Invisible Asterisk

I spent some time scrolling through my portfolio whilst creating this site - a digital gallery of past projects, logos, and artworks that I’ve slowly built up over the years. A familiar ritual for any creative. But this time, a strange, new thought surfaced.

My portfolio now comes with an invisible asterisk: every single piece in that collection was made without generative AI.

There’s a strangeness in realising all the tools that were commonplace to us then, are slowing becoming relics in a bygone era. The process I once considered normal is now something that requires context. Staring into the depths of the blank square canvas in Adobe Illustrator, the familiar meditation practice. Maybe it was that boredom of being limited by our own creativity that created some new approaches.

At the risk of sounding like old man yelling at (AI) cloud, it’s an idea that struck me.

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At the beginning I didn’t even know what design was. I would log on to the internet, 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. However, having the ability to hear unknown techno tracks from the other side of the world (wow!) and surf through Google Image Search - saving anything I thought was cool - provided a strange precipitation of flow state.

Snapping from stock photos, over 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. Dropping saved images into Photoshop. Compositing, colour-correcting, and masking these to make these strange designs fit onto a piece A4 iron-on print paper. Every new addition to the design, a series of 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 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 skill set is expanding from technical execution towards a 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.

That’s why looking at my work feels so different now. It’s a testament to a different kind of labour. So now, when I show someone a piece from 2016, I’ll make sure I flex and say “this was made pre-AI you know”. Like anyone cares.

It’s certainly not a complaint. It’s a quiet acknowledgment that the ground has shifted. This body of work is a record of a specific way of creating digital work. A time capsule of sorts, 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 considering.

- Stav Rose