There’s a lot of talk about AI in design right now, and most of it sits at one of two extremes: that AI is about to replace designers, or that a proper studio should refuse to touch it. Neither is much help to a client trying to work out what it means for their project.
Here’s where we’ve landed, and what it means for your work.
Where AI helps
We use AI in a limited, specific way, and it’s mostly on the parts of a job you’d never see.
Research is one. When we’re building a brand in a sector we haven’t worked in before, AI can speed up the background reading and landscape-scanning that used to take days. We use it to gather reference, summarise context, and get up to speed faster.
Production is the other. For technically repetitive jobs, like preparing large sets of image assets or reformatting content across lots of outputs, it saves time without touching the quality or character of the work.
In both cases it’s saving time on the mechanical parts. The design isn’t coming from a tool.
Where it stops
The design work is ours. Not out of principle, but because that’s where the value is.
It means working out what a brand needs to include and what it shouldn’t, why this particular typeface, the reason behind a colour selection, how a presentation should be structured. The real risk with AI isn’t the tool, it’s using it to skip that part, and when a project has skipped it, you can usually tell.
So making sense of a brief, the visual strategy, the design decisions, the instinct for when something works: none of that gets handed to a tool. It comes from experience, judgement, and understanding the client’s situation.
The craft is the same. Professional design is a discipline refined over decades, and the small, deliberate details that make the difference come from a trained eye and a practised hand, not a prompt.
Keeping your work yours
A few things we’re careful about, because they matter more than the time-saving does.
We don’t put anything confidential you share with us into public AI tools. Your unreleased plans, your documents, your data: those stay out of systems we don’t control. If a job needs AI anywhere near sensitive material, we use it in a way that keeps your information private, or we don’t use it at all.
We don’t generate your brand with it either. Your logo, your identity, the work you’ll own and build on: that’s made by us, from scratch. Partly that’s a quality decision, and partly a practical one. AI-generated artwork sits in murky territory on ownership and originality, and can echo work that already exists. We’d rather hand you something that’s unmistakably yours and holds up as your own.
And whatever a tool produces, a person checks it. These systems get things wrong, confidently, so nothing goes near your project on trust. We’re accountable for what leaves the studio, however it was made.
What you can expect
None of this is us taking a side in the AI debate. It’s what we think you should expect from a studio you trust with work that matters: clarity on where these tools are used, and care with the parts that count.
If you’ve got your own view on AI, or a policy your organisation works to, tell us. We’re happy to work to it, and happy to tell you exactly where AI did and didn’t touch your project.
The short version
AI helps us move a bit faster on the background work. The ideas, the strategy, the design and the craft are human, your confidential material stays private, and the work you get is yours. That’s not likely to change.
Let’s make it happen
If you’ve got something coming up that needs to move fast, we’re worth a conversation.
