The sign outside your bodega will soon look like it was designed by Jony Ive.
AI is eating professional brand design: Swiss grids, tasteful type pairings, harmonious palettes, pristine mockups, and 80-page brand guidelines. Work that once required a six-figure agency and six months of meetings will arrive before lunch. And it will look very good. Good enough that every dry cleaner, dentist, and Etsy witch will have a glossy, coherent brand system with elegant type and a gorgeous color palette.
We’ll achieve design literacy at scale. A singularity of serifs. It looks like hell—but Bauhaus. Bauhell?
“Professional” branding has always been the signal of a wealthy company. But when anyone can produce it for pennies, polish becomes peeling wallpaper. A sleek, restrained, conversion-optimized brand that’s been run through Claude a dozen times will soon communicate as much as a Squarespace template does now: almost nothing at all.
Fear not. This will trigger a renaissance in branding. The brands worth remembering will become more abrasive, obsessive, ugly, baroque, regional, and bizarre. They will break the rules because following them no longer proves competence of any kind. In fact, following the rules will signal mediocrity. The crooked, hand-painted bodega sign will become more memorable, and therefore more valuable, than the VC-backed imitation that replaces it.
That doesn’t mean that designers shouldn’t use AI; rejecting AI in branding would be sentimental and stupid. AI can still execute the system. But a human with vision and references that Codex would never reach for should decide what deserves to be included in it. Only an expert can pick the peculiar inspiration, the purposefully jarring color, the typeface no model would recommend, and the feeling they want to sell. AI then carries that decision across surfaces from websites and packaging to signage, social cards, motion, and the hundreds of other assets that make a brand feel recognizable.
Charmingly off-kilter bodega branding will start to feel special—expensive, even. Its jarring colors and bad kerning will suggest something increasingly rare: A human made a decision, and nobody optimized it out of existence.
