Two weights, fifty-five countries
A type system for an organization working in dozens of languages gets tested by the longest word, not the best headline. German compounds, Vietnamese diacritics stacked above and below, Arabic that needs a family of its own: the setting that looked right in English has to hold when the copy grows by a third.
So I pick fewer weights and prove them in the worst case before anything is signed off. Two weights a country office applies correctly beat six applied at random. The specimen I hand over shows the long word, the stacked accents and the smallest type anyone will set, because those are the places a system gives way.
The grid is for other people
A grid starts its real work after the designer leaves. Someone in a communications team, on a deadline, will drop a photo and three paragraphs into it without asking whether the margin is right. Whether that comes out looking like the brand depends on how few decisions the template left them.
So master pages carry the decisions, styles are named for what they are rather than how they look, and every layout keeps an obvious place for the thing nobody planned for. A template that survives a year of that was designed well.
Where AI sits in my process
I use it daily, in the production lane. It extends a background, clears a plate, drafts a dozen variations of a layout I have already chosen, writes first-pass alt text, and takes the tedium out of resizing a campaign for eight placements. That work used to eat the hours I would rather spend designing.
It stays out of the decisions: type, color, the final crop, and anything the brand will live with for years. The skill worth having now is knowing where that line sits, and writing brand rules precise enough for a tool to follow, which is the same precision a designer needs in their first week.
