Journal

Ten industries, 246 ads, 124 brands, and thirteen ways of putting an ad together. Seventeen of the twenty-six SaaS ads are the same structure, from eleven brands. Nobody copied anybody.

A picture gets in without being read. No one has measured whether a picture you have to work out turns that into a stop. Here is the study nobody has run.

Brands want AI-generated people who don’t look AI-generated. The research says those faces are more average than real ones, and average faces get forgotten.

When a report goes unread, teams usually make more content. Research on reading, time pressure and AI search points to the format and the moment instead.

The advertising industry spent the last century learning how to buy attention. It hasn’t figured out how to earn it.

Design has never been this polished, or this hard to tell apart. When everything is well made, competence stops being enough.

Most creative teams still design as if people are going to stop and look. They won’t, so design for the scroll.

Learning English as a Spanish speaker taught me to listen before I talk. It still shapes how I design.

Design thinking sold workshops and walls of sticky notes. Inside large companies, it rarely delivered.

The logo matters, but it’s one small piece. A brand is the whole system people meet, again and again.

Everyone asks whether AI will replace designers. As a creative director who works with brands every day, my answer is no.

Section 508 first looked like a legal hurdle. It turned out to be the rules that make communication work.