AI Was Bad At Branding. Was.

I have a confession.

I have long been convinced that AI absolutely sucks at any sort of branding / creative work. The output always seemed sloppy and something to cringe at, not something to put your name on and promote to the world.

Even now, if I just randomly ask a Claude session (with a Sonnet model at low effort for extra sadistic pain) to create a poster for our next live session, I will probably punch the screen the minute it proudly exclaims “Done!”

FWIW, I did, and the results are … not pretty. See below.

And so for the longest time, we’ve used AI for marketing only from a performance and analytics lens, but any creative output from Luminary has been entirely manual.

For a company that needs to run at AI speed (and has no human designers on staff), we’ve just not pulled our weight when it comes to building our brand with AI.

All that is now changing.

We are churning out creatives faster than ever (see this post) and each of those performs well, looks stunning, and most importantly… doesn’t feel like AI made it.

Two things have contributed to this shift.

The first is that the models themselves have gotten better. There are no two ways about this. Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra are far more capable than their predecessors at producing high quality brand artifacts. I estimate this has improved the quality of our output by 20% with zero incremental effort from our side.

The second is that we went and built a design system artifact on Claude Design and painstakingly fed it everything we could about our company. As the owner of the brand, I was forced to make and commit to decisions that I had put off for months on colour hierarchy, type system, rules for imagery, and individual component design.

I’ve since realized that the visual system is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what I could teach an agent about our brand. So we added ultra rich context on positioning, tone of voice, target customers, and even our company values.

In technical parlance, that’s called a brand brain. Every agent that writes or designs anything for Luminary reads it first, so everything we ship sounds like us and not like everyone else.

Here’s the same live session poster, made with the brand brain loaded as context, in a single-shot, single-line prompt (I can send you video proof 🥸)

It still isn’t perfect and the brand brain is an ever-evolving asset that requires maintenance, but I’m very excited about us finally leveraging AI to show up as a more creative and authentic company.

I’ve also shared the exact system that we use with other founders, and pretty much everyone has seen a similarly noticeable improvement in their own work.

If you’re building a brand and struggling with how to leverage AI, a design system is a solid place to start. Give it a shot and let me know how it goes.

Akhil