When the pace picks up, the brand is the first thing to go
The amount of content my team has produced since we began this journey is remarkable. Documents, decks, one-pagers, posts, proposals. All being turned around at a speed that would have been unthinkable not even that long ago. And genuinely, it’s been exhilarating. But when the pace speeds up and the output volume increases, the visual thread that holds everything together has the potential to fray.
This isn’t really a new problem, it’s just a faster version of one that has always existed. AI tools have removed a lot of the friction that used to slow production down, which is mostly a good thing, but they’ve also removed the stage where a designer would have previously created a branded version of a document or presentation or at least art directed it before it went out into the world. The result is more output, moving more quickly, with less visual oversight.
A system is what holds it all together
In design, a brand system is the thing that makes everything feel like it came from the same place, even when different people made different parts of it. This is something I feel so passionate about from all my years in design. Typography, colour, spacing, tone of voice, image style. When those rules are shared and applied consistently, the work is still coherent even if it was built by ten different people across four different tools. When they aren’t, even great individual pieces can start to feel like they belong to different organisations.
For teams using AI platforms to produce content at scale, the absence of a brand system doesn't just create visual inconsistency, it opens a credibility gap. Buyers, clients, and partners are making subconscious judgements about an organisation all the time, based on whether what they’re looking at feels considered or thrown together.
Feeding your brand into the machine
As the visual lead for Scail, I’ve been building a set of brand guidelines that we’re now starting to test across different AI platforms. The ambition is that if we can give the tools our visual system from the start, they should produce outputs that feel more cohesive and on-brand from the outset, rather than needing a full design overhaul every time. We’re still in the experimental stage and I’ll share more as we learn what actually works in practice. Any designer produces far better work when they have a clear brief. We have to give our AI tools the same information, and what we give it as reference needs to be clear, considered, and consistent.
Brand guidelines can often be created at the start of a branding project but then get forgotten about and, as projects evolve, branding can start becoming a bit watered down. The cost of not having followed the system becomes very visible, very fast, once your team is producing at scale.
Building a proper brand system takes time and it takes someone who understands what they’re building towards. But it doesn’t need to be complicated. It needs to be useful, accessible to the people actually creating the work, and built for the tools they’re actually using, including the AI ones.
A clearer picture of where consistency is costing you
Brand coherence is one part of a larger picture. For businesses that want to understand where they actually stand on AI, the Scail AI Risk & Value Mini Scorecard is a short, focused place to start. A handful of questions about how your team is using AI gives you a snapshot of where you're already getting value, and where risk might be building that's worth getting ahead of.
Read more about our AI Risk & Value Scorecard.
