We tested four typefaces for the headings before settling on Fraunces. Each variant was ready on screen a few minutes after I had asked for it. No emails, no waiting, no guilty conscience about asking for the fifth version.
I have commissioned graphic designers and digital designers for more than twenty years. In that world, every correction costs time, money and goodwill. You learn to save up your requests and present them all at once. You also learn to live with the choices you did not argue for properly.
Iteration became free
What changed most was the freedom to try again. A left edge that did not sit right. An image style that felt too feminine. A front page where the brand promise drowned in keywords. All of it could be fixed the same evening.
That freedom changes how I think. When it costs one sentence to test an idea, you also test the ideas you would otherwise have discarded in your head.
Do I miss working with a skilled designer? Yes. I miss the resistance that comes from a professional eye that is not my own. Claude is happy to make suggestions, but it rarely insists. For the sake of the experiment, though, going all the way myself has been a valuable lesson.
The rules are the real work
The site only holds together because, along the way, we wrote the rules down as instructions that can be followed every time. A machine cannot follow opinions.
A shared left edge and a fixed width for the content column. Coral italics only in headings, never in body text. Article images in one style: a black-and-white marble statue performing the action of the article, with a 50/50 split between men and women. Tone of voice with epistemic marking, so that claims are carried by a sender. A hub-and-spoke structure, so that SEO and GEO connect with the content. A correction workflow in which text edits are made in the browser and written back into the HTML files.
One small example says it all. On the site, the dash must be written with a space on both sides. In one of my skills, it said without spaces. The rule was described twice, and the two descriptions disagreed. I only discovered it when two texts stood side by side and looked different.
That is the kind of error that becomes expensive in a world where the machine produces faster than I can proofread.
Towards liquid content
What I am working on points towards something bigger. Content that is no longer one finished page, but a store of rules, modules and sources that can be reassembled when the context changes. Some call it liquid content.
It is frightening and empowering at the same time. Frightening, because control moves from the individual product to the set of rules that produces it. Empowering, because as an individual I can build a site that only a few years ago required an agency.
As I see it, both feelings are right. They simply point to the same thing: the work is moving one link back in the chain.
The competency that will be decisive
There is still a need for truly skilled people. The need has simply moved. We need people who can describe the rules that make the design hold and keep the language consistent across hundreds of pages. The same applies when an organisation learns to write with AI.
It is a considerably harder task than the one most of us are used to. Assessing a layout requires a trained eye. Describing why the layout works, in a form a machine can follow every time, requires both that eye and an analytical precision we have rarely had to put into words.
Three questions to take back to your own organisation:
- Which of your design choices exist only in one person's head?
- Who in your organisation can translate a professional eye into rules others can follow?
- What happens to your quality when production becomes faster than your proofreading?
I believe that in the coming years we will talk more about rule sets than about templates. And perhaps the best question to ask a designer will no longer be how it should look, but how it will keep looking that way.
The rules are the new craft.
