Template Capitalism: The Aesthetics of Obedience
Caution: naughty words.
Template Capitalism — call it AI, Canva or even Adobe — doesn’t liberate creativity. It simply industrialises it. Making branding and design faster, cheaper, but emptier.
In the last 18 months there has been an explosion of freemium, AI-powered SaaS platforms, but I’m not here to bag anyone or stop you from using them. If you use these to run your brand ship then more power to you, my friend.
The patron saints of Marxism and Modernism look down from on high.
The Aesthetics of Obedience: How ‘Template Capitalism’ Commodifies Creativity
Template Capitalism sells aesthetics stripped of ideology.
Let me explain.
It’s the illusion of choice. Canva’s sales pitch “Make professional designs in minutes!” is not selling creativity. They’re selling standardisation.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll scream it into the void until William Morris rises from his wallpapered grave: this efficiency doesn’t solve a problem, it invents one. Microwaving branding and design like this attempts to quench a thirst for marketing and advertising that doesn’t actually exist. Or at the very least, shouldn’t.
When everyone can consume design and make ‘design’, clients start whispering the quiet part out loud: “Why pay for expertise when I can have efficiency?” Here’s why: you’re not paying for pixels. You’re paying for experience and a well-thought out ‘no, because…’
Good creative direction asks 'why' before it asks 'how fast.'
It defends the time it takes to make things that matter but platforms like these train would-be clients to think design should be fast, free, and frictionless.
This is inevitably the logical endpoint of late-stage capitalism: a ubiquitous tool that monetises ‘creativity’ as another gig-economy hustle, while surgically removing all risk, labour, or vision.
Capitalism treats culture like a factory: optimise for speed, scale, and profit. But real culture, like real design, is organic, uneven and alive. When culture becomes purely transactional, we stop making meaning — we just make more.
Huge efficiency gains through AI mean more campaigns, produced faster which flood the market with “content”.
As barriers to entry disappear and competition for attention grows, the cost of advertising just to cut through the noise will grow in orders of magnitude.
ROI is important, but cult brands aren’t built solely on templates.
May I remind you that Nike didn’t build a $180Bn brand by letting interns drag-and-drop Swooshes. It took 50 years of investment and ruthless focus on what the brand refuses to do as much as what it creates.
The Revolution will Not Be Templated
The promise of ‘democratised design’ has also revealed itself as a race to the bottom.
Erosion of the human act of communicating through typography, composition and strategic visual storytelling has tangible consequences. Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2025 shows 78% of marketing departments now use AI-generated visuals, up from 42% in 2023 accompanied by a 37% drop in engagement.
This proves that audiences instinctively reject formulaic work — our brains are wired to respond to human imperfection and intentional craft. Any creative worth their salt already knows this instinctively: brands using custom design achieve higher engagement and greater longevity in market memory.
The economic impact is equally alarming: AI-generated work commands 62% less monetary value than human-crafted alternatives (Research Square, 2023). When time saving become the priority, clients devalue creative expertise in favour of templated quick fixes for their businesses and brands.
What's sold as efficiency is actually the industrialisation of creativity, where speed and volume replace creative problem-solving.
Late-stage capitalism: put your best foot forward on the way down.
"To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing." (Williams, 1989)
The battle is against creative homogenisation, but the war is against the lie that creativity should scale for the sake of making a buck.
Am I worried that AI is going to take my job away? Fuck no. When McDonald's industrialised dining in the 1950s, it didn't eliminate fine cuisine — it just made real cooking more valuable.
Modernism championed order and objective truth. Postmodernism tormented them. David Carson’s rebellious typography set the whole rulebook on fire. Each movement made intentional choices that declared: “this is what we believe”.
Today? It’s mostly just 'on-brand' compliance. Template Capitalism is just a cage with prettier bars.
Maybe it’s just that I want the design profession to mean something. That’s a very Kieran thing to do.
Tools like Canva et. al. can produce aesthetic concepts at lightning speed, but they cannot answer the fundamental question: does this need to exist in the first place?
The template economy hasn't elevated design; it's created a paradox where:
More content means less impact
Lower barriers to entry depress wages
The creative industry now conflates 'professional' with a templated brand identity, mistaking aesthetic compliance for actual excellence and effectiveness
It’s easy to tell clients who get it vs. clients who don’t. Clients that ‘get it’ understand that the most authentic brands with higher market share possess a sharp perspective, and demand work that couldn’t be made in Canva.
They would rather commission illustrators, not disposable visuals.
True design and visual communication isn’t just information delivery; it’s meaning-making and authenticity. It is culture-jamming, anti-corporate grit — it’s a political act.
Brand differentiation now requires rejecting the very systems that claim to empower it.
The Happy Medium Studio ethos prioritises thoughtfulness and craft over speed and volume — all I’m saying is question the defaults.
