Good taste just got a promotion

There’s a version of the AI conversation that goes something like this: if anyone can generate a reasonably convincing logo, a landing page, and a dozen headlines before lunch, what exactly are we still paying designers for?

Fair question.

AI tools are genuinely impressive. We use them. Our clients use them. They can make rough ideas tangible quickly, get you out of a blank-page hole, help explore different directions and speed up all sorts of jobs that used to chew through our time.

But something interesting has happened while we’ve all been climbing the AI adoption curve; we’re discovering that being able to create something is not quite the same as understanding if it’s a crime against eyeballs.

When it comes to design, AI is very good at being adequate

AI has raised the floor on creative output at extraordinary speed.

In finance, there’s already a strong gravitational pull towards the same handful of visual cues: reassuring blues, groups of people wearing suits, clean sans-serif fonts and the occasional aspirational retiree staring meaningfully at a coastline.

AI tools are fed on those conventions, which means an investment analyst can produce quite a lot of blandly adequate and familiar-looking deliverables. The output won’t necessarily be terrible. That’s almost the problem, because terrible creative is relatively easy to spot.

Competent mush, on the other hand, can survive several rounds of stakeholder review, get a compliance tick and slide into market without non-creatives being able to spot the damage its doing to your brand and reputation.

Taste is moving up the org chart

For a long time, taste could be dismissed as something an agency or creative team needed to be concerned with.

AI has changed that equation. When almost anyone can generate a plausible-looking deliverable, the ability to distinguish the good from the cringeworthy becomes much more valuable.

Brand managers need taste when they’re approving work. Marketing leaders need taste when they’re deciding what gets funded and deployed. Business owners need taste when they’re working out whether the thing AI has just made is sending the right signals to their customer and the market.

And this isn’t just a case of us vigorously defending the creative profession from deep inside the tent. D&AD is already calling taste one of the most valuable commodities in an AI-heavy creative industry. Similarly, the World Economic Forum has creative thinking, analytical thinking and leadership among the skills growing in importance as AI adoption accelerates.

In other words, good taste has genuinely had a promotion. It’s becoming a core business skill.

Is it possible to talk about good taste without sounding pretentious?

“Good taste” can sound a bit design-y. Like we’re about to start judging your choice of dining chair.

That’s not what we mean.

In brand work, taste is really a bundle of judgement built up over time.

It’s recognising when an idea is fresh enough to be worth pursuing, when a concept is leaning heavily on a category cliché, when an execution is polished but somehow totally wrong for the brand or your market, and when an option that looks less immediately impressive has potential.

Taste is also knowing when to stop.

AI has made creative abundance incredibly easy. We can generate more directions, more variants and more polished-looking options than anyone reasonably needs at incredibly low cost (*cough* except to our planet cough).

This means the job has changed. The scarce skill is no longer producing enough work to choose from. It’s having the judgement to recognise what’s worth backing and the experience to ignore the rest.

10 AI-generated creative tells we can spot from across the street

Your customers probably won’t say, “Hmm, the visual hierarchy on this feels a bit cooked.” They’ll just register that your brand has started to feel cheap, generic or slightly off.

Like Tom Cruise’s middle tooth, here’s what you won’t be able to unsee now we’ve shared it with you:

1. The premium starter pack
   Beige, chrome, glass AND soft shadows? Congratulations, your finance brand is now an expensive hand cream.

2. Soullessly attractive talent
   Perfect teeth, perfect skin, perfect homes, and perfectly vacant expressions suggesting they’ve been told what happiness is but never personally tried it.

3. Card mania
   Four words and an icon? Better put a card around it! At some point, AI forgot that information was allowed to exist without its own little Tupperware container.

4. Crowded layouts with no hierarchy
   Headline! Offer! CTA! Testimonial! Image! Badge! Every element demands top billing, so your eye has absolutely no idea where to go first.

5. Typography with no adult supervision
   Words and lines break in weird places and half of the sentences include bold, italicised and underlined text, like a cat has walked over the keyboard.

6. Stylistic indecision
   A gradient here, a glow there. Add a reflection and a floating orb. There’s no shortage of flair. There is, however, a shortage of somebody saying, “That’s enough.”

7. Unhinged font choices
   AI loves a font with a bit of character. Unfortunately, that character may be “artisanal kombucha” when your brand is supposed to say, “reputable lender”.

8. Decorative nonsense
   A squiggle here, a three-star dividing line there, translucent circles doing absolutely nothing. It’s design confetti that achieves nothing.

9. Icon obsession
   Not every piece of text needs a tiny phone or handshake next to it. When icons multiply like this, they stop being wayfinding and start being wallpaper, and people's eyes just glaze straight past them.

10. Almost aligned
    Everything is several pixels off in different directions, like the designer had an inner-ear problem. It’s the visual equivalent of a crooked picture frame.

A simple rule for avoiding AI-instigated brand erosion

As production gets easier, it makes sense for brands to bring more execution in-house. Plenty of work that once needed agency support can now be handled by a capable marketing team with decent tools and a clear system.

But that carries risk.

The good news is you probably already have an antidote at your fingertips: your brand guidelines.

A good set of guidelines spells out what belongs and what doesn’t. Type, colour, imagery, layout, tone, distinctive assets, plus a few examples of things that should never see daylight. In other words, it defines good taste for your brand.

That makes it incredibly useful when AI joins the workflow. Feed it into your prompts and briefs and use it to sense-check the output, so when AI hands you a page full of plausible creative, you’ve got something more useful than “I like this” to judge it against.

And if your brand guidelines are mostly logo clear-space rules and hex codes, this might be its moment for an upgrade.

The clearer the rules, references and creative standard, the less room there is for AI to freestyle its way into a brand crime.

Need help with your brand foundations? We can help get the foundations, creative direction and standards sorted before you hand the keys to the machines.