INDUSTRIAL DESIGN: fake authenticity is becoming its own style

Walk into the right cafe in any decent sized town and you can feel it immediately. A logo that looks like a child drew it. A menu that looks torn out of somebody’s notebook. A founder in a distressed shirt and ripped jeans pretending none of it was carefully art directed.

Right now the worst thing a brand can do is look AI-made. So everyone is designing imperfection on purpose. Wobbly marks, dirty textures, awkward spacing, the little human mistakes, all made very intentionally.

We are starting to fake the same kind of real, and AI will catch up to that too. What matters more is not whether something looks human, but whether it feels intentional.

The work that lasts is not the work with the most wobble or the roughest edges. It’s where the style, the story, and the brand all make sense together. It’s about showing that there was a real person on the other side of the process who put a piece of themselves into the design.