Ok, why?

Small

A Worthy Cause is a vast studio of one.

The studio's small size is its greatest strength. Every client and every project gets the highest attention and full dedication & focus.

Down to brass tacks - you won't be paying to cover the overheads of a large team.

Working as a Team

Commissioning A Worthy Cause means bringing an experienced & dedicated design and strategy professional into your team structure. You won't be sending your project out to get passed around an external team.

A Worthy Cause projects are not bean counting exercises, there won't be clock watching and cost counting on every request. We will work together closely to get things done.

Experience

Your project will benefit from my 25+ years experience in design. You will get to leverage the tried and tested network of suppliers I work with. A small core of specialist service providers which A Worthy Cause recommendsfor any job, will have proven reliability time and again over decades.

AI Statement

While AI is encroaching on many processes within design, as a studio, A Worthy Cause does as much as possible to not use it.

There are reasons, highlighted below, but if you are looking to work with A Worthy Cause there is one primary, over-riding reason. Your money.

Hiring a design team costs. It's not a public service. You want returns for that investment. Our aim is to envisage, create and build solutions for you that are unique to your project. When you engage A Worthy Cause you are getting customised creations from a human imagination. We only make content for human communication.

AI does not create anything. It can't. It isn't built that way. It can't imagine. It is a pattern recognition machine. It see things elsewhere and averages them out, giving you what feels and looks, at first glance, like an answer to your question.

We aren't interested in producing averaged out repeats of training sources. That's not what we are paid for.

But there are other equally compelling reasons, depending on your angle:

• It is incredibly, unbelievably, world-burningly energy intensive. All that power and it's often wrong.
• It's a plagiarism tool. They are ALL trained on other people's work, uncredited, and without context.
• It looks cheap. It's already cliché, and obvious.
• Why would you pay us for it? if we use AI generation, we would be entering the same queries you could.
• It undercuts professions and industries. Where will we be in the future when we have lost untold human skills and knowledge? It does the work of junior designers in studios. Who will be able to learn those skills now?
• It gives shallow answers. AI is an expert on nothing, but gives answers that make it sound like an expert. Good design comes from understanding a client's needs, interrogating a brief, and coming up with something beyond all that.
• Add those last point together; we are losing skills and knowledge and have a machine that sounds like it knows what it's talking about. In time, with skills lost, who will be able to verify its output?
• Ethical considerations abound in the code creation of the AI itself. Who made it? It will contain their prejudices.
• Results vary. There is little consistency. This makes it imperfect for something like large brands that require strict consistency, every time.

But there are grey areas of course. What about tools like Object Select in Photoshop? These are surely AI, they involve machine learning. They are machine, not cloud, based (currently). And they are only the starting point in image creation, requiring literal tinkering around the edges afterwards. But they do speed up a process. Importantly they do so without changing that process.

And there are others, such as Expand Background in Affinity and Adobe, which are more obviously full featured AI. These can be a necessary evil. But in A Worthy Cause their use is restricted to technical considerations - adding bleed, or areas to put other elements over. They are not used to generate images from small starting points.

A Worthy Cause is not anti-tech, but tech must be implemented safely and with a regard for the future. At best AI is a useful pattern detection tool. At worst it is a dangerous disinformation tool. At the moment it's simply something we would rather avoid.

Ultimately design is a business. You don't hire a design studio to use an AI which you could use yourself. You come to us for expertise and guidance.