The Personal Brand Ate the Designer

How to spend less time being a designer and more time looking like one.

Apparently I have been spending my time backwards.

According to a growing corner of the internet, I should be spending less time designing and considerably more time talking about being a designer. Posting consistently. Building authority. Turning one idea into seven posts, three reels, a carousel and, presumably, a downloadable PDF called Ten Things Twenty-Five Years in Design Taught Me About Resilience.

AI can do the actual design work. It can develop the concepts, generate the images, write the copy, build the layouts and produce endless variations, while I concentrate on the important business of establishing myself as someone who develops concepts, generates images, writes copy and builds layouts.

You can see where I am getting confused.

A personal brand is simply what people have come to understand about you. What you care about. How you think. What you notice. What it feels like to be in a room with you when something is going wrong. We all have one, whether or not we have carefully selected three adjectives for it.

Traditionally, that understanding came from the work. You made things, the things accumulated, and eventually they said something about you that you could not have said about yourself without sounding insufferable. A body of work became a body of evidence.

We are now being encouraged to reverse the order. Construct the reputation first. Outsource the work that was supposed to earn it.

The man who got his own face on the cover of Time

None of this is new. It is just cheaper.

Raymond Loewy was on the cover of Time on October 31, 1949, illustrated by Boris Artzybasheff, under the caption "He streamlines the sales curves." He had a press agent, Betty Reese, who was extremely good at her job. Photographs were retouched. Cars were customized for public appearances. He designed his own houses less as places to live than as advertisements with plumbing.

That is a content strategy. It simply had staff.

Fun fact: Loewy restyled the Coldspot refrigerator for Sears in 1934 and its sales climbed from roughly 15,000 units to 275,000 within five years. He also did the Greyhound bus interiors, the Lucky Strike pack, the Shell logo, and the Exxon wordmark, which he drew in 1966 and which did not appear until 1972. A six-year gap between drawing a logo and seeing it. Imagine surviving that now.

So the mountain of work was real.

Here is the part that makes him useful rather than merely famous. Loewy's reputation has spent forty years being argued over, and it is always the same argument. Was he a designer, or a very charming businessman who signed other people's drawings? The 1953 Studebaker Starliner went out under his name. It was Robert Bourke's car.

Loewy is both halves of this essay at once. The largest personal brand the profession has ever produced, resting on an enormous pile of manufactured objects, some of which he did not personally design.

Note what it still required. A pile.

The proposal on offer now is the pile as optional extra.

Let AI carry the boxes

This is not where I tell you AI is bad. I use it constantly.

Let it rename the files. Let it transcribe the meeting nobody took notes in, resize the ads, organize the research, and find the one stock photograph that does not feature a suspiciously enthusiastic group pointing at a laptop.

Let AI carry the boxes. It is very good at boxes. It does not get bored, it does not develop opinions about the boxes, and it will never once ask whether the boxes really need to be moved at all.

I am less relaxed about handing over the part of the job that makes anyone worth listening to.

You cannot prompt your way to a spine

Design is not the production of a finished object. It is several hundred small decisions wearing a finished object as a disguise.

Why that typeface and not the one that is technically more legible. Why the headline needs more room than the client thinks. Why something correct still feels wrong. What this audience will recognize that another audience will walk straight past. What the client is actually trying to say, as opposed to what they said. What should be removed. When a rule is worth following, and when breaking it is the only honest option left.

Every one of those is a decision you have to survive.

That is where judgment comes from, and judgment is the raw material of a point of view. Automate the whole process and expect your perspective to come out the other side unchanged, and you are going to be disappointed. Stop wrestling with the work and you will eventually run short of useful things to say about it.

You will still have content. Content is embarrassingly easy to produce.

Perspective takes longer. It comes from trying something that does not work, defending a choice badly, changing your mind in public, noticing that the solution everyone in the room loves is solving a problem nobody has, and spending an unreasonable amount of time adjusting something most people will never consciously see. They feel it anyway. That is the whole trick and it cannot be delegated, because the person who did the adjusting is the only one who knows why it worked.

Be more human, they say, from behind a machine

The people telling designers to automate their craft are frequently the same people telling them that their humanity is now their competitive advantage.

Be more human. Show your personality. Share your unique perspective.

Then hand the thinking to a machine and use the time you saved to make a video about your unique perspective.

That is not a personal brand. That is a promotional campaign for someone who is drifting further from their own work every quarter, filmed in good lighting.

We have confused visibility with value. Being known is useful. Being trusted is better, and trust does not accumulate because you appeared in somebody's feed on a reliable schedule. It accumulates through the care and the judgment and the curiosity someone brings to a messy problem, which is the only thing anyone has ever actually hired a designer for.

Your personal brand should be the residue of the work. Not a replacement for it.

So what is it built on

I still believe a designer should be close enough to the work to be changed by it. Ideas should come from what you have attempted, questioned, discarded and defended, not only from what you have read or prompted.

Use the tools. Save the time. Remove the drudgery.

But be careful which part you call drudgery.

Because if the work is no longer personal, what exactly is the personal brand built on?