Our talented designer Alice Gedge talks to us about her view on AI’s role in design, and the smart ways she uses it to enhance the work she does for our revvd customers.
“I find myself constantly exploring the ways AI can enhance our creative processes, while also acknowledging its limitations.
Alice Gedge, designer at revvd
In this blog, I share my insights into AI’s role in design and how I use it to enhance the way I work, as well as the work I create”.
Canva
Canva calls itself ‘the design tool for non-designers’, but even qualified designers like me find it useful alongside my other professional tools.
Canva has a lot of new AI features and more are rumoured to be on the way. These are mostly presented through Canva’s Magic Studio, which allows you to edit your own images with the powers of generative AI.
It also comes with tools that help with design for video and presentations, plus Magic Write, which rewrites copy in your brand’s tone of voice.
While the features sound promising, in practice they are hit-and-miss.
It’s well worth a look and Magic Studio will save you time on the odd task, but Canva needs to fine-tune its AI offering before these tools become something designers can rely on with confidence.
3 ways AI from Canva helps designers:
– Magic Studio for image editing: Magic Studio can help with automatic background removal, smart resizing and intelligent object detection. This can save you lots of time in the editing process, but it’s not always perfect!
– Magic Write for copywriting: Magic Write helps designers by producing placeholder copy in your brand’s tone of voice. This can save time and ensures consistency in language across different design assets, although I’m pretty sure your copywriter will want to take a look before the finished piece of work is published!
– Design assistance and templates: Canva uses AI algorithms to provide personalised design recommendations and suggestions based on user preferences and past design choices. This includes recommending templates, layout options, colour palettes and typography styles tailored to the specific needs of each designer. This speeds things up and helps keep your design work consistent across multiple users. It’s especially helpful if a non-designer is dabbling!
Logo generators
Brand creation is a huge part of my role as designer at revvd. We use a proven process that brings a lot of thought and reasoning into the brands we produce. Hours of careful consideration and creative thinking go into each brand, as well as feedback and direction from our customers.
If there’s an AI tool that can replace all of that human thought, I haven’t found it yet!
AI comes in handy in the brand creation process by sparking ideas and answering questions, like ‘what should I consider when creating brand guidelines?’ – Chat GPT is great for that.
Chat GPT
Chat GPT is the natural language model AI tool – the one that most people are likely to be familiar with.
It’s great for finding tutorials and alternative ways to do things. If I don’t know how to do something in an Adobe Creative Cloud app, Chat GPT is my ‘go-to’ place to find the answer.
3 ways AI from Chat GPT helps designers:
– Ideas: even the best of us suffer from the odd creative block. Chat GPT can help get ideas flowing when it comes to high-level design concepts, colour schemes and typography choices.
– Learning: ask questions about specific tools or techniques and receive detailed explanations. A great tip for Chat GPT is to use the prompt ‘make it simpler’ or ‘tell me in fewer words’.
– Problem-solving: if you’re facing technical challenges or seeking solutions to design problems, Chat GPT can provide step-by-step guidance or alternative methods for achieving desired effects in design software like Adobe Creative Suite.
Adobe Firefly
Adobe Firefly is a product of Adobe Creative Cloud. Boldy self-described as ‘your imagination’s new best friend’, Firefly helps to encourage creative thinking, and it simplifies creative workflows with generative AI.
3 ways AI from Firefly helps designers:
– Text to image: create images by typing a description – hours of fun to be had. You can even guide the style and structure with reference images, which I haven’t seen in any of the other AI tools.
– Generative fill: use a brush to remove objects or paint in new ones – big time saver.
– Text effects: apply styles or textures to words and phrases.
Firefly makes some of the Adobe Creative Cloud apps simpler to use, for example, you can now transform colours with a simple text prompt.
AI has been used to power features in Adobe’s Creative Cloud software for a while now, like object selection in Photoshop and image auto-enhancement in Lightroom.
In Photoshop, it comes in the form of generative fill. It lets you do cool things like replacing a selected area or a background, with AI doing the work.
Firefly is being expanded to Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Express, with a big focus on generating photo, video and audio to extend or modify designs.
Firefly can also be used as a standalone tool at firefly.adobe.com. It’s worth a look!
How I make AI work for me
AI enhances my understanding of the design tools I use, so I can use them to the best of my ability.
I can use it to answer questions, fuel my creativity, and to speed up certain tasks, but its current capabilities aren’t without limitations.
AI complements but does not replace the essence of human-driven design. I remain curious about AI’s role in design and look forward to seeing what comes next!
