Russian-born French artist Marc Chagall, whose distinctive style drew on Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, and other currents of European modernism, once said, “Great art picks up where nature ends.”
The ability to sense, perceive, and feel is inextricably linked to our humanity and, incidentally, instrumental in our ability to create art. In an increasingly mechanized world, is there something intrinsic, primal even, that recognizes the soul behind a creation? When we look at an object, does something in us register it as human-made, and do machine-generated images signal the lack of humanity in a way we can recognize? I’m sure science is emerging on the biological basis of these questions, but what do designers think?
There’s no question that brand and graphic design are undergoing seismic shifts due to AI. Of course, designers aren’t alone in asking existential questions about their field, but there’s particular urgency in figuring out the human designer’s role in an age of technologically proficient execution. Humans deal with rapid change in many ways; enthusiasm, resistance, and resignation are favourite responses, particularly with changes that we didn’t implement ourselves.
We need only look to the Industrial Revolution for a historical correlate to this moment, as it too had its own version of early adopters and vehement resisters. The Arts and Crafts movement, in which textile designer William Morris was a central influence, emerged partly in reaction to industrialisation and machine-dominated production, championing the intensive labour and human craftsmanship that industrial manufacturing seemed to threaten. Morris’ response resembles the opposition to AI creation in creative disciplines.
I wanted to understand the role of the human touch from inside the process rather than as a historical exercise, so I approached two brand designers working in different registers to find out what they see in AI-generated work that signals its lack of humanity, and how they see their role in the design process when so much of it can be outsourced to a machine.
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Table of Contents
About the interviewees
Fiona Humberstone is a two-time author, founding designer at Studio Theia, and design educator known as “The Brand Stylist”, whose work centralizes color, intuition, and a brand’s natural essence.
DD LONDON is a London studio that has designed identities for Fabergé, Gemfields, Nobu Residences, and The Shard Residences; creative director and co-founder Dominic Evans answered on the studio’s behalf.
The role of intuition
Good technology is often described as “intuitive,” but machine intuition often comes from programmatic fine-tuning. Human intuition, however, eludes our understanding because it relies on a complex mixture of conscious and unconscious perceptions, and its role in creativity is unmistakable.
For Humberstone, intuition, or a felt sense, is primary. “This is foundational to my work, and I bring it into every single stage, from finding initial clarity, to developing a resonant vision, to discerning which creative route to follow, to honing the design work,” she says. “Every single stage puts the unique resonance of my client’s brief and brand at the centre. For me, it’s impossible to create great work without it.”
DD LONDON describes something similar. “For us, it always starts with understanding,” Evans said, before qualifying it. “There is a strategic process behind that, but instinct plays a part too. Often a client has a feeling about what they want to build before they can fully articulate it. As we get deeper into the research and conversations, we uncover things we could not have anticipated at the start. A detail about the place, or something a client says almost in passing, can change our understanding of the project and become central to the idea.”
When feeling changes the work
Human intuition can be fallible, and failure is instructive. DD LONDON remembers failure as instruction: “We had the architectureBrand architecture defines the role of each brand and acts as a guideline for the interrelationship between the brands in your organization. Learn more, amenities, location and brand story, but something still felt quite flat.”
The problem turned out to be narrative rather than technical. We realised we were spending too much time explaining what someone was buying and not enough time thinking about the life they were being offered.”
The fix wasn’t more market analysis, but reengaging the senses. “We looked again at what was distinctive about the place and built the story around the experience of living there. That gave the work a more emotional centre.”
Any brand designer worth their salt knows the value of colour in brand identity, and for Humberstone, color psychology plays a substantial role in creating a meaningful brand. But it’s not color for colour’s sake:
“My practice is centred around resonance and colour is one element that enables me to communicate a brand at a level their clients will be able to respond to in the right way. I actually always start with the type, that’s much more important to my process than the colour.” However, she went on to say, “when a colour is ‘wrong’ or a palette is ‘off’ we feel it deeply.”
Returning to a faculty AI can simulate in its outputs but does not itself experience: feeling.
Discernment is also an act of editing
Discernment and specificity were paramount for DD LONDON, and discernment, like intuition, comes from accumulated experience.
“We look at how the choices work together. Typography can give a business a particular presence, while photography can help an audience recognise themselves in the brand. The hierarchy of information can tell us what someone needs to understand first. Those are visible decisions, even when the insight behind them is not.”
Editing was equally important. “Knowing what not to do is an important part of design. You do not always need another typeface, graphic device, or visual idea.”
