Made with AI Is the New Made in China
Twenty years ago, “Made in China” meant cheap, disposable, unsustainable, and low quality. Today, China is actively changing that perception, but the label still lingers in people’s minds.
Made with AI design is the new “Made in China” — and we mean that as a warning, not a trend report. We’ve spent twenty years watching what happens when cost becomes the only design criterion. The results are always the same: disposable work, eroded brand identity, and a market that eventually has to pay twice.
The same thing could happen with AI.
A lack of knowledge about how to use it, and a lack of judgment about what is good or bad, will quickly turn “Made with AI” into a stigma as well.
AI produces mountains of garbage—but so do humans. And AI is, in many ways, learning from us.
Nobody asks whether a movie was edited with Premiere, whether a book was written in Word, or whether a logo was designed in Illustrator. The tool disappears. The work remains.
This says more about people than it does about the technology. Because AI doesn’t replace taste. It exposes the lack of it.
Eager to know—will the label stay?
What Made with AI Design Gets Wrong About Brand Identity
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Ethics
Design ethics and sustainability aren't a policy we wrote to hang on a wall — they're the criteria we use before we say yes to a project. We've been running this studio since 2004, and the framework hasn't changed: if the work can't be defended on ethical grounds, it doesn't leave the desk. Design ethics and sustainability, in practice, means turning things down as often as taking them on.
To all the misfits who jumped to freelancing
Freelance designer struggles don't announce themselves. One month you're euphoric about escaping the agency; six months later you're chasing an invoice at midnight and questioning every career decision you've ever made. We've seen this arc enough times — from our studio in Ljubljana, across two decades of watching good designers disappear into bad freelance situations — to say something honest about it.
What Does a Branding Agency Actually Do?
What does a branding agency do — and what separates the ones worth hiring from the ones who just make things look nice? We've been answering that question through work since 2004. What does a branding agency do at its best: it builds the strategic and visual foundation a business can actually stand on.
Should designers code?
Should designers code? We've been asking ourselves that question since 2004 — across identities, interfaces, and campaigns where design met production head-on. The answer depends entirely on what kind of designer you want to be, and what kind of work you want to make. Should designers code is the wrong binary; the real question is how much of the medium should you understand before you hand it off.
You thought it would hold.
Brand consistency breakdown rarely announces itself. It arrives as a slightly wrong typeface, a colour that's close but not right, a logo scaled by someone who didn't know why the padding existed. We've spent two decades watching brands we built with precision quietly come apart — not through malice, but through the ordinary entropy of handoff.
Branding Agency vs Logo Designer: Understanding the Difference
Branding agency vs logo designer — the confusion is real, and it costs clients money. Most briefs we receive conflate the two, assuming a mark is a brand. It isn't. A branding agency vs logo designer comparison isn't about prestige; it's about scope, process, and what problem you're actually trying to solve.
Ai killed the lorem ipsum
AI killed lorem ipsum quietly, somewhere between the first GPT prompt and the moment clients started sending actual copy on day one. We noticed it not as a loss but as a correction — design built around real words is harder, more honest, and significantly better. That's the shift AI killed lorem ipsum protecting us from confronting for decades.
Passion
Passion in design gets misquoted constantly — treated as fuel when it's closer to weather. We've spent twenty years watching it ignite projects and abandon them halfway through. What keeps work honest isn't feeling, it's the decision to continue when passion has already left the room. That gap between passion in design and actual commitment is where studios either build something or quietly repeat themselves.