Why taste will become the rarest and most coveted commodity

There’s been a huge shift in branding. Below, Cat How, D&AD’s New Brand Identity Jury President for 2026, gives three propositions to explain the reasons why.

Let’s start with a provocation:

People say creativity is dying. AI is killing it. Automation is replacing it. We’re all redundant. Everything’s fucked.

But recently I’ve been thinking…what if we’ve forgotten what creativity really is?

Because creativity has never been tied to the tool in your hand. If it were, painters would’ve packed up their brushes the moment photography arrived. Designers would’ve declared defeat when computers replaced scalpel blades and glue sticks, and writers would’ve panicked when word processors landed in the early 80s.

But of course… none of this happened.

What actually happened was: representation became easier. Execution became faster. And creativity? It didn’t shrink. It expanded.

Which is where we are now. Wahoo!

We went from painting with pigments… to painting with pixels… to now painting with prompts. And I’d argue every technological leap didn’t kill creativity – it refined it.

AI is taking the grunt work. Great. Let it.

Because it frees us to do the human work: harnessing imagination, curation, direction and using past experiences of broken hearts, witnessing beautiful sunrises and the burning shame of that dodgy dolphin tattoo to imbue our creative work with depth, meaning… and feeling.

AI is letting us do the thinking part.
The solving part.
The really fucking fun part!
The part that makes brands matter.

So no – creativity isn’t dead. It’s levelled up, and shed another skin.

Let me bring this closer to my home – to branding. Because our industry has been a case study in this shift, and it has been brutal.

Here are my propositions:

Proposition 01: Brand design is becoming more conceptual, less literal.

Tools like Midjourney and Krea (which we use all the time) have made parts of the visual execution pretty much frictionless, as well as instantaneous. Now you can easily pump out 100 mockups in an afternoon while listening to The Archers Omnibus.

But the real value now sits above the canvas: What tension is this brand holding? What future is it trying to build? What truth are we surfacing that no one else has noticed? What should it make people feel?

At our studio, the most powerful brand platforms this year came from unexpected insights – behavioural shifts, cultural undercurrents, emotional truths. AI helped us explore faster, but it didn’t give us the ideas. It multiplied them.

Proposition 02: Craft isn’t dead – it’s redistributed.

The craft used to live solely in the hand. Now it lives in the edit.

It’s the designer who knows what to reject, not just what to create. It’s the strategist who recognises the single line of truth in a mess of generated noise and hallucination. It’s the writer who can turn a bland model output into a line that brings a smile to the mind.

The industry is moving from making to meaning. From production to perception.
And quite honestly? It’s about bloody time.

Don’t get me wrong, my heart aches at the decreasing understanding or appreciation for genuine ‘craft’. Many years slogging it out in art school – I know the act of making (paint to canvas, pencil to page) is one of the most rewarding experiences. But that act of making, and its very definition, has now shifted to occupy a new set of parameters.

Proposition 03: Clients are coming to us for clarity, not decoration.

In a world drowning in infinite outputs, the ability to simplify is gold. Furthermore, the synthesis and simplification of complex, emotionally driven ideas – is the jewel in the crown. Strategy is becoming more valuable. Narrative is becoming more valuable. Taste – actual, cultivated taste – is becoming more valuable.

AI can generate assets. But it can’t tell a disruptive Korean proptech startup who they are. Or help a global streaming platform of 1000 people understand the cultural role it plays.

Creativity is shifting upward, toward the layers where humans excel.

Perhaps what we’re not seeing amidst the panic still around at the moment, is that creativity was never solely just about the execution. It was the intention.

Not the interface – the idea.
Not the prompt – the imagination behind it.
Not the graphic asset – the story it unlocks.

If your creativity lives purely in the technical side of creation, yes: AI looks scary. But if your creativity lives in judgement, taste, perspective, philosophy, and meaning? You’re about to become even more valuable.

Currently, AI doesn’t understand consequence. It doesn’t understand cultural signals. It doesn’t understand the emotional undertow of a colour, or a word, or a design decision. It doesn’t understand why something matters.

AI makes things. Humans make sense.

So what’s next? How do we keep creativity alive?

Prioritise thinking over output.

The future belongs to those who can synthesise, connect, and leap across categories.
If execution is instant, the differentiator becomes vision. The idea behind the idea.

Build brands from truth, not tropes.

We can’t afford shallow insights or recycled narratives. People can smell generic branding from five screens away. Push into real tension. Real behaviour. Real human motives. Real category-defining differentiation. Go big or go home.

Develop taste like it’s a muscle.

Taste will be the rarest and most coveted commodity. Why? Because anyone can ‘produce’, but not everyone can discern. Taste becomes your moat. Own it.

Use AI as a multiplier not a shortcut.

AI is an accelerant. Not a replacement. Use it to stretch directions, explore territories, debug thinking. Let it expand your sandbox, not define it.

Make space for imagination.

When the tools speed up execution, we must slow down the thinking. Give yourself the time to explore the rough edges and weird shit. That’s where the work gets interesting.

So in light of all of this, perhaps we can argue that creativity isn’t dying… it’s finally free.

We’re living in the most exciting moment creativity has seen in decades. Because the machinery no longer slows us down, it has opened the gates.

The barrier to entry is gone, where any chancer with an iPhone can make things. So the professionals – the real creatives – need to level up. Not in skill. In imagination. In direction. In the ability to say: This is what matters. This is the story. Follow me.

Creativity isn’t dying. It’s just moved up a level. And now we get to play at the top.

What a time to be alive!