Design the world at once

Even the way I design brands has changed. I used to design very sequentially. The logo first, trying to get that right. Then some CI. By that point I'm already creatively tired, so I'm just mocking up whatever. Then a profile or a document. Those were the main touch points that started building the brand.

Now I've built workflows and skills around how we do logos, how we package them, how we do business cards, documents, websites. And with all the work I've done on the strategy of branding, the AI can lay out the pieces, and my process becomes designing across all the touch points at once. Going for the general vibe of the different elements, then pointing at things to flesh out and build a complete world.

So I end up designing the world at once, not artifact by artifact. It comes out a lot more cohesive, more dense, more layered, more interesting.

A brand is a logo, the general shape and type of it. It's the colours, the textures, the imagery, the composition, the language. And an infinite variation of all of those is what makes different brands. Understand that system, build tools and methodologies and workflows around it, and you can do way more than one thing at a time.

It's moving from being an artifact thinker to being a systems thinker.

So if you're a freelancer who has always done one part of the pie, now you can build the whole system. I don't have to spend hours going through my bank statements, checking and connecting things and making them pretty so I can understand what's up with my money. I built something to do that for me.