In the two years since generative AI went mainstream with the arrival of ChatGPT, the design industry has shifted from a stance of revulsion and litigation, to something more along the lines of reluctant acceptance or, in some cases, eager adoption.

That was until earlier this week, when Pentagram—arguably the most storied graphic design firm in the world—debuted Performance.gov, its first public work built in-part through the image generator Midjourney. Designed atop a library of 1,5000 icons that were the result of Midjourney image training and prompting, the work has divided the design world into two camps.

Some have heralded the work as modern and genre-stretching, just the sort of expression you’d expect from a leading design firm making aggressive use of the latest technologies. (Its own Instagram post has been liked over 16,000 times.) But others—and what appears to be a more vocal majority of illustrators and other creatives commenting on the story—have expressed disgust at the firm’s decision to embrace automation instead of hiring human hands to do the job, while suggesting the work suffered as a result.

But to Paula Scher, the Pentagram partner leading the work—who in the past has designed brand identities for corporations including Microsoft and Shake Shack, album covers for Boston and Leonard Bernstein, and posters for NYC’s Public Theater—there’s no moral vagueness whatsoever. 

On Tuesday night, after the work went live, Scher read through every piece of criticism of her team’s work. As a multi-decade creative, she was repulsed by the response, both hurt and angered by the vitriol. And she argues that if you don’t understand what Pentagram is doing with this project, you don’t get the practice of design itself. 

“They were really in this complete unity in a way that really scared me, as if they didn’t have any understanding of what the site was and how it would operate,” she says. “They are not designers. They are people who make drawings all the time.”

Pentagram’s plan to build performance.gov

The goal of the site was simple: To more succinctly present government reports that tracked the strategic goals of dozens of agencies, including the departments of Defense and Health and Human Services. To figure out how to do that was more complex. 

“The real problem is the government writes long, cumbersome reports because they have to appease and persuade constituents in government or affiliated places. They’re very hard to decipher and boring,” says Scher. “The whole notion of the site was to correct that by creating a site that could run all by itself.” 

In other words, Pentagram imagined that performance.gov could sidestep bureaucracy through automation in order to get knowledge to the public faster, and they designed an entire framework for the site that used technologies akin to ChatGPT to abbreviate reports into brief and readable rubrics for the reader.

“Five years ago, I wouldn’t have even dreamed of that sort of thinking,” says Scher. “But the thing was, I’ve spent a lot of time at this point with the government. I realize for the government to do anything timely is nearly impossible from the checks and balances, and the layers of hierarchy.”

AI-generated graphics that promised to spruce up an endless parade of reports were a big part of this plan—and they have proven to be the piece of the project collecting the most ire. 

Pentagram designer Bruno Bergallo developed his illustration style through 20 shapes made in paint and paper—ranging from eyes to hospitals to abstract bubbles—and fed his examples into Midjourney to train it on his aesthetic. After several rounds of tweaking through prompts that Pentagram has shared publicly, he used Midjourney to realize those components into a war chest of 1,500 icons that the government approved, making them ready to go for any agency report for the foreseeable future.

Scher says it’s a scope of illustration production that would have been far outside Pentagram’s three-month, five-designer window on the project (the project continued another three months unpaid, Scher adds), but it was necessary to provide the government with a system that could truly operate in an ongoing capacity.

“My argument about this, and where the differential is, is that the definition of design in the dictionary is ‘a plan,’” says Scher. “We created a plan, and it was based around the fact this would be self-sustaining, and therefore was not a job for an illustrator.”

“If someone else wants to draw 1,500 icons every other week, they can do that,” she follows a few beats later. “We will use the best tools available to us to accomplish the ideas we have.”

But was it wrong?

Pentagram’s primary defense is it designed a solution to satisfy “an impossible client” within tight boundaries—and in a way that would serve a public good (although under a Trump administration, the project’s future is unclear). Its second defense is to argue that all of this illustration work that professionals feel was stolen from them never existed in the first place.

“[Illustrators] look at a website built on illustration, and they were thinking those are little jobs I’m losing. Every time we built a house, we took a house from them!” says Scher.

“I know all about illustrators. I used to be a record cover designer. I married an illustrator [Seymour Chwast]! They alway think everyone is going to undercut them and take away their work,” she continues. “The reason I didn’t feel immoral about it at all was because I knew there was no job for an illustrator on this. There could be one illustrator at Pentagram, and that was Bruno.”

Scher does cede that technological jumps can leave designers behind. She cites the rise of clipart in the ’90s as eating a chunk of the illustration industry for several years. But she also sees Pentagram’s own work in Midjourney as founded in craft and with its own point of view, rather than something carelessly mass-produced from someone else’s work. And she argues that now that generative AI has arrived as a ubiquitous tool, the industry does need to adapt to the new reality. It’s a reason why Pentagram shared its methodology rather than treating it as some trade secret.

“I’m 76 years old. I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve been through a million technological changes. In my early years, we used mechanicals. I used an X-ACTO knife, and these old guy with razor blades said, ‘You’re a sellout! You’re using an X-ACTO knife,’” recounts Scher. “When the computer came in, we thought the industry was dead. ‘We have to use this stupid metal on our desks? Wah wahhh!’” 

“[The complaints] did no good,” she concludes. “Two years later, everyone forgot about it.”