The briefing
AI is great at generating options. It's terrible at having opinions. Today's stories — from a gleefully weird chocolate bar typeface to a sports rebrand that nobody can quite place — reveal why creative conviction might be the most undervalued skill in design right now.
A font that tastes like something
Studio Drama's new custom typeface for Snickers is, by any sensible measure, a bit odd [Creative Bloq]. The letterforms are deliberately irregular, characterful to the point of being "nutty" — which is exactly the point. It's a typeface that could only belong to one brand. You couldn't mistake it for a Hershey's campaign or a KitKat wrapper.
What makes this interesting in the current moment is how completely it resists the logic of AI-generated design. Generative tools are trained on patterns. They converge toward the average, the expected, the formally correct. A custom typeface that embodies a specific brand's irreverent personality isn't a pattern problem — it's a taste problem. It requires someone to decide that the letters should look a little unhinged, and then have the conviction to ship them that way.
Xavier Sheriff, co-founder of StudioXAG, made a related argument in a Creative Bloq interview this week: "Design by committee kills ideas" [Creative Bloq]. His point is that consensus-driven processes sand down the interesting edges of a concept until what's left is safe, inoffensive, and forgettable. He's talking about committees, but the same dynamic applies to AI workflows where designers generate dozens of options and then gravitate toward whatever feels least risky.
The committee and the algorithm share the same failure mode: they optimize for acceptability, not memorability.
When distinctiveness fails
If the Snickers typeface shows what bold specificity looks like, the Tennessee Titans' new logo illustrates the opposite [Creative Bloq]. The NFL team unveiled a redesigned mark that immediately drew comparisons — not to other sports brands, but to car manufacturer emblems. Fans couldn't place it. It felt like it belonged somewhere, just not specifically to the Titans.
This is the perennial trap of logo redesigns: the desire to feel "modern" and "clean" can strip away the very elements that made something recognizable. It's a problem that will only intensify as AI-assisted branding tools make it trivially easy to generate polished, contemporary-looking marks. Polish isn't the hard part anymore. Distinctiveness is.
The Titans comparison is worth sitting with. It's not that the logo is poorly executed — it's that it doesn't have a strong enough point of view to resist being confused with something else entirely. In a design landscape where AI can produce an infinite number of competent options, "competent but generic" is the new failure state.
Persuasive design's reckoning with depth
Anders Toxboe's retrospective on persuasive design, published in Smashing Magazine, echoes this theme from a different angle [Smashing Magazine]. Ten years after persuasive design became a hot topic, Toxboe finds that most teams are still stuck on surface-level tactics — gamification badges, notification nudges, onboarding tricks — while ignoring the deeper structural work that actually changes behavior.
The parallel to AI-assisted design is direct. It's easy to use AI to generate variations, A/B test micro-interactions, and optimize for short-term metrics. It's much harder to do the strategic thinking that determines whether you're solving the right problem in the first place. Toxboe's argument is that persuasive design's failures aren't tactical — they're conceptual. Teams reach for tricks when they should be rethinking their entire approach. That kind of rethinking requires a point of view, not a prompt.
Tool spotlight: CSS corner-shape
On the technical side, Smashing Magazine covered the new CSS corner-shape property, which natively supports beveled, scooped, and squircle corners without the fragile clip-path and SVG mask hacks designers and developers have relied on for years [Smashing Magazine]. It's a small thing, but it matters: more expressive UI primitives in CSS mean designers can spec subtler, more distinctive interface details without worrying about implementation complexity. One less excuse for every app to look the same.
The shelf worth noting
Smashing Magazine is now shipping Accessible UX Research by Michele Williams [Smashing Magazine] — a practical guide to integrating accessibility into UX research for teams at any budget or timeline. If inclusive research isn't part of your practice yet, this is a solid entry point.
Takeaway
AI's gravitational pull is toward the center. It generates the most probable output, the safest composition, the most statistically average solution. Committees do the same thing for social reasons — nobody gets fired for picking the option everyone can live with.
The work that actually lands — the Snickers typeface that makes you grin, the brand identity that's unmistakably itself — comes from someone willing to make a specific choice and defend it. That's not a production skill. It's not even a strategy skill, exactly. It's a conviction skill.
And conviction is the one thing you can't generate with a prompt.