The easy story about AI in creative work is that it closes distance: idea, prompt, output, iteration, all compressed. It’s Nice That gets at the more designerly version of that question by putting creative technology’s appetite for “happy accidents” next to design’s need for control:

“From the technology approach, the metaphor I equate it to is the classic ‘happy accidents’ you have when you are in a design tool,” Seth says, finding expected moments of creativity. “The best happy accidents aren’t just between a person and a tool; they happen between people.” It’s perhaps in this notion that co-creation is at its most visible, not in the technology itself, but rather in the conversations and unexpected developments that occur when people with different perspectives work closely together. For Talia, however, this isn’t the case. “Nothing we do is experimental by nature,” Talia says, “everything is incredibly controlled – or, better yet, ‘designed’,” stressing the importance of the role of the designer and the meaning behind design itself. “Design is about creating solutions; there is a sense of control, there is a purpose, there is a function,” she continues, “even the beauty is controlled to a degree.” An example is the generative motion graphics system that Talia created, in collaboration with Mother, for the Crypto coin USDC.

Designer and coder Talia Cotton’s line clarifies the whole piece: “controlled – or, better yet, ‘designed’.” Cotton’s point is that the speed of generation only makes the designer’s eye more important, because someone still has to decide the boundaries before the machine starts producing variations.

Cotton’s USDC system makes that concrete:

Within the visual identity, Talia developed a custom tool that generated guilloché patterns, in reference to the historical patterns used in traditional finance. Alongside set, systematic parameters – including height, width, density, and speed – Talia had to create algorithmically constrained rules within those limitations. “As you adjusted one parameter, another parameter would automatically change its available range,” Talia says, “that ensured every possible output looked good.” As Talia suggests, especially considering the ease with which people can generate things, the “designer’s eye” is now more important than ever. “The designer’s job is to create an airtight generative system that considers every possible case and every possible output,” she says, “so that every single output always looks great, no matter how different it is.”