What The Buckell’s John Buckell warns against settling for AI-generated ideas

John Buckell, design director at What The Buckell, argues that anyone treating an AI-generated concept as finished work is settling for the average.

“If a machine can think of it in seconds, it’s the definition of the sum of all average ideas combined,” said Buckell, who has worked in design for more than 18 years, the last 11 of them leading creative teams. He is judging the design category at an industry awards festival this year.

He has seen people accept an algorithm’s first draft as “good enough” without pushing it further. His answer is peer validation, checking an idea with real people before relying on it: “Bouncing ideas off actual people, your colleagues, or even your mum, to see if they actually resonate.”

AI has a role in admin, summarising long documents and taking notes, he said, but should not replace the friction between people that produces real breakthroughs.

Buckell sees design as the thing that connects long-term brand work with short-term commercial needs. “Short-term commercial pressure is a reality of business, but design ensures that those quick wins don’t come at the cost of the brand’s future,” he said.

His approach rests on consistent craft. If a short-term ad gets less care than a flagship project, the audience notices, he said. “The brand is simply the sum of every interaction.”

Brands afraid of being forgotten often overload an experience by trying to say everything, and end up saying nothing, he said. “Whitespace, silence, and focused storytelling are what create memorability, not more features or more screens.”

His advice for brands now is: “Be useful, not just loud.” Too many confuse flashy with innovative, he believes, and he would prefer teams to identify where customers genuinely hit friction and design that away. “If you can create an experience that solves a problem or sparks genuine joy, the success and the data follows,” he said.

His single investment for 2026 would be motion. Whether it appears on an LED wall, in a mobile app or on a digital billboard, the way a brand moves is becoming as recognisable as its logo, he said. “Motion bridges the gap between the static world and the interactive one,” he said. “It adds emotion, provides feedback, and guides the eye.”

He identifies the “production gap” as the most overlooked problem in design: the distance between a grand idea presented in a pitch deck and the work required to build it. Digital is too often treated as an afterthought, he said, when knowing the specifications, dimensions and hardware from the first day is what protects the creative vision through to delivery.

Buckell expects successful leaders of the future to need resilience as well as what he describes as radical curiosity, the capacity to keep learning new tools without losing faith in their own craft. Humour matters as much. “You have to be someone people actually want to work with,” he said. “A sense of humor is what gets a team through that ‘25th hour’ of a high-pressure delivery.”