Buck is a creative company with studios in London, Amsterdam, New York, Los Angeles and Sydney. It works on branding, events and design for clients like Airbnb, Samsung and YouTube.
Executive creative director and partner Vincent Lammers explains how they’re using AI, and how he feels about it.
You can see all the articles in this series here.
Broadly speaking, are you excited for how AI will change the design industry, or nervous?
That’s a layered question, so I’ll give a layered answer.
First, I think we’re piling way too much on those two letters. The hype is distorting how the industry thinks about and implements it. We need more nuance in this conversation.
AI is an incredible innovation. It opens up opportunities across so many parts of our industry, and in specific applications, it’s wildly impressive. Automating repetitive tasks, collecting and framing data in meaningful ways, those are exciting because they create more space for humans to make meaningful contributions.
There’s also potential in how the technology shows up as a product in itself. We’ve been involved in visualising different versions of AI Assistants, giving them character, form, and presence. That sparks fascinating conversations about what people connect with, how they interact, and what makes them disengage.
Where I do get nervous is around the process. There’s this narrative of, “Now you can do this at the push of a button.” And yes, technically you can. But it won’t look or move as thoughtfully or purposefully.
Focusing only on the output of generative AI is misleading. I tell clients all the time – we could give you 100 designs in a day. We have some of the best artists in the world. But that doesn’t solve your problem.
Our process is built to take complex business and communication challenges and break them down into manageable pieces. We inform ourselves, challenge both ourselves and the client, and ask the right questions to ensure every element is purposeful.
That approach creates trust, builds solid foundations, and allows us to prototype and pressure test along the way. It’s what helps the final work stand the test of culture, quality, and time. Just as importantly, it creates buy-in across every layer of a brand’s organisation. Without that, even the best creative won’t stick.
Because let’s be honest, if someone generates something quickly, puts it into the world, and it fails, who takes the blame?
They used all the test data to write the prompt, so it can’t be the human…right? That’s why I’m wary of this technology as a shortcut.
Shortcuts usually mean cutting out something vital from the process. If you’re aware of that and willing to accept the risk, fine. But don’t pretend it’s the same thing.
So yes, I’m excited about the potential. But I’m equally concerned about the shortcuts people think it will give them.
Do you have an agreed policy around AI as a business? If so, how did you create it?
We do and it’s constantly evolving and changing. Early on, we brought in legal counsel to make sure we had our ducks in a row and were informed from a business and compliance standpoint. In many ways, that was the easy part.
The trickier and ongoing work is the policy around how we use AI and what we do with it. That part is a constant work in progress, shaped by our collective knowledge, experience, and clarity of purpose.
We’ve set up global groups across the company who meet regularly to discuss AI.
Right now, we’re in a stage of exploration, inspiration, and implementation all at once. Our approach is driven by our people and informed at every level, from labelling AI-generated art during the process to making sure tools are accessible to our teams, all while maintaining a high level of security and rigour around their use.
And we’re clear with clients about how we use these tools. Some brands are excited to embrace them, while others prefer to stay away. Our policy is flexible enough to align with both.
When did you realise AI was going to have an impact on design?
It happened very quickly. When the Midjourney Experiments channel became one of the most active on our Slack within just a few weeks, I personally knew something was shifting.
We immediately created space for conversations with our staff, listening not only to their concerns but also to their excitement. We assigned people at different levels to stay informed and share knowledge.
As a company, we’ve always been deeply connected to new tools and innovations, so it came very naturally to us as a company. But we also recognised right away that this wasn’t just another plug-in or software update, it was something bigger.
Another moment that stood out was the ability to train models or Loras on our own work. Suddenly, we could generate variations within the same visual language. That really struck a chord in terms of how this technology could help us continue to create and design in new ways.
Have you undergone any AI training, either as a studio or individuals?
We have a natural culture of training and development at Buck. We’ve always made space for artists and staff to share new ways of working, whether it’s a process, a workflow, or a specific technique or tool used on a project.
From how we used Rive on the Notion Assistant project to an artist experimenting with different animation styles from a simple line test, these spaces quickly turned into hubs for trying out new tools, including AI.
