Why Didn’t You Just Use AI?
Since launching my website and branding, one of the most common questions I’ve been asked is: “Why didn’t you just use AI?”
It’s a fair question. We live in a time when artificial intelligence can generate logos, colour palettes, websites, and entire marketing campaigns in a matter of seconds. Type in a few prompts and something appears, quickly, efficiently, often impressively.
So why didn’t I? The answer has very little to do with technology, and everything to do with people. When people visit my website, they see photographs, journal entries, articles, and information about my work. What they don’t see are the years that came before it. The years spent studying herbal medicine. The afternoons wandering through woodlands with a camera. The notebooks filled with ideas. The articles written late at night when the house had gone quiet. The moments of self-doubt. The moments of excitement. The long, winding journey of slowly becoming the person I was always meant to be.
Nature with Nicola is not simply a business. It is the meeting place of many threads that have been weaving themselves together for years. The challenge was never creating a website. The challenge was understanding how all of those threads connected.
This is where I think many people misunderstand branding. A logo is not a brand. A colour palette is not a brand. A website is not a brand. Those things are expressions of something deeper. The real work is understanding what sits underneath. What do you stand for? What do you want people to feel? What story are you telling? What makes your work different? And underneath all of it: Who are you?
Here is the heart of it. AI can generate. That is what it is built to do. Give it a prompt and it will return an output, a logo, a headline, a palette, a page. What it cannot do is uncover. It cannot sit with you while you fumble towards something you’ve never quite put into words. It cannot notice the thread you keep returning to without realising. It cannot catch the catch in your voice when you finally name the thing that matters most and gently hand it back to you. Those things require conversation. Curiosity. Reflection. Listening. They require another person who is paying attention to you, not to a prompt, but to the living, contradictory, half-formed truth of a person trying to understand their own work. A machine can answer the questions you know how to ask. It cannot ask you the questions you didn’t know were there.
When I began working with Alex at Corv Studio, I assumed we would be talking about websites. Instead, we spent a surprising amount of time talking about me. About herbs. About folklore. About photography. About storytelling. About why I write. About the feeling I wanted people to have when they arrived.
At times it felt less like a design process and more like somebody patiently helping me untangle a ball of wool. Ideas that had drifted around in my head for years began to connect. Things that had always felt instinctive became clear. Patterns emerged. Themes emerged. Slowly, a picture took shape. Not because somebody designed it. Because somebody helped me see it.
There is a phrase I keep returning to: “I felt seen.” That sounds simple, but it is surprisingly rare. Many of us spend years trying to explain ourselves. Trying to describe what we do. Trying to articulate why it matters. Sometimes we stand so close to our own work that we can no longer see it clearly. A good designer does more than create beautiful things. A good designer listens. They notice patterns. They reflect things back to you. They help you find clarity. For me, that was the most valuable part of the entire process.
Not the website. Not the branding. The clarity. The confidence. The sense that everything finally belonged together. The website that exists today is not the result of a clever prompt. It is the result of conversations, questions, reflection, trust, and understanding. It is the result of one human being helping another make sense of their own story.
When the work involves identity, meaning, purpose, or storytelling, the thing being created is an extension of who you are. And understanding a person, really understanding them, has always been a human art. So when people ask me why I didn’t simply use AI, my answer remains the same. Because Nature with Nicola was never really about building a website. It was about finding the courage and clarity to share my work with the world. And that required another human being. Not to tell me who I was. But to help me see it for myself.
If this idea resonates with you, Alex explores it beautifully in his article The Prompt Isn't the Strategy, where he examines the difference between creating something that looks like a brand and uncovering what a business truly stands for.
