Let’s take a moment to consider the font, Instrument Serif. Created by the Portland-based design agency Instrument for their own use — along with Instrument Sans — they open-sourced it on GitHub, where it made its way to Google Fonts, in a generous act. And, guess where LLMs love to get fonts?
Instrument Serif went from a cool nod to the condensed serif type beloved by direct-to-consumer brands on Instagram — inspired by the way New Balance, Nike, and Apple approached branding — to the default output of LLM-assisted and vibe-coded web work. Today it’s everywhere. The White House uses it. In all caps, natch. “It’s the fascism font.”
The embrace of typefaces like this, and the slurping up of what’s been hot and trendy results in the tell-tale sign of the manufacturer.
“Craft will no longer be a moat. The LLMs are getting very good at craft.”
A speaker said something to this effect at the recent Design Futures Assembly.[1]
I nodded to myself. A while ago, craft and taste were bandied about as untouchable and unreplicable. But there is bad craft and terrible taste. There’s no accounting for it. LLMs are in the cosplaying stage, approximating what’s popular and what’s in the zeitgeist. Aesthetic alone was never a defense. It’s always been easy to copy, mimic, and rip-off design.
Another speaker: a mechanical engineer from a hundred years ago and one today could find common ground in process. Technology can and will evolve, but shared understanding persists, and an engineer from then and one from now will still be able to converse.
I nodded again. That fundamental knowledge passes through culture, through community, to practitioners who push it further.
Culture is the moat. It’s not craft and it’s not aesthetic. It’s always been culture — lived, relational, contextual. The ability to decode what’s happening right now, to encapsulate it, to communicate it through deep experience. Culture can give birth to something that hasn’t been seen, hasn’t been appropriated, hasn’t been followed to death.
LLMs can pattern-match around culture, but they cannot be inside it. They cannot live it.
A curated gathering of about a hundred design operators across generations hosted by Jeff Veen. We were seated in a squircle — fitting — able to face each other, in the light-filled space. It operated under the Chatham house rule. Disclaimer: I did the identity, branding, and website for the event. ↩︎