Don't let Command W hit you on the way out
For the video version, head over to YouTube
The strangest thing happened to me the other day.
I was hanging out in the Slack channel of a savvy, tech-ish community I belong to, and I saw advertised an opening for "storytelling PR." Given that PR is like my middle name and storytelling one of my passions, my fingers instinctively clicked through.
What awaited me on the other side of my curiosity could not have surprised me more.
Under my eyes, a glossy black background appeared, gold Times New Roman headers, and the unmistakable flatness of AI-generated copy answering a rather lousy prompt.
In a rather frenzied fashion, I found myself clicking around the website trying to understand what actual gold was hiding on the page. After all, storytelling PR was telling me "there's something good to talk about here." Eventually I zigzagged my way to a simplistic three-portal design which revealed some kind of choose-your-own-adventure experience for people to explore their purpose. Or something to that effect. Hard to elaborate, because my left thumb and index finger hit Command W, as if I'd slammed the door shut on my way out. (If you don't know: Command W closes a tab.)
What was so bad? Every piece of text screamed default ChatGPT. But what had me flee the scene was a combination of hollow words multiplied by bad design. Bad juju.
It felt almost as if I had landed, Martian-like, onto an empty planet. No sign of life here. Bots had been around, though.
If this wasn't for me, the storytelling PR lover with a very explicit propensity toward self-development, then who was this built for?
Moments later, I paused to consider the implications and felt my face beginning to tense up. I rubbed my temples just as I realised that someone was going to take a job spinning stories about that silly platform that offered an even sillier AI-generated self-discovery program. No amount of PR or storytelling talent could make it a success.
No wonder some people think of PR and communications as hot air.
Anything can be hot air if we choose to put out work that has no substance.
What's that I hear? "Anne, it's hard to put work with depth out there. Do people even care?"
YES WE CARE. Sorry, that came from my soul. It wanted to be heard.
I know it's hard. We live with this endless tension between "I want words and designs that express me, my brand, my objectives" and also "it's hard."
But anything worth making will bring friction, and with it difficulty and frustration. I too have shouted at my screen after writing, drafting scope of work emails, designing my own social posts; I've paced up and down my apartment groaning trying to release the bubbling anger when graphic designers failed to understand my brief; I've sat on the floor of my living room, devastated, after calling it quits with my second to last design appointment because that person and I had completely different understandings of what the word "designer" actually means. But then my following appointment was just awash with ease and joy. What do you know?
AI promises to remove all of that.
And what I see on the other side is: when the metaphorical blood, sweat and tears are gone, what's left is an empty shell. Think snail. No more life in there.
Isn't it funny, not ha-ha funny, how we can feel effort and intention even behind simple 2D frames? Our struggle builds creative grit. That's also where breakthroughs come from: ideas, products, writings, podcasts, art. You name it.
When something you're making comes hard, what do you make that mean? That you're not good enough, or that it matters?
The point of design is the process. The care is the point.
Which means AI-generated design isn't just aesthetically flat. It's philosophically wrong. It skips the thing that makes design mean something.
This leads me to wonder: how do we express substance online?
Counter-intuitively, not everything needs to be online.
Don't build or move in online unless you have the means to invest in quality, whether in design or copy. The investment could be time, money, or both.
Building online has always been a tough translation exercise: to take what is textured, subtle, or specific in real life and make it feel right on a screen. It's not unlike what I wrote about the other day, about the 3D self versus the flat pack self.
This calls back to a time when I was still working for Christian Louboutin, heading communications. Back then, the brand's website ticked the boxes for a functional e-commerce platform, but it felt devoid of the brand's personality, the mix of camp, grit, and outrageous creativity that has been otherwise synonymous with our designer.
A survey of clients confirmed this. The women polled said they didn't recognise the brand on the site. No sign of him. Which in itself was the problem, because back then you could feel his touch in every store and in most aspects of the brand.
This wasn't a hard read, though it escaped many in the upper echelons of the business. Christian's extraordinary taste in architecture and design, his whimsy, his love of sourcing random materials from his travels, like bespoke lighting fixtures made of agate slices (oh, there's a story there), the handpicked patchwork-covered furniture, the Indian-crafted wall coverings and other eclectic interior elements that unmistakably said: "ah, he was here." This didn't just come from nowhere.
No wonder he's designing and opening hotels now.
Many websites say: sorry, our creative was never here. In a sense, it's a way of saying they don't care about this.
Head over to Cartier.com and tell me what you see. What I see is a digital platform designed for conversion over experience, an empty shell, a simplified shelf compared to the experience of their retail stores.
It's hard for small brands. For independents. For big brands. It's that 3D versus flat pack problem, made digital.
How can we make it better, I hear you ask?
Unless we experience what good or bad design actually feels like, it's unlikely that our online homes, those essential calling cards, will ever feel anything like their three-dimensional counterparts.
As I was editing this essay, I remembered a quote from a movie. I had the second half of it, and AI helped me fish it out in full. It's from The American President (1995), written by Aaron Sorkin. The exchange is between Lewis Rothschild (Michael J. Fox) and President Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas):
Lewis: "They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand."President Shepherd: "People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference."
What I'm arguing here is this: we drink sand, bad design, because we don't know the difference.
