AI usage as a Designer

One year was all about crypto, this year is all about AI. And it makes sense, as it’s a technology that is growing exponentially and applicable across numerous sectors and job profiles.

While some AI capabilities aren’t entirely new (Photoshop already did some functions that we can find now on the image AI tools, like expanding an image, and Lightroom already changed the skies in photos)we’re now experiencing an explosion of tools, capabilities, and services catering to diverse professional needs, such as in marketing roles, creativity, data, education, communication, etc.

Some people are still a bit cautious about using AI for their work. The problem is not so much as if we should use it but in defining for what is really useful and would help us. Even if a tool can make and take your job, somebody has to use it for it to bring the results.

But let’s be more specific.

How can AI help you in your work?

Text-Based AI Capabilities

Texts. Anything that it is based on the written word, AI can be really good at it (the LLM). Whether it be a need for research, to write a formal email, to help in a product strategy, with the right prompting AI will do a great job of rapidly putting ideas into words and crafting documents.

· Writing captions for social media

· Giving ideas on posts, articles and sources to explore (just to give a fast start, I wouldn’t rely only on what it will offer)

· Helping you craft a brand, product or business strategy. Spend a good amount of time refining the questions, Spend a good amount of time refining the questions, your needs, and all details to get better results and accurate answers. It won’t substitute your experience and intrinsic knowledge, but it surely helps in getting clarity about the most important points. (Remember not to share sensitive information unless you are very sure you are using an AI that won’t keep it and won’t use it in their own training)

· Translating texts

· Correcting and refining texts, emails and other communications.  Make sure to specify how much you’ll let it change the original text and which kind of text, tone, and voice you want it to use so as to keep it sounding like you wrote it and not be seen as a generic AI text. If you have used it, you’ll have noticed AI have a tendency to write in a certain way.

· Get inspiration for naming and any small text task that doesn’t need a lot of creativity

Visual Design Applications

Images and video. You can create many images in many styles and videos thanks to AI. It’s not so easy to find which tool and how to prompt them so you get the exact result you want but it’s not difficult to get something quite appealing or interesting. Here are a few ways to use it for graphic design.

· Create reference images

· Create graphics to use in you designs, from photorealistic images to vector style illustrations

· Animate your own photos

· Animate AI images

· Change the backgrounds of images

· Create inspiration images

For industrial design you can do all the above, from generating ideas in text to transform them into images and getting inspiration from the images developed by the AI model. But the best part is the collaborative effort. You make a sketch and you have AI render it in different ways following your prompts, create variations of it and there’s software that will even prepare a 3d file for you to download and keep refining.

Technical and Analytical Support

· Programming, processes and excels. You can ask for so much help in AI… I find it works very well in helping to program, you can ask for links and for excels and you can ask what you need to get to x. The possibilities are endless and depend very much on what you are trying to achieve.

AI may not be an oracle, but it’s surely a great place to bring in your questions and find answers – still, keep a critical and creative thinking in your toolbox, as they will make you work and your results much better. At the end of the day, this is just technology, and it’s thinking it’s not our thinking.

Pros and Cons of using in AI for your design work

From my point of view, the best part of AI is getting fast results of decent quality. Probably not super-high quality, probably it’s still much better to tweak it on your own, but you get something to work from very quickly. No more blank page syndrome.

The most common con is that the results may not be very accurate when working with image or video, or they will still need a good amount of work if you are looking for something very specific.

And to make the most out of it, you’ll have to choose your favorite tool and pay for it so you can really use all features. Most AI tools and models have a free tier, but for full functionality or to be able to work for long and elaborate results, or make them do harder tasks, it’s indispensable to pay.

I’m sure the functionalities will just grow so much more so faster… It was yesterday that you couldn’t scrape the internet for results and now you can, and you can create files and excels etc.

So, to sum it up:

So, which AI tools to use?

Any of these will have different characteristics and will serve you differently.

Some of the most popular AI for text are:

· ChatGPT

· Perplexity

· Claude

· Gemini

· etc.

For image creation you can play with:

· Adobe Firefly

· DALL-E

· Midjourney

· Krea

For specialised design for products:

· Vizcom

· NewArc

· Runway (video)

But the list is endless and you can find AI that will do anything for you, even music and videoclips.

Although as in any thing, you’ll have to dig a bit, learn the ropes of the application you want to use and practice to get the best results.

What is undeniable is that the results you can get will be very impressive, very fast. To come up with an idea and visualise it in such quality in just minutes is amazing.

AI is a new tool to empower human creativity, speed up processes and provide new opportunities.

Get to it by using your curiosity, critical thinking, and an open mind. The most successful professionals will be those who learn to collaborate effectively with these intelligent systems.

Are you ready to exploit all of its potential?

Start small, experiment continuously, and remember: technology evolves, but human creativity remains irreplaceable.

Now, go have some fun!

* I’ve created all the images on this post with different AI tools, the possibilities are endless.

January 12th, 2025

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