Ask someone to define slop and you’ll usually get the same answer: something AI made.
Not quite.
The problem isn’t that AI can generate generic work.
Generic work was doing perfectly well without it.
The Taste Demonstration
Much of contemporary branding has become a taste demonstration.
An example of “taste-slop”: all the right references, none of the reasoning.
The right typeface. The right colour palette. The right reference. The right moodboard.
All the visible signs of taste, assembled correctly — without understanding where they came from, why they matter, or what they mean for this particular business.
A human designer can make it. A very talented one can make beautiful slop.
AI just makes it easier to produce at scale.
How Slop Happens
Slop isn’t a style. It’s what happens when a brand has no point of view of its own.
There are a few ways to get there.
Drift. The brand gets made one decision at a time. Each decision answers the brief in front of it, but nothing underneath connects them. No single decision is necessarily wrong. Put them together, and the signals start competing with each other. The brand ends up saying very little.
Consensus. The brand is designed to be acceptable — to the committee, to the category, to whoever might object. The moodboard fills with the category’s leaders because they’re safe. Fitting in becomes the brief, even when nobody explicitly says, “It worked for them, so let’s do something like that.”
AI. Give an AI a brand brief, and it will draw from what already exists. It can produce a convincing version of what a brand in that category usually looks like.
That isn’t a flaw. That’s what it is designed to do.
Unless there is a strong point of view to work from, it will tend towards the familiar.
AI doesn’t supply a point of view. If you don’t have one, it borrows from everyone else’s.
Why “More Human” Isn’t the Answer
The reflexive response to AI slop is to make the work look more human.
Grain. Hand-drawn type. A visible wobble. Deliberate imperfection.
These have become visual shorthand for “human”.
But “human” is just the next reference.
And a reference borrowed by hand is as borrowed as one generated by a machine.
The question was never who made it.
It’s where it came from.
The Antidote Is Specificity
Things that could only belong to your business.
Not better taste. Better reasoning.
When you’re developing a brand, there are two questions you should be able to answer about every major decision:
Why this?
Why this typeface, colour, material, image? Where does it come from — culturally, historically, inside the business itself — and why does it belong to this brand?
What does it mean?
What does it communicate beyond simply looking good? What does it make the brand feel, say, or stand for?
A model can’t answer either of them for you. Neither can a moodboard.
Take Piccolo House.
When we started rebranding it, there was already a dot in Piccolo’s world. It had been used before. It had never been asked to mean anything.
We asked why this?
Because it was already theirs. Nobody had to invent it, and nobody else could borrow it.
Then what does it mean?
We developed the idea of an axis of connection: place, people and building held in balance. The dot became that central point — the thing that holds everything in relation.
That idea shaped the identity.
Developments sit beside the dot, identified only by their address while they’re selling. When the building is finished, the address falls away.
The address moves.
The point remains.
That’s specificity.
The idea came from the business.
The visual language followed.
Where References Belong
We work from cultural and historical references when we develop the idea behind an identity. That’s how you introduce a new aesthetic rather than borrowing an existing one.
From our work for Arden, a private wealth firm specialising in digital assets. Every reference here is about permanence. Digital assets are volatile by nature. The firms managing them shouldn't be.
The result: a vault lock, a parterre and a circuit board, collapsed into one mark.
The difference is direction.
A good reference points back into the business — it explains where something comes from and why it belongs.
A bad one points sideways, at the category.
So when a designer presents you with a moodboard full of other brands — the socially validated ones, God forbid Aesop — pay attention to what they’re actually demonstrating.
Their taste, certainly.
Sometimes an aesthetic they’d like to explore.
But if the references are doing more work than the thinking, you’re heading for a taste-slop brand.
It’ll look great on Pinterest.
It won’t have any substance.
No specificity.
Slop.