You can't automate a reputation — A framework for getting known
James Martin on building a recognizable reputation: his DEEDS model, the six principles of opportunity design, where AI helps and where it doesn't.
James Martin has twenty-plus years of brand work, two bestselling books, and a seat on Canva's Design Advisory Board. We caught his live Q&A at the Brand Builders Summit (hosted by Jacob Cass) and it turned out to be the best argument we've heard all year for why the AI-sameness problem isn't really a tool problem.
"Brand" is the wrong word and it's costing you
I could ask 10 agency owners from around the world what brand is, and they would all give me a different answer
None of them wrong, all of them different. Which makes "brand" a useless word to build a client conversation on.
His replacement: a recognisable reputation. He was careful to credit the phrase to his friend Kevin Finn, who landed on it first, and said they've developed the idea together since.
The reframe does real work. Everybody already understands reputation. Everybody knows what a good one looks like and how someone earns a bad one. And reputation is built from behaviour, which is something a small business can actually control, unlike the vague aspiration of "having a brand".
The DEEDS model
Someone in the audience asked what behaviour a small business should make consistent first. Martin's answer was a five-step model he calls DEEDS, and it's the spine of the whole talk:
D — Decide what you want to be known for. Not a niche exactly, but a thing. You can't have a reputation for nothing in particular.
This sounds obvious and almost nobody does it. In HubSpot's State of Marketing 2026, 40% of teams still haven't clearly defined or documented their brand's unique value proposition.
E — Educate yourself in alignment with becoming that person. Learn what you need to learn to actually be the thing you decided on. He was blunt that this never ends.
E — Evidence the journey. Case studies, work, testimonials. Proof that you're becoming the thing, accumulated over time.
Semrush's 2026 data found that what earns you visibility sits off-domain, in third-party sources. Testimonials, case studies and other people's write-ups aren't nice-to-haves. They're the only version of your reputation a machine can read.
D — Demonstrate the proof. This is the marketing step, and his framing of it is precise: not everyone will see all your evidence, so you have to package it and put it in front of the right people. Content, networking, online, offline, whatever gets it seen.
S — Stay in the game long enough for it to compound. The one he says everyone skips. He said nobody knew who he was for roughly fifteen years. It was small, it was under the hood, and he kept going. People give up early, decide it isn't working, and the honest diagnosis is usually that it just hasn't been done enough yet.
The DEEDS framework
A five-minute exercise you should do today
Before the conversation properly started, Martin gave away an exercise he credits to his friend Lucy Werner.
Open a private browser window. Type your name plus what you do. Not just your name: "James Martin brand designer."
Then look at what comes back.
He's run this with a lot of people and the reactions are reliably grim. A podcast from five years ago, a photo from a beard you no longer have, work you'd never show a client now. The point isn't vanity, it's that when someone hears about you and goes looking, this is the reputation they find, assembled without your input.
His extra step: change your location. Use a VPN and set it to where your target clients actually are, because the results and the competitors will be different. If your buyers are in the US and you're checking from the UK, you're auditing the wrong search.
💡 We think this exercise needs a 2026 upgrade. Google is no longer the only place people check you out. Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google's AI Mode who you are and what you do, and read what comes back.
As Jordan Jewell of IDC put it in Semrush's AI Visibility Index: most brands are invisible in AI-generated answers entirely, and the ones that do appear often show up wrong: mispositioned, conflated with a competitor, stripped of context. LLMs build a picture from everything the internet says about you, not just from what you publish.
Your reputation is being assembled by other people. The only question is whether you've given them anything to assemble it from (we wrote about this in Your brand is what YouTube says it is).
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Six principles, one purpose
Martin listed six things he's done consistently, and noticed in people he admires, designers or not:
- Trusted difference
- Unexpected novelty
- Visible effort
- Obsessive craft (see A designer's guide to composition in the age of AI)
- Team player
- Predictable generosity.
Compound those, and opportunity compounds too.
That's a clear description of branding. Every signal you build: the craft, generosity, and visible effort, exists to remove friction between someone and the decision to pay you. A brand's job is to make money. Everything else is downstream.
The three circles framework
The other framework worth stealing is how he manages relationships, which he half-jokingly called a friendship framework. Three concentric circles:
Existing relationships: people who've paid you before. Most creatives finish a job and never speak to that person again, then wait to be remembered. Martin picks a small group and stays deliberately in touch. These are today's opportunities.
Strategic relationships: perhaps three people, chosen on purpose, in a direction you want to grow. You get into their ecosystem, engage with their work, send them things that are useful. These are next year's opportunities.
Aspirational: one person you'll probably never reach. His is Brené Brown. The work here isn't asking for anything; it's becoming someone worth her time.
You can design the environment for more opportunity to land.
The rule across all three: you're not asking, you're being useful first. Opportunity happens when people collide and talk, and he's simply been more intentional about creating collisions than most people are.
If you want to work with people in the hotel industry, don't go and speak to a load of designers. Go and speak to people who own hotels.
James Martin and Jacob Cass in the Brand Builders Summit.
Where does AI actually fit
Nothing in DEEDS gets automated:
- Deciding what you want to be known for is a judgement call
- Educating yourself is time
- Evidencing the journey means doing real work for real clients
- Staying in the game is patience.
There's no tool for any of that, and anyone selling you one is selling you something else.
But you can use AI tools to demonstrate the proof.
It is a production problem: you have evidence, and you need to package it into proof that reaches the right people, repeatedly, for years.
That's where most solo designers and small studios stall. Packaging proof means a case study video, portfolio piece, carousel images, a reel, a mockup — over and over, on top of the client work that pays.
This is the part we work on at Artificial Studio: video, image, audio and 3D generation with AI in one place, so that turning finished work into visible proof doesn't compete with doing the work.
And because the whole point is being recognisable rather than generic, you can feed the model your own references and visual system instead of inheriting whatever house style a tool ships with. The decision about what you stand for stays yours.
What a freelance designer should prioritise?
Consistent visuals, a distinctive personality, or a clear niche?
Build a reputation around what's genuinely natural to you: whether you're kind, organised, funny, whatever is easy for you to repeat. Because you'll be repeating it for a very long time.
I don't think people should be products. I think that's a very dangerous journey. Humans evolve and humans change. And the problem is brands, if they change all the time, break
Try it yourself
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