I Asked AI To Design My Brand Identity.
The Real Story Is In The Process.
For a creative director, admitting you launched a newsletter without a real brand identity is…a choice. Design‑A11y my inclusive design blog and newsletter, and a practical playground where I put my craft into practice for designers and fellow inclusive‑design nerds, has lived for years with a soft color story, a paint drop, and a rotating cast of temporary icons while I prioritized getting ideas out over perfecting the visuals.
Now I’m refreshing both the content and the brand, because the tools, workflows, and realities of our jobs have changed, and the identity needs to catch up.
Why I’m Refreshing Design‑A11y Now
When I first launched Design‑A11y, I was writing into a world where “modern accessibility workflow” meant a stack of Figma plugins, browser extensions, and manual checks. Those references were cutting‑edge at the time.
Fast‑forward to today:
Many of those tools are outdated or deprecated.
AI is baked into design systems, content pipelines, and audits.
Designers are asking different questions about prompts, automation, and how to keep human judgment in the loop.
If I’m going to keep Design‑A11y useful, the content has to reflect this AI‑infused reality instead of a pre‑AI tool stack. Refreshing the brand is part of that responsibility. A newsletter about AI‑native inclusive design shouldn’t look like it’s wearing a temporary icon from three years ago.
Design‑A11y As My Practical Playground
By day, I’m an Executive Creative Director at Level Access, helping organizations connect brand, product, and accessibility with rigor and governance. That’s where the official customer stories live.
Design‑A11y plays a different role. It’s my practical playground:
A space to test AI workflows and inclusive‑design tactics.
A place to try things, break things, and be transparent about what works.
A safe zone where I tell stories that are mine, not my customers’, while still staying credible and current in the AI creative‑direction era.
In other words, it’s where I earn the right to write thought‑leadership pieces like this by actually doing the work, not just talking about it.
The catch? For years, this playground has been held together with “good enough” visuals: a color story I liked, a paint drop I was attached to, and an AI‑generated placeholder icon I promised myself I’d replace “soon.”
My Allan Peters Obsession (A Framework For The Refresh)
When I finally committed to refreshing the identity, I went straight to one of my favorite logo storytellers: Allan Peters of Peters Design Company. I’m admittedly obsessed with his brand transformation reels on Instagram—how he takes a simple letterform or shape and, through negative space and reduction, turns it into a cohesive system.
I borrowed that lens for Design‑A11y. The brand ingredients I’m playing with now:
The D or a half‑circle as a strong, simple anchor.
A pencil or paintbrush to signal design craft.
A paint drop as a nod to creativity and experimentation.
An open door to represent access, inclusion, and removing barriers.
The goal isn’t to cram everything into one mark, but to distill these ideas into a minimal, repeatable symbol that feels native to today’s tools and still grounded in inclusive design.
Letting AI Take A Swing (For Science…And Humor)
Because Design‑A11y is my test bed for AI, I did what any curious creative director would do: I gave AI the same brief I’d give a junior designer and waited to see what happened.
The prompt went something like:
“Create a brand icon for Design‑A11y, my inclusive design newsletter. Think in the spirit of Allan Peters’ work: minimal, strong negative space, and a mark that can become a repeatable pattern. Consider a D or half circle, a pencil or paint brush, a paint drop, and an open door that represents inclusion—but don’t use them all.”
The responses in text were…surprisingly articulate. The actual icons were a different story.
You’ll see a few of them here:
Figma Agent Results
A chunky D with a triangular wedge hacked out of it, proudly labeled “The Ajar Wedge,” as if a random cut somehow equals a metaphor for access.
A D with a vaguely tombstone‑shaped door floating inside it, “The Archway,” whose emotional impact is more “mysterious bunker” than “welcoming access.”
A D sliced by a single diagonal line, “The Angular Slice,” trying very hard to convince you that the cut is doing conceptual heavy lifting.
They’re endearing in their own way, but they’re also a perfect illustration of the gap between AI’s ability to describe a concept and its ability to design a compelling brand mark.
See content credentials
Chat GPT result
In short: great captions, forgettable logos. Ok awful logos!
What This Teaches Me About AI And Brand Design
Letting AI try (and fail) on my own playground reminded me of a few things:
AI is good at briefs, not taste. It can paraphrase your strategy back to you, but it still struggles with the nuanced visual decisions; weight, proportion, tension; that make a mark feel intentional rather than generic.
It over‑relies on language. The icons needed names and descriptions to feel meaningful. Strong brand marks reverse that: the form carries the story, and the words simply support.
It treats identity as a single artifact. Most outputs felt like standalone graphics, not seeds of a system that could live across a newsletter, blog, social, and beyond. The idea of “how this behaves everywhere” is still very human.
It’s still early for values‑driven identity. For work grounded in accessibility and inclusion, avoiding clichés and respecting nuance matters. AI isn’t great at that line yet.
The good news? This confirms that brand designers and creative directors are still very much needed. AI is powerful, but its brand‑design instincts are underdeveloped for now.
How I’m Actually Using AI In This Refresh
Even though the icons themselves won’t survive the critique wall, the process is already useful. In the Design‑A11y refresh, AI plays a very specific role:
As a brief amplifier: I use it to refine problem statements, explore metaphors, and generate naming or narrative directions I can then edit.
As a concept generator: I treat visuals as a fast way to see “what not to do,” which often sharpens my own sense of what does belong.
As a system helper: once I’m happy with a human‑crafted mark, AI tools are great for testing patterns, variations, and applications across different formats.
In other words, AI is in the room, but it’s not leading the project. Think “enthusiastic intern with infinite visual memory and no taste.”
Refreshing Brand And Content Together
As I update Design‑A11y’s content, retiring posts anchored in outdated tools and writing new ones around AI‑native workflows, I’m treating the brand refresh as parallel work:
Evolving the visual system so it feels at home in an AI‑powered design ecosystem.
Crafting a mark that can scale from newsletter icon to pattern to motion.
Documenting how AI fits into an inclusive‑design practice without over-claiming its capabilities.
The result won’t just be a new logo; it will be a more honest expression of what Design‑A11y is now: a living lab for accessibility‑minded designers navigating AI in real time.
Why Share The Process Before The “After” Shot
I could wait to post a tidy before‑and‑after reveal once the identity is locked. But that doesn’t reflect how creative direction actually works in 2026, especially with AI in the mix.
Sharing the process while it’s in motion:
Normalizes the reality that many of us are updating our content, tools, and identity at the same time.
Shows how to experiment with AI in a space designed for learning, not on client work.
Keeps thought leadership grounded in practice: here’s what I tried, what broke, what was hilarious, and what I learned.
When the new Design‑A11y mark and system are ready, I’ll share that chapter too. For now, the most useful story is this one, the messy middle where automation meets craft, and where the human still has the final say.
