“Our power has always been in the ability to curate”

Creative Career Conundrums is a weekly advice column from If You Could Jobs. Each week their selected panel of professionals from the creative industry answers your burning career questions to help you navigate the creative journey.

This week’s question:

“In a world where AI and algorithms dictate what is important, and metrics are no longer a metric that justifies the value of design, how do design leaders communicate and help their teams grow when the landscape is shifting the shape and value of design work?”

Katie Cadwell, co-founder of branding studio Lucky Dip and The NDA Podcast:

Automation isn’t detracting from design thinking. It’s taking away design time. It’s changing how design is delivered.

Our power has always been in the ability to curate. We used to print everything in the studio, put it up on a wall and critique it. That skill is more important now than ever before, it just looks different.

If clients are generating AI content, especially in rollout, our job is to help them audit it. Our wall is now a Figma board of all the different outputs. We can point out the inconsistencies and highlight where they’re becoming indistinct. Any assets with high conversions? It’s your team’s job to highlight why. And remind them that the algorithm is an unruly beast – that sometimes the success is purely time and placement, not the creative. Giving teams the opportunity to demonstrate their design thinking cements their value, internally and externally.

The pace at which companies need to generate ads isn’t something the industry could keep up with right now. We need these tools to meet the demand of the algorithm. And they need us to stop them getting lost in the void (for now). I’m sure this demand for content will slow, and the tide will turn to quality over quantity again.

It’s important to remember we’ve always had challenges. It was the move from print to digital. Desktop to mobile. Long form to short form. And now, it’s the saturation of AI content. 

But AI needs inputs. We are the input. One cannot work without the other. It’s vital we make this distinction to our teams and junior talent. That what they think isn’t something that can be replicated. They aren’t going to get the hours on the tools that we did, refining their execution. So their power is in their thinking.

If we empower them with that narrative, we’re arming them to become the critiques of AI, not competitors.

In answering your creative career conundrums we realise that some issues need expert support, so we’ve collated a list of additional resources that can support you across things that might arise at work.

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