Open almost any business and you’ll find a familiar scene: brand templates neatly filed in a shared folder, a Canva licence for every team member, and the well-intentioned belief that design has finally been “democratised”.
On the surface, this feels like progress. Speed increases. Bottlenecks disappear. Anyone can create a slide, a social post, or a sales document in minutes. Design, once scarce and specialist, is now everywhere.
But beneath this efficiency lies a quieter risk… one that many organisations don’t notice until their brand begins to blur, weaken, or quietly lose relevance.
Because while everyone may now have access to design tools, not everyone is a designer. And when organisations confuse access with expertise, they often end up passing the burden of creativity to people who were never meant to carry it.
The myth of “design as a toolset”
Canva is not the problem. Nor are templates, brand kits, or self-serve assets. These tools are extraordinarily powerful when used correctly. The problem emerges when design is redefined as “assembling things that look acceptable”.
Design, at its best, is not decoration. It’s decision-making. It’s taste. It’s restraint. It’s understanding how form, language, and systems combine to express a point of view. Tools can help execute those decisions but they cannot make them.
When brands treat design as a checklist rather than a discipline, something subtle happens. Visual output increases, but creative intent disappears.
Logos are respected, but meaning is diluted. Tone of voice exists but lacks conviction. Everything looks “on brand”, yet nothing feels distinctive.
Passing the burden, losing the signal
Many brands unintentionally build a culture of passing the burden of design, and instead of investing in strong creative leadership, they distribute responsibility across marketing managers, sales teams, internal comms, and operations, people whose primary job is not creativity, and shouldn’t have to be. This isn’t a failure of talent. It’s a structural decision.
The result is predictable:
- Design becomes safer, not stronger
- Consistency replaces originality
- Brand becomes maintenance, not momentum
Over time, the people stop asking “What should this feel like?” and starts asking “Does this follow the template?” And templates, no matter how well designed, are inherently retrospective. They preserve what was once true — they don’t imagine what should come next.
Creativity needs seniority, not just licenses...
The brands that thrive creatively aren’t the ones with the most design tools… they’re the ones that treat creativity as a senior function.
They understand that brand is a strategic asset, not a production task. That creative decisions shape perception long before metrics appear. And that originality rarely survives committee ownership.
Crucially, these brands know when notto democratise. They empower teams to use brand assets, but they protect the thinking behind them. Design systems are shared; creative judgment is not.
By investing in senior expertise, brand and design are aligned into a tool that works for the organisation (not against them)— enabling speed, clarity, and consistency without diluting character. Creativity is led with intent, not dispersed by default.
Embryo example: knowing when to go deeper
Embryo is a strong example of this maturity in action.
They already had great internal designers. They already understood the value of creativity. Yet when it came time for a significant brand project, they recognised something important: this wasn’t about capacity — it was about perspective.
Rather than relying solely on internal resource or stretching existing teams, they chose to engage seasoned brand experts (Us). Not because their own designers weren’t capable, but because brand moments require distance, depth, and a level of specialism that day-to-day execution rarely allows.
The outcome wasn’t just a visual refresh. It was clarity. Confidence. A renewed sense of who they were and how they showed up in the market.
And the results followed, not just aesthetically, but commercially.
That decision signalled something internally too: that creativity mattered enough to be handled with care.
The cost of playing it safe
Brands rarely fail loudly. They erode. They become harder to distinguish, easier to ignore, and increasingly reliant on performance spend to compensate for lost emotional connection.
This isn’t because they lacked tools.
It’s because they lacked conviction.
In a market where sameness is abundant, creativity is not a luxury. It’s leverage.
And leverage only comes from people who are trained, trusted, and empowered to think — not just to assemble.
A more balanced future
The most effective brands don’t swing to extremes. They don’t gatekeep design, nor do they flatten it into a universal responsibility. Instead, they create a clear hierarchy of creative ownership:
- Strong senior creative direction
- Thoughtfully designed systems and assets
- Empowered teams who execute within a meaningful framework
In that model, Canva becomes what it should be: a tool, not a philosophy.
Because when everyone is treated as a designer, design itself slowly disappears.
And the organisations that recognise this early, and reinvest creativity at the highest level — are the ones that continue to stand out, long after the templates look the same.
At Courts, we work with ambitious organisations to bring clarity, creativity, and conviction back to their brands. If any of this resonates, we’d love to have a chat.
