My Portfolio Now Comes With an Invisible Asterisk

I was scrolling through my portfolio whilst creating this site - a digital gallery of past projects, logos, and artworks that I’ve slowly built over the years. It’s a familiar ritual for any creative. But this time, a strange, new thought surfaced, one that simply couldn’t have existed even a few years ago.

Every single piece in that collection was made without generative AI.

There’s a certain strangeness in realising all the tools that were commonplace to us all, are increasingly becoming relics in a bygone era. The process I once considered normal is now something that requires context. That blank square canvas in Adobe Illustrator wasn’t just a starting point; it was the only option. The void from which all ideas had to be drawn.

I remember the hours I spent at the start of my design journey… at that point, I didn’t really even know what design was. I would log on to the internet (hopefully mum wasn’t expecting a call), open Windows media player and navigate to the internet radio section. Welcome to PartyZone. It might have been a German station, or perhaps it was based in Eastern Europe - I don’t recall. All I remember is I could listen to unknown techno tracks from the other side of the world (wow!) and surf through Google Image Search - saving anything I thought was cool. Bouncing from stock photos, to scientific and fashion sites, right click > Save As. I remember finding a website called Hel-looks (a style blog based in Finland - which still exists by the way) and getting ideas for T-shirt designs. Searching for 30 minutes to find the perfect complementary image, and then spending another three hours in Photoshop compositing, colour-correcting, and masking these to make them fit onto a piece A4 iron-on print paper. Every new addition to the image was a series of deliberate, manual decisions.

This wasn’t a better or worse way of working; it was simply the only way. The friction was a feature, not a bug. It forced a certain kind of problem-solving. A “happy accident” wasn’t a misinterpreted prompt; but instead was losing track of the layers you had created, and finding that one you forgot to delete makes the design look so much better. Creativity was a direct, tactile conversation between your brain, your hands, and the software.

Today, the fundamental question for a designer is changing. It’s shifting from “How do I build this?” to “How do I describe this?” The skillset is expanding from technical execution towards verbal fluency in creative direction. The designer is becoming an art director for a tireless, infinitely skilled, and sometimes frustratingly literal machine. It feels as though design today favours the written word over the cursor.

And I embrace that. I’m fascinated by the new tools and the creative avenues they unlock. I’ve used AI to brainstorm ideas I’d never have conceived of, to generate placeholder imagery and video in seconds, and to accelerate workflows in ways that feel like magic. It’s an undeniably powerful partner.

But it’s why looking at my old work feels so different now. It’s a testament to a different kind of labour. It’s a portfolio where 100% of the output can be traced back to a human input - not a text prompt. And somehow it’s a more absracted version of the same process. Instead of stealing single images from Google search to use as references, the models are trained on many orders of magnitudes more. We are using the same digital source material, but in a different way.

So now, when I show someone a piece from 2016, I feel the urge to add a verbal footnote: “This was made pre-AI”

It’s not intended to be a flex, and it’s certainly not a complaint. It’s just a statement of fact that has suddenly become relevant. It’s a quiet acknowledgment that the ground has shifted. This body of work is a record of a specific way of thinking and creating. A time capsule from the era before we could prompt new visions. And in a future where most of what we see will be a collaboration between human and machine, that feels like a distinction worth noting.

- Stav Rose