I’ve been redesigning the cover art for my WeChat public account lately. And for about two days, I seriously considered turning it into a reusable Skill—some kind of AI-powered template generator. Standardize the whole thing. One click, perfect brand consistency. That’s the logical move, right?
Right.
Until I stopped myself.
Let me explain why.
Every time I open a new cover design, I start with a blank canvas. No saved presets. No strict color palette. No fixed layout. I just let the current mood and the topic of the article guide me. Sometimes I use an AI image generator with a wild prompt. Sometimes I manually tweak a photo from Unsplash. Sometimes I even draw a crude sketch with my trackpad—because why not?
And you know what? It’s inefficient. Absolutely. Every cover takes at least 15 minutes of fiddling. If I were a “real” content brand manager, I’d have a fixed template, a brand guide, and a production line. I’d pump out covers in 30 seconds each. But here’s the thing: efficiency is only a virtue when you want more of the same output. I don’t.
I’m after the process itself.
There’s a dirty secret about standardization: it kills surprise. When every cover looks like the last one, readers might feel safe, but I feel bored. And when I’m bored, the work becomes mechanical. The moment I start “automating” my joy, I’m basically outsourcing my own curiosity to a machine. That’s a rabbit hole I’d rather not go down.
I’ve built enough automation tools to know: you can make almost anything into a template. You can even make an Agent that selects fonts, crops images, and writes alt text. But you can’t make an Agent that enjoys the process. That’s the one thing I refuse to hand over.
So here’s my conclusion: don’t standardize what you love.
Outsource what you hate. Automate the drudgery. But keep the parts of your work that make you itchy with curiosity—the parts where you try a new trick just to see if it works differently this time.
That’s the line. For me, cover design sits right on the fun side. So I’ll keep doing it manually, with all its wasteful inefficiency. Because the waste is the point. It’s the space where new ideas get born.
If you ever catch me building a “cover template for all seasons,” please call me out. And then buy me a drink, because I’ll probably be secretly happy to be freed from it. But for now? No thanks.
Keep the boring bits skillable. Keep the fun bits personal. That’s the only standardization I’ll ever need.