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In primary school, they asked us to stop writing in cursive and switch to print. They called it standardization. They said it would kill creativity. That's not exactly what happened, but cursive was something else: more expression, more of your own hand. Print was uniform, the same for everyone.
Almost nobody truly mastered cursive. The ones who did ended up drawing and designing. For everyone else, print was a gift: it let us communicate clearly without being artists.
I see the same thing happening with AI. It's the new print. Anyone can now produce a decent design. But recently my eyes hurt looking at a poster made entirely with AI: everything saturated, everything fighting for attention. It killed my desire to buy.
And I see it from my own work, at both extremes. Some clients send me images they generated with AI and say: "make it not look like AI." Others ask me to build a design system with Claude, but deliver it as an editable Adobe file so they can refine it afterward.
Both are asking for the same thing: a standardized base, with a human hand on top.
Maybe the designer of the future is the one who writes in cursive on top of AI's print.
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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