For better design to emerge, we all need exposure to a wider, more eclectic range in general. I am arguing for the need to build a taste register. To learn to feel the difference. To look outside of industry and competitors, to react to good or bad design. To look at artists. To let ourselves feel the joy of creativity, bold choices, or the puzzled feeling of something genuinely quirky.
All we need is to spend a few minutes every week following our curiosity, learning to notice how sensorially charged a good digital design can be.
I personally feel tickled by certain font choices and functionalities. I felt distraught not long ago when I realised I'd lost a short list of websites I'd come across and loved, inspiration for a future mood board.
Like a house, a website is a home for what you or your brand stands for. In essence, it's an expression of your values.
The day I looked at that website, my reaction expressed the misalignment between the intention of storytelling PR I'd read about and the reality of AI-generated design. What I was experiencing wasn't just bad aesthetics. It was a breach of something.
Aesthetics as ethics, you could say.
The quality of the container matters as much as the content. How something is delivered is part of what is being said. You cannot separate the two.
My favourite example this year was the Hermès homepage, and their deliberate use of hand-drawn illustration, the addition of friction and discovery. Hermès made this choice despite their resources, and because of their commitment to their values.
They understand that in a moment when everything is racing toward AI-smooth and frictionless, texture is the differentiator. Craft is the signal. The proof of life is in the details.
This brings me back to proof of life. That's what I'm looking for when I encounter someone's work.
Not: was AI involved? I use AI too. But: how present was the human in this? Can I feel someone thinking, choosing, caring, and occasionally, like I do, getting it wrong? Failure is part of the process of creating.
Because AI is brilliant when directed by smart and caring humans. The problem isn't the tool. It's the absence of intention. The plastic sheen when you want the depth of lacquer.
If the promise of AI is to remove the friction, it may be that we create an empty world. If it requires no effort, is it worth doing?
What if the fact that this is hard isn't a sign we're doing it wrong, but a sign it's worth doing?
I see how many of my clients, my friends, my audience exist at the opposite end of this frictionless experience. Our values mirror each other. Not only are they full of substance, purpose-led, heart-led, pursuing projects they genuinely believe in, but they also want to be inspired by others who are putting effort and care into what they do.
At times they struggle with finding the right words, the right design experience, the right consultants or service providers, caught between inner vision and outer expression, between the full complexity of what they care about and the language, design or otherwise, available to express it.
That gap, between substance and expression, between who you are and how you come across, is exactly where I work.
I delight when I see people bring the texture of who they are into the work they put out into the world. Deep, differentiating, crafted, authentic, memorable, uniquely yours.
We all have a choice every single day about what we put out and how we put it out. I'm not above anyone when I say it can feel hard. The pressure to produce is real. The quality of presence it demands is real.
But if you're going for depth and substance, if you want your work to carry the quality of attention you actually have, I work as a midwife to your expression, helping bring what's already in you out into the world. Three-dimensional. Alive.
You know where to find me. Until next time, thanks for reading.
DIVE DEEPER
Aesop and the art of refusing to flatten
Take Aesop. Years ago, when I was about to open the Louboutin store on Mount Street in London, Aesop were opening down the same street. I remember being fascinated watching how they partnered with a different architect in every city, no visual throughline from store to store, apart from the product itself. Every experience made new and surprising by the choice to work with opinionated designers in eclectic locations (look for yourself thanks to Dezeen.com).
Around the same time, they were sending long-form emails. Never crowding my inbox, I was surprised to see literary references, intellectual notes, barely any product mentions. I've thought about their emails on and off for fifteen years. About the clarity of their point of view. I was only mildly surprised to read that the brand turned two of their mainland Chinese boutiques into pop-up libraries.
(The Aesop Women's Library arrived in Wuhan, with shelves cleared of formulations to make way for complimentary books by female authors. This year, the Library focuses on the notion of the human body as a bridge between our private interiority and what is shared with the wider world.)
If you visit their website, their design philosophy is plainly stated: "We believe unequivocally that well-considered design improves our lives." When choosing new locations, their intention is to "weave ourselves into the fabric of place and add something of merit rather than impose a discordant presence."
And yet, in my eyes, their homepage doesn't reflect the originality and intentionality they bring to their store design. I'm sure someone would argue the financial numbers or some other constraint. It's a shame. Even a brand this intentional still flattens online.
But not completely. On their footer, arguably the most unglamorous real estate on any website, they made it generous, clear, human: every possible need anticipated, every person on the other side of the screen considered. Nobody asked them to do that. They just did.
Even the footer. Care made visible in the least glamorous corner of the house.
On sovereignty, digits and showing up
My friend Caitlin Krause, a former guest on Out of the Clouds, works the other side of this question entirely. She's not lamenting what digital or tech gets wrong. She's asking how we use it to genuinely connect, and insisting that we don't relinquish our sovereignty to the machine before we've had a chance to know ourselves first. She makes the case for experience, intention, and exploration.
She has a provocation I keep returning to: the origin of the word digital comes from our digits. Our hands are the execution of our will, the fine-tuning of our doing. So why would we make what lives on the other side of the screen hollow, frictionless, emptied of us?
"Your body is your testing ground. You get to have your experience and own it," she says. Experiment. Try. Notice how you feel. The question was never whether digital can carry meaning. It's whether we're willing to show up and put it there.
Listen to our conversation on the podcast. LISTEN HERE
"Skill still requires repetition. Creativity still demands boredom, frustration and failed attempts." It's Nice That
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