Give It a Heart, Not Just a Spark
Give It a Heart, Not Just a Spark
by RICHARD HUNT
Now, I’m not making films, of course, but as the owner of a brand design agency, I hear him loud and clear. However helpful the tech becomes, I want the designers at our studio to keep the craft alive: to immerse themselves in the work, learn all they can and stay curious, bounce ideas off one another, and debate the tiniest details as we edge towards a solution. Use their own eyes and taste. Make their own calls. There’s real value in that and losing it would be a loss to the art of brand design.
The reality, of course, is that AI is here and it isn’t going anywhere. It’s fast, effective and, understandably, clients like what that does to timelines and budgets. And if I’m being totally honest, I like it too. It speeds up the “what if?” part of the job and opens up routes I might not have considered on a drowsy Monday morning. But the more I use it, the more I notice a gap. AI assembles. It stitches parts together and provides a spark—but not a heartbeat. It gives neat, literal answers with little room for happy accidents, empathy or pushback. Where a designer might say, “That’s not going to work,” AI simply delivers the brief as written. The result feels, if I may, Frankensteined together.
Left to itself, AI struggles with restraint. It loves bolt-on flourishes, extra textures, more of everything—when the work often needs less. But design often lives in the nuances that make something feel inevitable, not assembled.
Take our work on the Freixenet rebrand. The big idea didn’t come from a prompt; it came from years of a relationship with the client. We knew the people behind the brand, their vision, and what had been done before. The discovery of the original sign happened because we were at the winery, standing in front of it, really seeing it. We recognised the character in the lettering, the tiny irregularities, the quiet confidence of how it sat in space. We kept the hand, tidied the cadence, and resisted the urge to polish the life out of it. Could AI have mimicked the style? Probably. Would it have chosen that exact balance of imperfection and poise? In my experience, no. That choice came from being there, feeling the place, and knowing when enough is enough.
AI is brilliant for breadth, but it doesn’t know when to stop. In design, the hardest work is often subtraction: taking things away until the silhouette reads in one glance and the object feels inevitable in the hand. That last two per cent of editing. That’s the bit that makes the stitches disappear.
So, this is where I’ve landed. AI is a great tool, and I’ll let it do the heavy lifting. But my own visual intelligence still has to decide what to keep, what to lose, when to stop. It’s the bit that asks the unshowy questions: does this protect the equity the brand has earned? Will it manufacture well? Does it sound like the brand when it moves and speaks? That’s not just a gothic romance; it’s just doing the job properly.
Great design existed before AI and will continue alongside it. What may also grow is the stack of busy, soulless work. Creations pieced together without judgement. The answer isn’t to decry the tools, but to show up and do the craft, using head, heart and visual intelligence to make work that isn’t perfect on paper, but just right in the world.
