Does it feel like we’re all losing our minds a little bit?

Has scrolling through the polished sameness of our feeds started to feel like sandpaper on our eyes? Like we are one more glassmorphic pastel blob away from canceling our Adobe subscriptions and becoming local forest cryptids?

Your mileage may vary on the cryptid dream. But the current surge of messy, noisy, rambunctious anti-AI design reveals our shared anxiety. We are craving visual friction as proof of life.

When everything is effortlessly polished, the rough edge becomes enthralling. Hand-drawn marks, irregular textures, imperfection deconstructed: all of it feels more human because it resists the smoothness of the machine.

Is it time to get ugly?

This backlash is one more turn in art history’s cycle of embracing and rebelling against the dominant vocabulary. Every era has its version of “good taste,” and every version eventually gets painted over. Some of humanity’s best works were born from that tension.

But “getting ugly” in the desperate hope of being heard above the elevator jazz of AI-generated sameness is just a panic response. Panic is never conducive to good strategy.

Good design needs to DO something.

This creative discipline has always lived somewhere between Art and Craft, like a weird roommate in the garage apartment. Good design is both artful and well-crafted. When we spot it in the wild, we say it’s good design because it “works.”

Good design is working when a button gets clicked, a sign gets followed, a campaign converts, etc. The way a design looks is only partially responsible for its success.

The trouble with feeding neural networks on generations of artists, designers, and high-converting campaigns is that all those patterns and paths get synthesized down into algorithmic mediocrity. When millions upon millions of instances of “good design” become optimized, the result is startlingly homogenous.

The thing that shifts design to Design That Works™ is ineffable, but unmissable. The thing is intentionality. Designing for specificity, not for generic best practices.

There is no universal aesthetic truth for good design.

Sleek, pristine digital work can capture and convert as strongly as a handcut woodblock print. Aesthetics and functionality are not enemies, no more than beauty and ugliness. Composition, balance, friction, polish, and mess are all tools in service of communicating human messages to other humans. If a work is only trying to prove it was not made by AI, it is still letting AI set the tone of the conversation.

Intentionality is always the key. If a brand’s identity is built on idiosyncrasy, get weird and let it play. If a message needs to build trust with an anxious audience, support the structures that protect and care for that audience. If someone needs to take action, teach them what they need to know so they can jump in with both feet.

Design is a language of service.

Good design understands what it is responsible for and makes every visual choice answer to that responsibility. Sometimes that means designing a system so clear it disappears. But it also means startling people out of monotonous scrolling and seizing their attention.

Everything may be too pretty these days, but getting ugly is a distraction from the real problem. The cure is remembering that every choice, beautiful or strange or chaotic, needs to serve real people. When it is time to rage against the machine, by all means, rage. Just make sure it is by choice, not by reflex.