along with design ideas and examples of what I was going for. We made some progress, but no bullseyes.
One evening when I was desperately frustrated, I sat down at my desk overlooking the lush courtyard, which was surely mocking me with its relaxed beauty. I put my brand map into Chat GPT and asked for help in creating the visual identity. It took hours of back and forth, no more or less than when I’d worked with a talented art director or designer.
To my surprise and delight, I got to that all-the-cells-in-my-body-humming moment that happens when congruence arrives.
I shared the concept with Mat and he agreed. We had landed.
This is starting to sound like a doom and gloom story for designers, which in one sense it is. I had worked with AI like I had worked with humans, artists no less. I don’t feel at peace with this.
I come from a lineage of visual artists. I grew up bathed in visual art, with a deep reverence for both art and artists. Yet of the infinite things I am not, a visual artist is high on the list, which I knew from an early age.
My grandmother—Mrs. Lipitz, Grandma Elaine to me— showed her art in galleries from a young age and ran the art department at a large Queens High School for decades, where she was nothing short of a legend. To this day, I still get emails from her former students.
On school breaks, my parents would escape to Portugal or Greece to be adults without kids for a week or two. They would drive my brother and me from our decidedly suburban home in Suffolk County on the north shore of Long Island to a grittier and city-ier Queens to stay with my grandparents. I was too young to know what I was missing out on exotic locations. I was excited to get to go to school with my grandma and have her art students dote on me.
In her enormous art studio bustling with actual artists, it was clear to me that I did not have the gifts that they possessed. The same when I would go into the basement with my grandma to her studio and paint with her. My paintings were fine for a regular kid, but the family visual artist gene that my grandma, mom, and aunt had inherited had clearly skipped a generation.
Later I discovered that I’m a different type of artist, someone with a particular and precise sense of taste. I’m a words person, a vibe curator, and an intuitive knower of aligned creation and living.
I know what I like. I know what precisely matches a person or brand that is both authentic and amplifying. I don’t know how I know this, but I’ve seen enough evidence to convince me that there’s something to this sense I have. I’ve spent my career refining my taste receptors, my ability to translate my knowings into words, ideas, reflections, action plans, brands, and aligned lifestyles for ambitious humans.
Some of my most treasured collaborations are with designers—artists—who have created visual identities and assets based on my brand maps.
Yet I’m not going to lie; working with AI to create my visual identity was liberating.
I’m excited about this new possibility. I’ve run recent clients' brand maps through AI to create visual identity guidelines and been delighted by the results. It took hours of back and forth, days of getting crappy results until I got to gold, but the combination of my taste, intuition, and sense of alignment with AI’s ability to synthesize and translate so quickly got me to results that would have cost me and my client weeks of time and money.
Some of my clients have zero interest in using AI for their visual identity. I love and support that. They can take their brand maps to an agency or designer and they’ll be good to go, with or without my ongoing support. But for people who want to create their visual identity on their own, or with a designer or creative director who uses AI, the brand map gives them what they need to leverage AI supported design.
Next I tested AI’s ability to create a brand map versus the map I would create. I wanted to be as honest as I could with myself about the value of my brand maps in the age of AI. I uploaded the transcripts of the conversations I’d had with a client plus several brand map examples, then asked AI to generate a map.
I couldn’t get AI anywhere near the complexity, nuance, and alignment I strive for when creating a brand map.
I tried with several sets of client transcripts. There’s something about tone of voice, quality of presence, body language, and soul that AI just can’t digest and represent, at least not yet.
My brand maps are still squarely in the human domain because they rely on taste, discernment, and intuitive knowing. Being in living, breathing conversation with my clients allows me to create a precise, aligned, soulful brand foundation.
For many people, creating a brand from the ground up with AI can work well enough. What it won’t achieve is something timeless and essential. We still need another human to experience, know, and reflect us to get to a soulful representation.
Making the investment in a timeless and essential foundation saves time and money going in all sorts of directions that don’t hit the mark.
Once the foundational territory is mapped through in-depth human connection, AI, along with a human designer or creative director, can take this map and spin out aligned and compelling visual brand assets, saving another bucket of time and money in both the short and long term.
I’m delighted to discover that there’s still a place for my brand maps. I love creating them, and even more so, the depth of connection and personal growth that happens for both the client and myself through the process is exhilarating. And it’s not just brand maps; we humans are uniquely valuable for any role, product, service, or art that relies on taste, discernment, intuition, and connection.
And still, I am not at ease.
I don’t know what to do about the obsolescence of designers in the world of advertising and brand, other than to feel the heartbreak of the ending of an era, and the humility of knowing that AI will keep evolving and come for us in all sorts of ways, both known and unknown.
I do know that I don’t want to hang AI art on my walls or see it in a gallery. I want to drink in art knowing that human hearts and hands made the thing.
I want to continue to be impacted by artists so that we question how we do culture, politics, and relationships.
I want to delight in more lineages of artists, in my family and in our human family.
And if I’m wrong, if people don’t value my brand maps in the age of AI, I’ll still map the human experience. Before it was a product, it was just what I did: my art, my way of making sense of the world, and my desire to support individuals and the collective to shine.
In these times, I try to remember this daily: of all the times and places to exist, I get to exist here and now. As long as there’s still breath in me, there’s creative expression and walks on the beach and the joy of seeing my son home from college for the summer making pancakes with my husband in the kitchen. AI can’t do any of this for me. And if I’m out of a job sooner than I expect, I have the best humans around me to come up with another plan where I get to be me and they get to be them, and best of all, we get to be ourselves together.
I hope that AI will inspire more of us to value our beautiful, messy, feeling, intuiting, desiring, art-making, connection-seeking selves.
With love,
P.S. I don’t use AI to write for me. Not ever. This is my art. You’ll have to pry it from my cold dead hands. Another thing that AI can’t do. Ha!
I love this soulful reflection on what AI can do - and what it can't. I find the same with clients whose books I'm editing: AI is such a valuable tool for organization, research, editing, but it can't tell stories with soul!