Creative Efficiencies vs Creatives
April 30, 2025
A few quick notes from the intersection of AI, marketing, branding, and small business.
AI-designed logos. While inexpensive quick-design logos have been around for a long time, it’s now AI’s turn at the glyph. AI-powered branding tools, like Tailor Brands, are making logo and brand identity design more accessible for very small businesses. Tools like these, I’ve read, use machine learning to generate logos quickly and cheaply, allowing small businesses to establish brand identities in minutes rather than months. Consider this Brand Auditors article.
Meanwhile, more news about the killing off of designers and copywriters. Tools like Uizard, Relume, Figma plugins, Jasper, and Copy.ai are enabling non-creatives to generate logos, website layouts, marketing copy, and social posts from simple prompts. This down-valuing of creative work is causing deep concern but offers small and micro-sized businesses design and copywriting capabilities they may not have had. More writing tools.
Not the end of the world for creatives? Okay, AI can automate routine content and design tasks, but some, like Nicki Krawczyk, say it’s not poised to fully replace skilled designers or copywriters. Pros who master smart prompting (see this Tyler Carty post), strategic thinkers, or innovative concepters can use AI as a creative partner—speeding up workflows, expanding ideation, and focusing more on high-level strategy and brand alignment. Or how about working fewer hours?
Oh, maybe AI has low EQ. AI excels at generating content based on prompts but struggles with nuanced strategy, emotional resonance, and deep brand understanding. That’s what some people are saying, anyway. Human expertise in audience insight, campaign planning, and creative direction is still critical—AI is a tool, not a total substitute. Have these people ever even used AI?
How to succeed. Designers and copywriters who learn prompt engineering and how to integrate AI into their creative process will remain in demand. Those who rely solely on basic execution are likely to be eliminated quickly. That’s the consensus view. Here’s my view as of April 30, 2025: Simply learning to prompt engineer and speed up a creative workflow won’t be sufficient. Curiosity, patience, vision, aesthetic taste have always elevated the best creatives and those skills will become even more valuable. AI lures you into thinking it’s the Easy Button, but talented creatives who put in the work will find a place in the short to mid-term economy. Long term? Who knows.
