Design With Wit, Friction, and Point of View

What gets lost when custom digital experiences are dressed in generic visuals.

I was in a meeting recently with a large company, deep in a conversation about building a custom digital experience, one that was supposed to reflect who they are, how they work, and what kind of culture sits behind the brand.

Then someone said, almost as a practical aside, “Let’s use stock images.”

Stock photography is not automatically wrong, sometimes it serves a purpose, sometimes it helps move things along, and sometime it’s the only option. But in this kind of situation, it revealed something bigger. Companies will spend real time talking about authenticity, differentiation, internal culture, and how they want the experience to feel specific to them, then reach for the most generic visual solution in the room.

That disconnect says a lot.

When you are building a custom experience, especially for an organization that wants to present itself with some depth and distinctiveness, the imagery cannot feel like it came from the same tray every other company is pulling from. The whole point of the exercise is to make the experience feel rooted in something real. Otherwise, you are building a tailored interface and then dressing it in borrowed elements.

People pick up on that quickly, even if they do not say it out loud. They may not have the word for it, they may not explain that the visual language feels disconnected from the message. They just sense that something is off. The company is speaking about itself in one voice, while the page is showing them something flatter, safer, and far less specific.

That is usually where the work starts to lose its edge.

I think wit in design matters. Not wit in the sense of trying to be clever for attention. I mean a kind of intelligence in the work. A sharpness. A sign that somebody made an actual choice. That the design is not just functioning, but saying something. That it understands tone. That it knows when to hold back and when to give a page some personality. That it has enough confidence not to default to whatever feels easiest.

Too much digital work today is competent but anonymous. It works well enough. It looks clean enough, maybe it’s generated with AI. It may follow the familiar patterns then it all disappears into the sea of other sites doing the same thing with slightly different colors and slightly different headlines.

That is why these smaller decisions matter more than people think.

Stock images are often designed to be broadly acceptable. That is their job. They are made to fit many situations, many industries, many moods. But broad acceptability is usually the opposite of point of view. And if a company is trying to express something about its own culture, its own people, or its own way of working, broad acceptability is not a strong enough standard.

You do not get authenticity by talking about it. You get it when the experience starts carrying details that feel true to the organization behind it. Sometimes that comes from photography. Sometimes it comes from illustration, typography, tone of voice, motion, pacing, or how information is organized. It does not always require a large production. But it does require intention. And that is where a little friction is useful.

Not every fast decision is a good one. Sometimes friction is what keeps a project honest. It forces the team to stop and ask what they are really trying to build. Are we trying to represent the company, or are we just trying to fill the page? Those are two very different goals. One leads to something memorable. The other usually leads to something passable.

And passable is often the real danger. Not because it fails dramatically, but because it lowers the ceiling of the entire experience. It takes something that could have had character and turns it into something merely acceptable.

If the goal is to reflect company culture, then that culture has to show up somewhere in a form people can actually feel. Not just in a positioning document. Not just in a strategy workshop. Not just in internal language about values. It has to appear in the experience itself.

Otherwise, the site may be custom in process and generic in outcome.

That is what I was reacting to in that meeting. Not the idea of stock photography by itself, but the ease with which teams can drift away from the very thing they say they want. They ask for something more honest, more specific, more reflective of who they are, then make visual decisions that smooth all of that away.

A custom experience should leave some trace of the company behind it. Some evidence of judgment. Some sense that the work belongs to this brand and not to any other. That is where the point of view lives. That is where the experience starts to feel real.

And in my view, that is worth protecting.