None of it is bad work. It's been "made" carefully, by people who know what they're doing, and it all arrives in the same place regardless.
What it is, is an average of what a generative model hands back to you. Ask it for an AI logo and it builds one out of every AI logo already in circulation.
It will find the centre of your category faster than any human, and the centre is the one place you want to avoid.
So the founder who briefs AI to "design" their AI brand (I say brand loosely) gets a competent average of their competitors, in a day, for nothing, and at no point does any of it feel like a mistake while it's happening. Unfortunately that's why it sticks.
None of this started with AI, mind. Clients and agencies have been landing on the safe option for years, because the safe option is the easy one to approve and nobody ever got in trouble for picking it. AI just gets you there by lunchtime.
None of which is an argument against using the AI tools. They're very good at what they do, which is producing work quickly and showing you what already exists. It goes wrong when they're handling the decision as well as the output. AI returns the likeliest answer, and the likeliest answer is the one your competitors are being handed too.
Sidekick made this obvious because the problem was sitting inside the product. It's a second player, your gaming bff, something that reacts to how you play and has opinions about your decisions, so the whole thing rests on personality, and an average hasn't got one.
The decision underneath all of it was that Sidekick sits beside you rather than taking over, a Player 2, at a point when most AI marketing is busy promising to do the whole job for you. That settled more than any sketching did, because it's why the mark reacts, emotes and behaves.
So the mark moves. The idea for motion came before the shape, which is backwards from how identities usually get made, and it's where the feeling in the thing lives.
The other question was whether anyone would carry it around. Gaming brands get built by the people who adopt them rather than the company that owns them, so it had to survive being somebody's avatar and being redrawn badly by a fourteen year old kid.
A good brand is really just a strong strategy and a stack of creative decisions a human, not AI, was prepared to make and defend.
If you're building something in AI and you'd rather not arrive at the same place as everyone else, that's the work we do at Ótimo.
Ian Howarth
August 24th, 2026
There is a particular kind of pause that happens on a call when a founder shares their screen, shows you the website they have just finished building, and then sits back and waits for you to say something.
