Colorado-based graphic designer, lettering artist and illustrator Katie Sturgis creates a hand-lettered piece after her design job is replaced by AI, arguing for the inherent value of human creativity and turning it into a product she never planned to make.
Katie Sturgis’s graphic design job was replaced by AI. Her response was to make something by hand and put it into the world.
Creativity Belongs to Humans is a hand-lettered piece made in the direct aftermath of that experience, and it says what it means without irony: human creativity has something AI cannot replicate, and we need to keep placing value on it ourselves. “One thing AI will never be able to replace is human creativity,” she says. “It lacks true human experience, emotions, and originality. Humans create with intentionality, while AI operates with regurgitation.” The piece became merch, which Sturgis acknowledges is new territory for her. “I’ve never been a merch-selling gal,” she says, “but this felt important to share, and it was an opportunity to try something new in a time of uncertainty.”
That quality of doing something uncomfortable because it needs doing connects to how Sturgis thinks more broadly. As a mountain biker, she knows that progress comes from taking risks.
“I like to say ‘do what scares you,'” she says. “Fear is there to protect you but can also hold you back. Risk is scary, but risk pushes you forward.”
The piece itself is an act of that logic: stepping into a new kind of making and selling at a moment when the professional ground shifted.
The lettering is entirely hand-drawn, the statement clear and direct. In a design world increasingly shaped by efficiency and automation, the argument for the handmade has to be made by hand.
Katie Sturgis is a Colorado-based graphic designer, lettering artist and illustrator. She is an AIGA COS board member and spends her time outside mountain biking, hiking and van-life-ing in the Colorado mountains.
Website: sturgiscreative.com Instagram: @letterbugg
Creativity Belongs to Humans. Hand lettering by Katie Sturgis, Sturgis Creative.
