AI is making design easier.

Good.

“We do hard things” (thanks JD) is a mantra I’ve been repeating to the Maven team ad nauseam for a few years now. Partly in response to the endless ads promising that the latest bit of tech will make everything effortless. Partly because that's what interests us and keeps us sharp.

We’re early adopters of technology. We understand where it can remove repetitive work, speed up our workflow and give us more time to think.

But we also understand the danger.

The danger comes when easy starts shaping the answer.

When the thing that’s easiest to generate becomes the thing that gets made. When the first plausible answer starts looking like the right answer. When everything slowly gravitates towards the large language model median.

Polished. Plausible. Perfectly fine.

Design has always had this problem. Committees have it. Focus groups have it. Competitor moodboards have it. “Can we make it a bit more like them?” has it.

We’ve spent our careers fighting that gravitational pull towards the middle, protecting good ideas while everyone, usually with the best intentions, tries to knock their difficult edges off.

There’s a quote attributed to Brian Wilson that I love:

“Beware the lollipop of mediocrity;
lick it once and you’ll suck forever.”

Crude, but useful.

We do hard things

It’s finding the real problem hiding behind the brief. Zigging while an entire industry is zagging. Standing in a confusing building and working out how a first-time visitor can find reception without having to think about it. Getting architects, contractors, AV teams, developers, marketers, suppliers and clients moving in the same direction when they all have different priorities.

It’s making complicated things feel simple. Knowing when there are too many ideas, messages, signs, pages or features and having the confidence to take things away. Knowing when a rough edge is the interesting bit and should be left alone. Sometimes it’s knowing when not to design something at all.

Adding is easy. Removing requires judgement.

And great design has always been about relationships: between a business and its customers, an employer and its people, a visitor and a space, a promise and the experience that follows it.

That’s the bit that gets lost when design is reduced to how something looks.

Design isn’t decoration. It’s helping someone else solve a problem through clear thinking, good judgement and skilled action.

The beautiful bit at the end is just the most visible part.

Yeah, but how?

We start by looking beyond the brief. What actually needs fixing? That might mean following a customer journey, talking to employees, walking through a space, questioning the message or finding out why different teams aren’t joining up.

Then we reduce. We find the idea that matters, remove what doesn’t, make the complicated clear and get people behind a direction.

Only then do we decide what needs making.

It might be a brand, website, campaign, space or wayfinding system. It might be a small change somewhere nobody expected. Sometimes the answer is to leave something alone.

And we don’t stop when it looks slick. We stay involved in the difficult bit of making it work: bringing people together, solving the awkward details and making sure the experience lives up to the idea.

Because a beautiful solution to the wrong problem is still the wrong solution.

Thinking for a living

Anyone who thinks AI is killing design is confusing design with its output.

AI is already very good at producing average work quickly, and it will get better. Some production work will shrink or disappear. We’re fine with that. Give the repetitive bits to the machines.

It makes the other parts more valuable: understanding the problem, seeing what others have missed, making choices, simplifying complexity, protecting an idea and turning it into something that actually works for people.

We’ve even questioned whether design is still the right word for what Maven does. It has become increasingly associated with aesthetic-first, surface-level output, when for us that has never been the whole job.

We think for a living.

Then we make things that matter.

AI can make plenty of things easier. Good.

We do hard things.