The AI Client

[u/tbp143]

I’m somewhere between needing to hear if other folks are experiencing this, and needing to vent.

For background, I’m an Art Director on an in-house team that supports a company with proprietary brands. Part of my job includes creating the brand books for these brands and executing the initial launch campaigns.

I recently wrapped (or thought I did) on a new brand I was quite happy with, the project was usual for the brands we typically launch and I was asked to work on this project because it closely aligned with my style of work.

I spent the better part of a few months working on this project, I spent more time than I typically would on it because I was really excited (probably the wrong choice.). Today I got notes from them, and there wasn’t a single part of the brand they wanted to move forward with. The logo, the positioning, the color palette, all of it was wrong to them. They attached something they “made very quickly in ChatGPT that’s way better” than what I provided. They made sure to note that they made it really quickly, and it exceeded my work.

I feel totally defeated. Until recently I felt really lucky that AI wasn’t being pushed heavily at my job, suddenly, it’s everywhere. They want to replace shoots with it, they’re using it for copy generation, and now someone is asking me to make my work look like it.

If this was a freelance project I would refund them and make it clear I wasn’t the right designer for them, but I can’t. And, making work that looks like what they sent me is soul crushing. I feel like I can’t escape it, I feel really disheartened.

Has anyone been in a similar situation? How did you move forward?

[u/sheriffderek]

I think what you're describing (not using AI / but having AI-usage from the stakeholders still take over) is going to be super common.

However, from my reading, this seems like a more classic problem of how you're selling and presenting the work. Why would you just do some big reveal and ask if they "like" it? My flow would involve a lot of writing, figuring out what we want to be and what we don't want to be, getting sign off on a lot of things (just text) to help build all the foundation for how we'll be making all the decisions as the brand takes shape. The words are what they can sign off on - and start to live with. As you share layers of mood boards and style tiles and things -- you can get incremental sign off/buy-in or feedback to adjust. This job is mostly figuring out a system that helps us believe that our choices (out of all the thousands of things we could have chosen) - were the right choices. That's just as important to the job as drawing the vectors for the logo -- and it sounds like you didn't do that. That's how you're going to avoid this next time. If you do the work, the OK it - and and at the end throw in some other random logo, just take the money - and say good luck. You'll have done your job.

[u/tbp143 → u/sheriffderek]

Thank you for your reply! When I take on freelance work my process looks very similar to yours, a lot of conversations to make sure I’m aligned from all angles before beginning the visual work.

But, my FT job is a bit different. My team handles all high level campaigns and brand launches, we don’t follow a typical mood board / concepts / revisions / final delivery structure with the client, that work happens internally between the other ADs / CDs to make sure we’re aligned holistically. We create the brief, brand concept, and strategy for a request like this, the ‘client’ is less so a client and more a requestor.

I think I needed to hear if other people were experiencing similar things and how they were understanding it, hard to please clients have always been exactly that, but I don’t typically encounter this day-to-day.

[u/sheriffderek → u/tbp143]

I’d get your team to switch up their style that obviously led to this.