I met Jennifer Jerde early in my career. She’s one of the nicest humans I’ve ever encountered in this business, and her firm Elixir Design has been quietly building brands out of San Francisco for 27 years.

Rachel Paese, writing for Design Observer, gets Jerde on the question the rest of the industry is trying to dodge:

We’re in a world right now where everything kind of looks the same. You can go to Canva, you can get Squarespace templates, and you basically just change out the messaging. And it looks pretty handsome. It’s a design of an ad. It’s a design of a website. It’s where the design is a noun. It looks pretty nice, but to make stuff that’s actually true, it looks like listening to a lot of different people.

The thing you ship is the artifact, and the artifact can be produced by anyone with a template and a logo file. What Jerde sells is the listening—27 years of it—and the specific verb that template work can’t perform.

She gives the verb a definition later in the piece:

We do have an observation practice. I would never refer to it that way. We listen like crazy. We’re observing what lives inside clients’ minds and hearts about things. And then we don’t just show them 3 directions, we show them fifteen. Then we observe what happens.

The difference between three directions and fifteen is the difference between a studio and a feed. Three directions is what you present when you already know which one you want the client to pick. Fifteen is what you present when you genuinely don’t know yet, and you’re willing to use the meeting as the instrument that tells you. That’s expensive and it doesn’t scale. It’s the entire reason Elixir has been doing this for 27 years and not 27 months.

Jerde on AI:

I’m both deeply impressed by AI and scared of it. But I feel like companies and brands get exactly what they deserve. They hang out there exactly who they are, in a way. […] And then there are the players who are like, no, no, we really want to reach this audience. We want to show how genuinely great we are in whatever way we are genuinely great. That takes effort.

There’s a caveat in there: the migration to AI is optional. You can opt out. The template will work for the audience that doesn’t require you to have listened. It’s good enough.

But the interesting brands are the ones that don’t accept good enough, that demand that extra effort.