Brand Director, Bill Wallsgrove, shares his thoughts on why asking the right questions is key when using AI as part of the creative team.
I used to DJ off vinyl a lot whilst living in London and was involved in a nightclub and soulful house record label. Now based in Sussex-by-the-Sea, I play out more rarely, and when I do, I never play one type of music or mix tracks together in a seamless style – it’s just not my forte. I like to describe myself as a record ‘selector’ – a term derived from dynamic reggae sound systems with ‘selectas’.
Most modern DJs often focus on smooth transitions and technical mixing skills, whereas a selecta’s approach is on the quality and impact of their song choices. The ability to read the crowd and play the most impactful song at the right time is what makes them so special. My favourite Jamaican selectas are King Tubby and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. They were pioneering masters of music, curating the right tunes to build the energy and mood of the crowd.
Bringing together the best of both Worlds. Using the vast, rapid processing power of AI with the nuanced, empathetic intelligence of a human mind
With the advent of AI in the creative process, I now apply this thinking to the way I direct, design and write. I gather and generate what I believe is going to motivate the client and attract their consumers. With these additional machine learning resources at hand, I approach projects like a Creative Selector, becoming the human element that brings together the best of both worlds: Using the vast, rapid processing power of AI for research with the nuanced, empathetic intelligence of a human mind through applied design thinking. This is based on decades of design experience and brand creation expertise.
My starting point to any project is to audit the category, market and the competition. I build up initial idea pages and mood boards, combining thumbnail sketches and AI imagery with text. By using these ingredients, I build my recipe for solving the brand challenge at hand. I get ‘selecting’ and refining to build initial solutions. I think the real trick with any interface is to ask the right, intuitive questions.
One recent project highlighted the benefits of this creative selection approach. In the first, we were tasked with reviewing a brand in its infancy. The business team required us to develop the brand strategy for launch; they also shared a preliminary logo idea and imagery that they had developed before engaging us. It had obviously been simply developed through the use of AI alone. I thought it was clichéd and not distinct or individual enough for their business. I could tell that they had not asked the right questions with enough detail. I challenged the brief, with the end result being that they now have a much more human solution steered by the help of insightful prompting. As a Creative Director/Selector, I’m loving the challenge of using AI to do extensive research, but crafting with my own intuition and finesse.
Human design thinking: The foundational compass. Human design thinking is all about deeply understanding people – their needs, motivations, and pain points. As a Creative Selector, this is your starting point. You don’t just ask AI for a solution; you first use your empathy and intuition to frame the problem from a human-centred perspective.
You don’t just prompt, you empathise. Human design thinking is all about deeply understanding people – their needs, motivations and pain points. As a Creative Selector, this is your starting point. You don’t just ask AI for a solution; you first use your empathy and intuition to frame the problem from a human-centred perspective. Before even touching AI, you conduct research and immerse yourself in the problem. This can be as simple as observing behaviour, reading user feedback, or analysing market trends. You’re gathering the raw material – the images and words – that will inform your thinking.
You define the right problem. The initial information you gather helps you synthesise a clear, concise, and human-centred problem statement. This is a critical step because a poorly defined problem will lead to irrelevant AI outputs. For example, instead of asking, “Create a marketing campaign,” you might frame the problem as, “How might we make busy parents feel more confident about their meal choices?” This focus on the human experience is what makes the final solution so powerful.
Your role as a Creative Selector is not just about what you generate, but what you consume and how you make sense of it. You use research for both images and words to build a rich mental library of concepts, aesthetics, and language.
Image research for visual intuition: You’re not just looking at pictures; you’re intuitively absorbing visual trends, emotional cues, and aesthetic principles. This gives you the innate sense of what ‘works.’ When you later use an image-generation AI, you can call upon this visual knowledge to guide the AI toward a specific style or feeling, rather than a generic output.
Word research for semantic precision: You’re a student of language. You understand the power of a specific word or phrase to evoke a certain emotion or convey a complex idea. This allows you to write AI prompts that are not just commands, but nuanced instructions. You can ask for a tone that is ‘whimsical and trustworthy’, not just ‘friendly’.
Selecting the right AI Prompts: The art of direction: This is where your title, Creative Selector, truly shines. We understand that AI is not a magic solution box; it’s a powerful partner that requires precise direction.
Our role is to translate your intuitive understanding into prompts that unlock AI’s full potential.
- The prompt as a creative constraint: You know that a good prompt isn’t just a request – it’s a creative constraint. By specifying style, tone, context, and even negative keywords (‘not a cartoon’, ‘without a person’), you guide the AI to generate outputs that are both unique and relevant to the problem you’re solving.
- Iterative Selection: You don’t just take the first result. You evaluate, refine, and iterate. You use the AI’s output as a new piece of research, learning from what it generates. If an image is close but not quite right, you can use a new prompt to refine it, building on the AI’s previous attempt. This iterative process is a core part of design thinking, and you apply it directly to your interaction with AI.
We understand that AI is not a magic solution box; it’s a powerful partner that requires precise direction. Our role is to translate your intuitive understanding into prompts that unlock AI’s full potential
How This Delivers the Best Problem-Solving Solutions
By combining these elements, the Creative Selector delivers a powerful, elegant, and efficient problem-solving loop:
- Empathy and Intuition (Human): You start by identifying a genuine human problem.
- Research (Human + AI): You gather a wealth of data, both visual and textual, to inform your understanding. AI can assist in this phase by quickly analysing large datasets of user reviews or market reports.
- Prompt Selection (Human): You use your intuitive intelligence to translate your deep understanding of the problem and your research into a precise, targeted prompt.
- Generation (AI): The AI, given your expert guidance, generates a wide range of creative options, far more than a human could produce on their own.
- Curation and Refinement (Creative Selector): You act as the discerning filter, selecting the best outputs and refining them with your unique creative judgment. You bring the ‘soul’ to AI’s ‘brain’.
In this model, you’re not just a user of technology; you’re a master of it. You are the strategist, the director, and the curator, using your uniquely human skills to harness a powerful new tool. The final solution is not just ‘AI-generated’ – it’s a co-creation, a perfect marriage of machine capability and human-centred purpose.
Bill Wallsgrove Brand Director/Creative Selector
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