It’s been incredibly powerful to watch our most craft-focused, traditional artists and art directors dive into these tools and share what they’re learning. They’ve shown how to experiment while keeping control and ownership of the work and that peer-to-peer exchange has had a huge impact.
One of my favourite examples of this is our TGI Friday’s education series, a crowd-sourced initiative started by our artists to share and showcase new AI workflows. It’s become a space where teams come together, swap ideas, and stay inspired as the tools keep evolving.
We think of this as a “middle-out” culture. It doesn’t just come from leadership at the top or from the newest talent coming in. It happens across every layer of the company.
How do you use AI in the studio’s creative process?
We very much believe Humans, with a capital H, should stay in the driver’s seat. Clients want and need to collaborate with people they can build trust with. That relationship can’t be automated.
That said, there are many strategic and tactical areas where we see opportunities, and where we’re already implementing new tools. From analysing audience data and research, to unpacking briefs, to prototyping and exploration. We use it during our ideation or exploration phases, quickly testing or prototyping visual ideas.
Never as a final output though – it always starts and ends with human input.
These tools have also been empowering our 3D teams by speeding up repetitive or monotonous tasks, freeing our artists to focus on the things humans do best – creativity, storytelling, and craft.
We’ve also noticed that generative tools produce better results when they’re grounded in human input, design sketches, animated line tests, things with intent baked in. But also in versioning and delivering at large scales.
We build a lot of brand design systems, and those can become ingredients for further tools. Increasingly, clients handle asset creation themselves with their internal teams. We provide the building blocks – frameworks, assets, templates. That’s something you could easily train a system on.
Instead of just a Brand Design System, you start to imagine a Brand Design Brain.
Do you think clients care if/how you use AI in your work?
Some do, some don’t. What matters is the question behind the question – why do they care?
Sometimes it’s because they want to move faster or to get to ideation and iteration quickly. Others are looking to innovate or pioneer new processes. And yes, some assume that it will make things cheaper or easier.
What matters to us is using the tools for the right reasons. Our job is to make sure the work stays successful, meaningful, and impactful, with or without AI.
Do you use AI for any non-creative aspects of running your business?
Absolutely. I think there’s a lot of tunnel vision on the generative type tools, when in fact some of the biggest opportunities are operational like finance and IT.
We’ve been building assistants in areas like talent resourcing, feeding in years of data on what kinds of projects our people have thrived on, so we can place them on the right work.
We’ve built assistants that analyse client briefs, drawing from two decades of briefs to flag similar past projects or uncover opportunities we might otherwise miss.
We’re also experimenting with Culture Assistants that track what’s happening on specific platforms, surfacing trends or cultural conversations that could be relevant for our clients. And Audience Assistants that model specific target groups, allowing us to test prototypes or creative ideas and see what resonates.
The potential here is huge. Again, these tools don’t drive our work or make decisions for us, but they give us better intelligence and keep us more informed. And that, in turn, makes us better partners to our clients.
Beyond the best known tools, what is one AI tool that you would recommend to other design studios?
We’ve always taken a fairly software-agnostic approach as a studio, meaning we don’t put all our chips on a single tool or platform. So rather than pointing to one “silver bullet,” I’d recommend approaching with curiosity and experimentation.
At this stage, the most valuable thing is simply getting your feet wet. Try different platforms, see what’s possible, and explore how they might fit into your creative process in playful, low-barrier ways.
Tools like Krea, for example, make it easy to test a variety of models for image generation, editing, or even video. They’re great for sparking ideas and opening up new directions.
Once you’re ready to move from playful exploration into production, we’ve found ComfyUI to be a powerful base tool. It lets you integrate multiple models, work with more control, and build structured workflows that can deliver production-quality results.
So my recommendation is less about a single product and more about mindset – experiment broadly, stay curious, and use these tools as a sandbox.
Then, when you’re ready, take that curiosity into more advanced frameworks like ComfyUI. That’s often where you discover the workflows and creative solutions you wouldn’t have found by locking into one tool too early.
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