Excerpts from an excellent article by Elliot Vredenburg featured in Fast Company.
In the age of AI, design is less about making and more about meaning.
The craft of execution is no longer a differentiator. For surface-level visuals, speed and quantity now rule. But this shift reveals something deeper: When production is automated, the designer’s role becomes less about making and more about meaning.
If you’re a designer today, your ability to thrive depends on shifting your creative identity from executor to editor, and from technician to translator. The cost of not adapting isn’t just irrelevance. It’s being indistinguishable from the tools themselves.
Which is why creative direction matters more now than ever. If designers are no longer the makers, they must become the orchestrators. This isn’t without precedent. Rick Rubin doesn’t read music or play instruments. Virgil Abloh was more interested in recontextualizing than inventing. Their value lies not in original execution but in framing, curation, and translation. The same is true now for brand designers. Creative direction is about synthesizing abstract ideas into aesthetic systems—shaping meaning through how things feel, not just how they look.
AI can absolutely help translate complex ideas into accessible ones. But it’s the designer who chooses which ideas to bring forward, how to apply them, and why they matter in a given moment. That’s not just a function of intelligence—it’s a function of intuition, authorship, and taste.
Taste isn’t just personal preference. It’s an evolving, often unstable framework—shaped by experience, exposure, and the cultural moment—that informs how we make aesthetic judgments. It’s not fixed, nor is it singular. What feels resonant in one context may fall flat in another. Taste is less about knowing what’s right and more about understanding what’s relevant—what aligns, what disrupts, what works now. In a world of infinite possibilities, taste becomes less of a crown and more of a compass.
AI is a tool—but like all technologies, it’s not neutral. It reflects the choices of its makers and transforms every system it touches. It influences markets, media, and belief. It expands what’s possible while quietly reshaping how meaning is made. And its impact on creative work is especially complex. It’s a medium, a system, a collaborator. It can generate, iterate, and surprise. But it can’t decide what matters. It can’t assign meaning. It can’t make a choice. AI responds to input. Creative direction is that input.
We’re moving into an era where synthesis and judgment—not just execution—are the creative differentiators. AI will continue to evolve, and yes—it will replace certain tasks and even entire roles. But it won’t replace curiosity. It won’t replace intuition. And it won’t replace the ability to decide what matters. Taste.
#Marketing #BrandStrategy #CreativeExcellence
https://www.fastcompany.com/91319403/why-taste-matters-now-more-than-ever