How using AI for design can optimize your workflow and provide results

Many aspects of life have been affected by AI technology and most of them are accessible, engaging, and efficient. Let's take a look at how Imarc's Creative team is utilizing AI in our daily workflows, the tools we're using, and what we're hoping for in the future of AI for design.

Considerations

Before we dive into how AI is a great addition to any designer or client workflow, let's first discuss a couple of common barriers that you may face when using it.

1. The learning curve: AI design tools rely on commands and prompts to deliver what the user really needs from them. Remember to be as descriptive as possible and to provide details that will ensure the AI understands your needs to the best of its ability. Trial and error is necessary to get the right results. Nothing is automatic or immediate when creating impactful work. Don't be afraid to take the leap and get started by experimenting and exploring the capabilities and limitations of these new tools! One revolutionary aspect of AI is that anyone can utilize the tools to explore their creative visions despite having limited technical ability, which may have previously been a barrier.
   
   
2. Psychological fear: "Is AI replacing my job?" Designs will always need a human touch and strong strategic intention to be successful, so don't be concerned that technology will take over your job. Adding it to your design workflow will encourage you to spend more time being creative and less time on tedious and menial tasks often associated with modern design.

A blank page can be intimidating, but with AI, you can use retainer and project design hours for creative exploration and design thinking instead of monotonous, time-consuming tasks. The single choice to use it means that your campaigns will get further, faster, and be much more innovative!

That's why we fully endorse learning how you can best use it while retaining visionary creative autonomy.

Learning to integrate AI into our workflows

Our clients trust us to bring our full brain and skillsets on our journey to phenomenal and thoughtful work – no shortcuts. We embrace that and intend to keep doing just that.

However, we are excited to have access to powerful systems and models where our ideas can be enhanced and visualized in ways previously unavailable to us. Ones that can help our creative efforts more efficiently.

With AI in its infancy, the results generated by it are never at a quality level that we would simply take and utilize them unaltered. Instead, we have decided that the best use of this technology is to get our own creative minds warmed up and limber.

Note: We've drafted an internal playbook with tips, tools, best practices, and values we hope to maintain. We explore them in depth in this blog.

Tools we use

Chat-based AI systems

Chat-based AI systems, although not visual design tools have been extremely helpful in allowing designers to be thoughtful around microcopy as well as replacing placeholder text like lorem ipsum within design compositions.

Asking the right questions and using a novel process with these conversational systems has allowed creatives to have a sounding board. We use it for things like vision statements, replacing a thesaurus for finding just the right words and tone, and even for ideating on brand and product naming.

When we leverage AI as another member of the team, we allow everyone else to stay focused while still picking the proverbial hive-mind of AI in a collaborative and original way.

AI in Adobe

Designers are already familiar with AI tools within Adobe products that have been quietly doing the dirty work in the background for some time. Photoshop's neural filters have allowed us to fix awkward smiles, smooth skin, color-correct difficult photos, and even transfer styles from one image to another.

Within Photoshop's new beta release, using their generative AI tool, we can even select areas of images and provide the changes or additions we'd like to see. (e.g. 'Change this man's tie to blue' or 'Add a laptop to this table').

It has saved countless hours by "uncropping" images and creating realistic extensions of images that give designs more wiggle room. Unlike many recent arrivals to the generative art field, Adobe has taken steps to ensure that their models have been trained on their own stock library to avoid any unwanted copyright issues and are available for commercial use. This allows us to work with added peace of mind and respect for artists and photographers who are contributing to the bigger picture.

If you look at Adobe's stock website, they have added new licensing and purchasing options for AI-generated images.

Midjourney

Last, but certainly not least is Midjourney.

While this tool likely needs no introduction, the way our team has been utilizing it differs slightly from a standard approach. As we mentioned, the idea of generating completely fabricated scenes, characters, art, or designs isn't something that is always reliable. When we're creating work within the Adobe suite from scratch, we have the necessary layers, history, smart objects, and ultimate control over the final product. This need alone makes generating final work with Midjourney extremely far-fetched, particularly in a world where client approvals and the requirement to align with branding or stylistic goals are crucial.

Therefore, we find that Midjourney is best utilized for ideation, mood boarding, and generating smaller elements that can be utilized within our more comprehensive software to complement stock or digital compositions.

Note: Midjourney is just one of our creative and collaboration tools. View our others here.

One of the best parts about starting a new project is browsing for inspiration and seeing what others are producing. Historically this has been a double-edged sword.

As the saying goes, "Good artists copy, great artists steal." However, we're not making art most days, as design is driven by strategy, business requirements, our own intuition, and experience. Good designers don't generally enjoy tarnishing our clean mental canvas with excessive visual noise that we might accidentally end up mimicking within our own output.

Similarly, when you have a rough vision of a desired outcome and search for existing lookalikes to quickly exhibit your idea, more often than not you can come up empty-handed.

Not only that but even if you're lucky enough to find just the right specimen, you run the risk of being discouraged prematurely if you come across something a bit too similar. Now that generative AI can help us visualize these early ideas without looking too much at our peers, our ideas can remain our own for a bit longer, and we can have a little guided back and forth with the system to push our own limits comfortably.

Working on moodboards and early concepts in this way saves us a lot of critical time early on, allowing the bulk of our time to be spent improving and refining new ideas and thoughtful original work for our clients.

Lastly, another helpful and often overlooked Midjourney feature is the ability to provide a source image and have the AI "describe" what it sees. Finding the right words to describe something is an under-appreciated skill that even the most experienced designers can struggle with. Seeing how Midjourney is describing something is helpful for generating similar concepts or even naming graphic styles we may not be familiar with. This in turn helps us as designers explore styles further on other platforms.

These tools have served our Creative team well in our continued efforts to deliver the best possible work for our clients, but we're sure that we'll be adding more to our toolkit in no time.

An evolving tool

AI is a constantly evolving technology and it's important to remember the benefits outweigh the risks. If you're hesitant and don't know where to begin, start small and work your way up to more advanced AI technology.

Embracing AI as another tool can help you with your project and will free up creative individuals to think bigger and more strategically to deliver even better results than you're used to. Our hope for the future of AI is that we leverage it appropriately to provide even more value to our clients.

Are you interested in integrating AI into a current or future creative project? Let's talk.