Has the creative agency space forgotten about taste in the pursuit of functional design?
Everywhere around us (well, maybe not everywhere, there’s still loads of bad design out in the wild), we see design that’s technically proficient. Aesthetically pleasing composition, good hierarchy, nice white space, accessible colours, mobile-optimised layouts, and so on. On paper, it’s good design.
Technically ‘good’ design is no longer as valuable
Particularly now with AI, there’s no longer an excuse for technically “bad” design. What tech has very rapidly done is change the value of technical proficiency, and raise the bar for creative agencies to truly add value.
A few years ago, a well-structured layout or a considered colour palette was something you paid an agency for. Now, a founder with the right tools can generate something that looks clean and professional in an afternoon. That shift isn’t a threat to good agencies, it’s a filter. It strips away the agencies whose entire offer was “we can make it look tidy,” and it puts pressure on the rest to prove they’re bringing something tools can’t.
Because what AI can’t replicate is taste, insight, originality, or genuine creativity. It can’t tell a brand that it needs to feel quieter, stranger, or more alive. It can’t hold a point of view in the face of a client who wants to play it safe. It can optimise, but it can’t decide that the preferred option is actually the wrong one.
Value now lies in taste and instinct
Creative agencies need to catch up to the idea that taste is irreplaceable. The value in technical design skill is diminishing, but the need for actual insight is more critical than ever.
Taste isn’t a vibe or a gut feeling pulled out of thin air. It’s built. It comes from years of looking closely at culture, at people, at what’s actually happening in a market rather than what a brief says is happening. It comes from having opinions, being willing to defend them, and knowing when to let them go. That’s a completely different skill set to knowing how to run a grid system or pick a font pairing, and it’s the one that’s becoming harder to find, not easier.
Deepening an understanding of culture, people and context, and knowing how to bridge that to creative problem-solving, is where agencies are truly valuable. This is the work that happens before opening Adobe Illustrator: the questions asked in a discovery session, the willingness to push back on a brief that’s playing it too safe, the instinct to know when “on brand” has quietly become irrelevant.
Where we’re prioritising our time
Our positioning at Forme is to nurture creative instinct, sharpen understanding and insight, and intentionally develop taste. We’re focused on the things that make a brand feel like it belongs somewhere, stands for something, and means something, not just keeping up with the tools.
That means we’re not chasing every new tool as a point of difference. Tools change fast, and anyone can adopt them. What doesn’t change as easily is a genuine point of view, a sharpened sense of what a brand needs to say and how it needs to feel, and the judgement to know when something is technically correct but still missing the mark.
If the last few years have taught the industry anything, it’s that technical skill has a ceiling, and that ceiling is getting lower every year as the tools improve. Taste doesn’t have that ceiling. It’s the thing worth investing in, for agencies and for the brands who work with them.
