The Death of Nuance

For a good few months we kept showing up to projects without enough time, budget, or a finished brief. But our approach was always the same: ‘Make it good, it will help us get the next one’

Something else was happening in parallel: AI was rising, automation was scaling, and the way businesses approached creativity was being redefined in real time (instead of accounting smh)

And yet, amid all chat GPT dribble, “can you do this in Canva?” and repeatedly being told how easy everything we did was. When everything else is automated, commodified, and templated to death: What’s left?

One thing was clear and kept cutting through: taste.

And slowly, something shifted.

I stopped thinking about ‘creative direction’ as a ‘function’ inside a business. It’s not. It’s the centre of gravity. The whole fkn thing.

Creativity, strategy, commercial instinct, emotional depth, pitching a product, telling a story. It’s all of it. Everywhere. All at once.

If you’re ever bootstrapping, when teams are small and stakes are high, there’s no time to over-intellectualise the work or punch in a prompt. You need people who know what is good.

Who see the idea in its raw form. Who can move fast and still make it beautiful.

I’ve led a lot of teams now. Designers, engineers, developers, editors, writers, videographers. Every one of them works differently. Some need silence. Some need chaos. Some sprint. Some sit with it. Some build with code. Some build with shape. Some with sound.

The common denominator? They know what feels right—before anyone can explain why.

And now we’ve got AI in the room too.

The intern that never sleeps. It fills in gaps. Clears the grunt work. Builds the scaffolding so we can get to the good part faster. It’s changed how we build, but it hasn’t changed why.

Because at the centre of every campaign, every edit, every frame that lands, is something we still don’t have a metric for: taste.

And I think when content becomes a commodity, taste becomes a status symbol. It always has been.

The work that moves people, the stuff that lingers, it doesn’t come from data (but you can see it). It comes from someone’s gut. A vision in the right room, making a call. That line. That animation. That crop. That moment of stillness.

That’s what makes a brand resonate.
That’s what makes a product stick.
That’s what keeps people watching.

I’ve learned that creative direction isn’t a role. It’s a posture. A way of holding the room. A way of knowing what to say, what not to show, what to let live. It’s now everything.

You used to have to choose: fast, cheap, or good. Now everything’s fast. Everything’s cheap. So what’s left?

Good.

Quality isn’t the trade-off anymore. It’s the advantage.

Tools matter. AI helps. It powers our business. But taste is the throughline.

You can’t fake it.
You can’t automate it.
But you can lead with it.