Creative at Scale
3 important things to know if your marketing teams want to scale your creative output with AI
Our design team is now several months DEEP inside of Claude and Claude Design for multiple tech companies, AI startups, and b2b clients. We’re using it with tools like Figma, Replit, Gemini, and a handful of others. Honestly, we are having a ton of fun…but we are also learning a lot in real time about to scale creative output in real time without losing brand-consistency or world class quality.
01
Brand guidelines will become more important than ever to scale design with AI.
Don’t see the value in a great, world-class, differentiated visual identity?
Then you might be able to use AI to generate a few graphics, but it won't help you create consistent assets that are unique and memorable.
Brand strategy/brand identity has to be the foundation of scalable design with AI. We're going to be announcing more brand sprint projects this year where B2B tech and AI biz's will be able to get a world class brand identity + strategy in days, not months to service this need.
Yes, prompting matters...but it's deeper than that.
When it comes to web and product design, your best bet is a human-designed starting point where something like Figma connects to Claude to give it a boost.
For example, the best results in web design right now are coming from something like a homepage design that's really dialed in by an actual senior-level designer.
Claude can then work with Figma or Framer or whatever to build out other sections and pages based off the starting point you give it.
Sure, you can skip this step, but the output will be objectively better if you start with a human, NOT just keep a human-in-the-loop.
These tools are still new, and sometimes they don't work.
Look, I get it. We built an entire site in like a day.
IT was unreal.
Turned out 80% close to being perfect.
The next day? Claude took a crap and the prompts we were using just wouldn't work.
Spent 3 hours trying to get things to connect with Figma.
Then I had to re-set a connection with Google Chrome. Wouldn’t work until the next day.
Several hours. GONE. WASTED.
Sometimes trying to go fast is the slowest thing you can do.
Know when to turn the tool off and roll up your sleeves.
Having this discipline and discernment is vital when your team is ALL billable. AI that scales creative work is AI that is a core part of existing content or production workflows, and its output doesn’t just increase how much gets done, but also HOW consistent to your brand the work stays.
02
I am now certain we are living in the golden age of creative services.
I thought maybe that was the case six months ago, but now I KNOW IT. The lid is about to blow off and the sky won't even be the limit anymore for people who sell creative work.
Here’s 3 reasons why:
The hourly creative worker will soon be a thing of the past.
Creative services are the hardest thing to scale, and always have been. Not anymore. Creative teams who understand workflows, figure out how to use the tools to scale themselves will win. It doesn’t matter if you’re a freelancer, an in-house creative, or a massive agency with a team of creatives.
Scaling used to be something that wasn’t for people like us, but that’s just not true anymore.
The need to hire creative help will only go up!
You might think AI is coming for your job as a creative or a creative biz, but 90% of businesses still want SOMEONE else to handle all the creative stuff.
Just because AI can do it doesn't mean they want to hire an AI person to sit and do it all in-house.
Creative services will never die because NON-creative people still need you and I to help guide them to the outcomes they want...even if AI is helping us get them there.We’re about to see new industries emerge. New markets. New niches.
Millions of new businesses by non creative people are going to spring up all over the world and they are going to need all the same stuff they’ve always needed:
Logos, branding, marketing
customer acquisition
content
email marketing
webinars
help with events
shirts, hats, swag, cup holders
case study PDFs,
the list goes on.
The demand for creativity and creative experts will continue to rise at an unprecedented rate! Just watch.I actually wrote a book called Save The Creatives to help the in-house creatives (people who might be on your team) and the gig economy workers of the next decade to bullet-proof their careers and make the most out of this new demand for people like them. Grab a copy for you or someone on your team 👇🏼
03
The luster and excitement of AI slop is about to run out in the next 18 months.
How do I know this? Because I am a human.
We all know how cool it feels to have ChatGPT make you an image of a turtle, or turn your wife into a queen on a white horse.
The slop is fun! JUST ADMIT it! I made a song for my kids on Suno and I had a blast!
But pretty soon… legal restrictions are about to kill the commercialization of work that brands can’t prove they actually OWN.
This means that while we might like the ability to create slop at will and put it in our email blasts or marketing materials, and while we might have poor taste and actually LIKE the crap we saved money on because we didn’t have to hire a writer… we’re about to be hit hard in the face with all kinds of scary reasons why our businesses cannot actually use it.
This means that a return to human-inspired, and human-originated creative work is going to be the only thing brands will safely invest in.
Sure, AI will be allowed to be used as a tool, and as agents, and as an augmenter… but only where human origination and IP ownership can be proven.
If you’re skating by on AI slop, or planning to scale by delivering 100% generated crap that most people don’t even know is fake then you have a rude awakening coming your way.
My point: Creativity is a human act, and when it comes to every single kind of creative service, output, and tactic, the demand and need for human creatives to sit behind the tools, orchestrate the workflows, and originate the ideas and concepts in ways that brands can legally defend and use is only going to go up.
AI is here to stay, but creative people like you and me aren’t going anywhere either. If you are running an in-house marketing team and you want to scale creative output with AI, shoot me a DM and we’ll show you how we’re using it WITH our humans to produce hundreds of on-brand, world-class deliverables and results per month.
For the love of humanity,
BT