Unlike grammar, no definitive rulebook guides a designer through the often arduous process of visual editing. It’s an experiential process that a machine may imitate without sharing the accumulated experience from which human discernment arises.
Neither studio describes finding humanity in the work; instead, their answers illuminate psychological and sensory processes that a machine may reproduce in output without actually experiencing: intuition, feeling, discernment, and sensory response.
Can we actually recognise AI design?
Interestingly, I expected more consensus that AI diminishes the authenticity of the work; instead, I found varying degrees of acceptance and scepticism.
Humberstone believes AI work is recognisable “as homogenous, generic and very often, wildly adjacent to what actually sets the business apart,” adding, “I am yet to see anything created that has been meaningful or compelling.”
DD LONDON approached the question with cautious curiosity about what the eye can actually detect, noting that distinguishing AI-assisted work “is becoming increasingly difficult” to judge.
DD LONDON and Humberstone’s divergence may reflect different studio focuses. Humberstone takes inspiration from nature and lets a founder’s identity come through the design, while DD LONDON works in the high-end property and luxury space, where market positioning weighs heavily on a design’s final form.
Both, however, agree homogeneity is endemic to AI design, a phenomenon DD LONDON called “familiarity.”
“With so many people using the same tools,” Evans said, “it is easy to arrive at similar answers. AI can reproduce the visual codes of luxury hospitality, for example, and give you something that looks convincing without revealing much about the particular place.”
The sameness of AI design has legible costs for artists. MIT Technology Review reported in 2022 that fantasy artist Greg Rutkowski’s name had been used roughly 93,000 times in Stable Diffusion prompts, against around 2,000 each for Michelangelo, Picasso, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Maybe AI isn’t the problem
Refreshingly, DD LONDON quietly dismantled the assumption that AI is uniquely bad for design, arguing that redundancy from uninspired designers is old hat.
“We think the human versus AI debate is probably too simplistic,” they said. “There was plenty of generic design before AI. Designers have always followed trends, referenced the same projects and arrived at similar answers. AI has simply made it possible to do that much faster.”
The studio revealed that they use AI for research, to challenge their own assumptions, and to visualize early ideas, leaving more time for the creative work that only the human senses can meaningfully produce.
There’s no doubt AI has democratized design for many founders and emerging studios; DD LONDON believes AI “raises the floor, making a competent level of design accessible to far more people and businesses,” and asks designers and agencies to be clearer about the value they bring to the process.
However, Humberstone locates that value in the process itself, arguing that working with a designer connects a founder to “the singular nuance that sets that work apart.”
Getting there, she said, “requires (human) effort, but the payoff is huge: a deep and unshakable inner confidence, a compelling clarity of vision and messaging, and visuals that really cut through. The design is simply the vehicle to communicate that confidence, and when we reduce the work simply to the end result, we miss the true power.”
Does the consumer care?
DD LONDON believes consumers don’t care much whether the work was AI-assisted.
“We think people will often respond to the brand before they think about the tools used to make it. Does it interest them? Does it feel relevant to their lives? People can respond to those things without knowing how the work was made.”
Humberstone arrives at the same place, albeit less enthusiastically about AI’s value to design.
“Branding is a human art: it’s about connecting at a human level: sparking emotions, building rapport, moving people to take action at a visceral, human level. You need insight and emotion to be able to achieve that.”
Both studios arrived at the same conclusion through different means. Of course, for successful working designers, the human touch cannot be divorced from the design output, and the processes that create meaningful design can’t be fully replicated.
Instead, they wrestled with whether increasingly competent tools will create more mediocre design, and whether consumers will care either way. That may be the harder question. If AI can convincingly reproduce the appearance of good design, the value of the human designer may increasingly lie not in what the machine cannot make, but in what the human understands that the machine does not.
Five things a designer or strategist can do with this
1. Ask whether the design could’ve been made by someone else, and more importantly, if the elements themselves could’ve been assembled by a machine.
2. Return to intuition. Is there a felt sense that is grounded in both the client’s and designer’s experience?
3. Ask yourself what a person would want to see in the design, how you want them to feel, and, in conjunction with strategy, design around that.
4. Edit, and edit some more. Not just for extraneous design elements, but pare the design back to the experience
5. Utilize the people in front of you as the primary source of inspiration. Track what makes them smile or wince, notice their workspace, listen to their histories, and ask them how they feel about the design. These are processes a machine cannot replicate.
