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Your brand looks fine, and that's the problem.

Writer: Julie Boake
Julie Boake
Sep 26
4 min read

Somewhere in the last year, perfect started looking fake.


We've all felt it, seen it, questioned the flawless lighting and seemingly perfect skin and hair. Suspiciously, we subconsciously questioned whether it's real but over-filtered, or simply AI. ... and almost before we can decide, our brain marks it as fake, and we swipe away.


Yet, the grainy, unedited Polaroid, slightly off lighting, and hand-drawn line stops the scroll; we lean in and agree... Ugly beats polished. Imperfect feels perfect.

Polish was never the enemy. Sameness is, and right now AI has made polish the most common look on the internet.


Why we suddenly trust the wobbly line

Behavioral economists have a name for this: costly signaling. A signal only means something if it's hard to fake. A peacock's tail works because a sick peacock can't grow one.


For decades, a glossy, expensive-looking ad was a costly signal. It was a signal of money, the brand's exceptional taste, and the quality of their team.

Generative AI just made that perfection free.


When we can all generate perfect videos, perfection ceases to be the goal or the signal of luxury, it's accessibile. It's lost its beauty.


So the signal moved. The opposite of fake is authenticity, the error, the flaw, the proof of a human hand, coloring outside of the lines. Adobe saw a 30% rise in searches for hand-drawn and imperfect design elements, and Kittl's 2026 trends report put "human-made visuals" at the top of its list.


There's a second bias stacked on top, the effort heuristic. We judge quality partly by how much work we think went into something. And the best part, humans are the judge. Research in the Journal of Advertising Research found that consumers see AI-generated luxury imagery as low effort, and discount the brand's value because of it.


Valentino learned this the hard way in late 2025. It ran a fully AI-generated handbag campaign, and the comments called it "cheap" and "lazy."




Is it nostalgia or imperfection we love?

Have you noticed, or perhaps fallen in love with all things retro? Film grain, Polariods, Risograph, letterpress, or the output of the old handheld video cameras that don't hide anything.

It's all very 90s.


Nobody's pining for 1994. What's happening is the pratfall effect at the scale of a whole aesthetic. Retro textures work as visual proof that a person, with a real tool, made a real choice and didn't hit undo.


Polaroid nailed it with billboards that read "AI can't generate sand between your toes." They didn't argue about pixels. They sold the one thing a machine can't fake: being there.






Luxury saw it first

If you want to know where taste is headed, watch luxury; they are the first area to be copied because they tap into the psychology of what matters to buyers.

Hermès rebuilt its homepage in January with hand-drawn illustrations by Linda Merad, paper texture and all, after commissioning nearly 50 artists in 2025. Loewe marked its 180th anniversary with roughly 2,000 frames of hand-painted animation. Chanel, Burberry, Dior and Porsche have all put illustrators and hand-finished animation front and centre, and they share the sketches and works-in-progress too. Seeing the process, even better.


Luxury has always sold the idea that craftsmanship and the hours in creation make what you're buying coveted. With artists, the marketing now follows the same rule. Once everyone else can generate, it has less value, less desire.


Main street brands are catching on. promising 'real people only'. Gartner found 68% of consumers frequently wonder whether what they see online is genuine. Brands are trying to regain the trust, and perception, in the minds of their consumers that they are workthy of their dollars.


So should you make it ugly?

Ugly is not the point. That's the trap.


Duolingo's unhinged owl and Ryanair's gleefully low-budget TikToks work because they fit who those brands already are. A luxury company posting deep-fried memes is mis-aligned with their main audience.


And sadly once every brand starts to focus on lo-fi designs, lo-fi becomes the new vanilla.


The real lesson is simpler, yet harder for brands to not be tempted by: stop looking like everyone else, avoid the trend. For some brands that means a scrappy phone video. Different executions of how their brand stands out in execution will vary. And they should. Consider how you can show proof that a human with a point of view was here.


If you want to check if you look the same, or if your brand stands out - look at it without the logo. Can the average person tell it's you or could it be the competition? Worse, could AI have made them? If you don't know, and you're not sure if your brand stands out, it's time to build your brand identity.


In a world of vanilla, be cheetah print. Even if the spots are a little uneven.






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