The gap between what the top designers charge and what the average designer charges has been getting wider for years.
An average designer in Sydney might charge $50k for a full service design package. The top Sydney designers often charge more than $250k+ for the same scope and service. How do I know? Because I am regularly talking with them about it :)
There are lots of factors that sit inside that price difference like brand, experience, the calibre of the work, the press they've been in and the reputation they've spent years building. But taste is also one ingredient in that price gap.
What AI is doing is flattening specific parts of your design process e.g. documentation, presentation, admin, ability to respond quickly, the appearance of thoroughness and professionalism. That stuff is becoming a commodity because every designer who learns how AI tools work will look professional on the surface.
But brand, reputation, the trade relationships you've spent fifteen years cultivating, the press and the experience won't ever get flattened. Those take years to build and AI doesn't change that.
Taste sits in its own category because nobody can give it to you and AI can't fake it.
Taste is hard to quantify but you know it when you see it. You can walk into a project and tell within thirty seconds whether the designer had it or not. Or just watch two designers in a tile shop, the one with taste picks three samples out of two hundred that all work together, the one without it asks the rep what's popular.
Taste is part instinct and part exposure.
The instinct is the bit you either have or don't. It's why two designers can sit in the same design school class, work on the same projects and it's clear one of them has an eye for design and the other doesn't.
The exposure is what sharpens that instinct over time e.g. by walking through good architecture, looking at thousands of materials and making choices, sitting in spaces that work and spaces that don't and being able to understand the difference.
A designer with taste is running on a different set of judgments to a designer without it and that's part of what the client is paying for even if they can't name it.
AI doesn't have any of that and that's why taste is about to be worth more.
Clients are about to be drowning in OK looking design output that all looks pretty similar on the surface. At the moment the average designers are rushing to use AI tools to help them with their design work (instead of helping getting it to help them with the admin and grunt work).
The designers who will charge the most over the next five years are the ones with the most specific, most opinionated point of view about what good design looks like. The ones with taste.
They won't say to clients "we will work with your style" (because AI can do that), they will say "I would not do that, here's why and here's what I would do instead."
