Friction Maxxing: Why the Process Is the Point.

A year ago, an AI-generated mockup in a student portfolio could stop you in your tracks. Now it’s a much different landscape.

That's where we landed on a recent Friday call. Alongside my Co-Managing Director Jack, Teacher Dan and Community & Social Coordinator Teresa we were meant to be talking campaigns. Instead, we kept circling back to one idea: friction maxxing.

When anyone can generate a polished outcome in seconds, the outcome stops being the impressive part. What sets you apart is how you got there. And that's true whether your process is a sketchbook, a camera, a can of paint or an AI prompt.

The term was coined in January 2026 by columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton in an essay for The Cut.

Friction maxxing is choosing the harder, slower, (maybe tedious) and more human route on purpose. It's reading a newspaper before you open BBC. It’s going for a walk instead of having an expensive smoothie. It’s putting your thoughts into a sketchbook instead of asking an app to give you an idea.

It isn't about rejecting tools, it’s more about refusing to let them do your thinking for you. Friction is where the good stuff lives: the dead ends, the research, the odd personal bit of ‘rizz’ that sneaks into the work and makes it impossible to copy.

It’s the same idea when we talk about kids being bored. They need it to let their minds wander.

Jack calls it building worlds that feel real, while Dan calls it digging deeper. Either way, it's the part of design no shortcut can skip.

At Shillington, one of our mottos is ‘ensuring students get the best possible chance of employment in graphic design’. With AI expectations changing by the month, we need to firmly know our own stance, our expectations with teachers and what we teach our students.

The problem isn't AI, it's volume without intent. Thirty slick lifestyle mockups of the same brand don't prove you can think, they prove you can press generate.

The moment that stuck with all of us was Dan walking through a recent graduate, Tom Crausby's editorial project on skateboarding in Manchester. He showed us around the working files instead of the finished project.

Tom's first layouts were tidy. Thumbnails that needed further thought and some more feedback. The easy fix would've been to grab a mood board of cool skate visuals and copy the look.

Instead, Tom pushed back on himself. He went for walks, he took notes, he looked at the city's walls, listened to music. He paid attention to his own experience of skating, and the emotions that he felt.

That's where the project came alive. The final piece pulls in things nobody would put on a skateboarding moodboard. If you think of the world of skateboarding, you don’t necessarily think of Scampi Fries, Manchester train tickets or brass work.

The result stopped being generic and “cool” and became something rooted in an idea, with its own visual language and real substance. For Dan, that's the whole point.

That's friction maxxing in one project, but it happens every single day at Shillington.

Examples of Tom's final project, Pushing Forward.

Friction maxxing doesn't mean banning AI, far from it. Teresa summed up the tension perfectly: she's been hunting for the middle ground between doing everything with AI and rejecting it outright.

Some of the strongest student work we look at uses AI really well. A fashion rebrand used it to build lifestyle imagery where everything was considered, right down to the model's on-brand bag. The difference was art direction. The idea came first, AI served it and tightened it up. A soap brand uses it to put the product in a real life setting, tastefully.

If AI is part of your process, it needs to be part of your story too. One of our 2025 students laid her AI prompts on a page showing exactly what was going on.

Why does it matter so much? Because it's exactly what employers need to know. We're even seeing brand guidelines that now include AI prompts for generating imagery, it’s not going anywhere so studios & agencies want designers who can steer the tools, and take control.

Big brands are now winning applause for identities built from real-world, physical experiments. Over the last couple of weeks, Apple Music introduced a futuristic new identity. Rather than relying entirely on digital animation, the team spent months experimenting with sound frequencies, physical materials, and lighting. The result gives Apple Music a fresh identity that connects its visual design directly to music.

At Shillington, students have been doing stuff like this for years.

It used to be called the Handmade Project, and today its the Offscreen Project. Students get away from their screens and make things with their hands: paper, paint, cameras, whatever the idea needs.

Jack still remembers one student, Jasper, designing a cover for a book called The Horse Boy. He didn't mock up a horse. He painted on a real one and photographed it.

If we saw that project in someone’s portfolio, we wouldn’t want to look at the other ones. We've seen enough apps, but how many horses have you seen today?

With a projects like these, we see personality and the value in a human.

That's the job of a portfolio. Not to prove you can make something polished, but to make someone want to talk to you.

Start away from the screen.

Walk, sketch, photograph, collect. Your first ideas should come from the world, not a feed.

Let your life in.

The trousers that fit in a specific way, the snack you always buy, the walls you pass every day. That's the stuff nobody else can copy. That’s you.

Document as you go.

Screenshots, sketchbook pages, behind-the-scenes photos. You can't tell the story later if you didn't keep it.

If you use AI, show the inputs.

Your references, your prompt, the first output and how you improved it.

Art direct, don't accept.

The first generation is purely a starting point.

One brilliant idea beats fifty mockups.

Restraint reads as confidence.

Make it a case study.

As Dan tells every class: “I don’t want these projects to feel like student projects. I want it to feel like a case study.”

Every month, we're leaning into this further in how we teach.

AI will keep getting faster and slicker. The outcome will only get easier to make, which means the journey to it will only matter more. Let’s all buy into Friction Maxxing, or the road less travelled. Because it’s fun, and more importantly.. it’s healthy to learn.

So make it harder on yourself. Go for the walk or paint on whatever is in front of you. That friction is where your ideas come from, and it's the part of you that people will want to work with.

Ready to build a portfolio that shows how you think? Explore our course.