The AI Wave in Graphic Design: Shaping the Future of Creativity

Designers have been co-creating with AI for a long time. The recent AI wave, riding on the coattails of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, has made it look as though it’s some scary new technology that we should all be afraid of.

The truth is that AI features — content-aware fill and font matching, for example — have been a part of Adobe’s Illustrator and Photoshop programs since 2016. They’ve augmented designers’ work for years and there’s no need to be wary of them now.

In this article, I will be sharing my personal observations of co-creating with AI in the past few months. The journey has had many pitfalls but there are upsides to what I’ve been able to create.

From AI-powered logo designs to social media post-generation tools, I’ve experimented with AI firsthand, and here’s why I think it’s going to be a huge assistive tool in the future for designers.

AI as a Graphic Design Tool

To get the most out of AI design tools, you have to go to it with a collaborative mindset. One of the reasons why I think AI will not replace graphic designers, not at least the good ones, is because AI is severely limited in original creative thought.

And therefore, its capabilities shine when you ask it to assist you — instead of giving it the sole creative control of the project.

These are the areas where I think AI technologies can do some great work for design.

● Generating design ideas

You can seriously cut down on your research hours when you use AI design tools for research. Dall-E is a great place to go to, to kind of explore what’s in your mind.

Through text prompts, you can ask this generative AI program to create unique imagery for you. These graphics can help you fine-tune your ideas, and even introduce you to new creative pathways to explore.

● Personalization

AI can be used to create personalized designs. Using AI to learn consumers’ behaviors and engagement patterns, dynamic content can be created that adjusts itself to what a user is looking for and what they are most likely to respond to.

● Design Automation

Certain tasks in brand building can be automated, such as ensuring typographic consistency across branding assets. AI-generated logos are another example of design automation with the help of AI tools.

● Data-driven creative variations

Designers usually create principal variations of design pieces to ensure design responsiveness across platforms. This task can be automated, sure, but you can go a step further by using AI to help inform what kind of variations you’ll need.

● Designing at scale and speed

Brand designs are sometimes time-sensitive. By cutting down the design time in half, AI can ensure that all your designs go online on time and that they are designed according to the scale of the brand.

The Impact of AI on Graphic Design

While AI was already a big part of graphic design in some ways — AI-assisted image editing, for example — the current integration has taken the relationship to a whole new level.

Here are some perks and challenges that outline this collaboration.

Upsides:

●       Resource efficiency: AI-powered graphic design tools save time, money, and other resources. So if you are looking for more efficient ways of using scarce design resources, AI is your new best friend.

●       Designing at a better speed: You can increase your work speed by assigning some work to your AI partner. Generative AI, premade templates, and AI-powered design tools can all come together to help you get your deliverables ready in time.

●       Less creative roadblocks: If you feel stuck with a design, use AI design databases to find inspiration. These resources help you keep on track and generally aid creativity.

●       Optimized visual content: AI’s predictive analysis and machine learning algorithms can help you optimize your visual content based on user metrics. Optimized content means visuals that convert.

●       Automation of repetitive tasks: Use AI to do your text translations or apply a certain filter or theme across all your content. Automation not only means convenience but also consistency.

Challenges:

●       No original thought: AI isn’t magic tech; it doesn’t create something out of nothing. It just studies past designs, learns from their patterns, and makes something similar to it. So when your client needs original ideas, it’s your very human creativity that’ll count.

●       Homogenization of ideas: Expanding upon the previous point, with no original thought and idea, what AI creates are variations of the same thing. So expect to find a lot of similarities across AI design.

●       Lack of nuances and empathy: AI isn’t nuanced. You can teach it design empathy but the task falls to a human designer. To add a unique human touch to the design, you’ll need human intelligence to do that.

●       Technology management: AI keeps evolving and expanding. To ensure it keeps aligned with your creative goals, you’ll need to keep a close check on it, always managing and fixing its parameters and standards.

●       A balance between human input and machine assistance: How much should you rely on machine assistance when creating client work? Striking the right balance will need learning and experience.

The Future of Graphic Design is Augmented Intelligence

When we consider the future of graphic design in the context of AI, the correct term I’ve come across is augmented intelligence. It’s the intersection where human and machine creativity combine to serve the larger purpose of efficient design systems.

● Accessibility of design

Thanks to AI-powered graphic design tools, brands big and small can now take part in brand activations and startup launches on a more level playing field.

These tools make it easy for good logo designs, website designs, and merchandise designs to become more accessible to the SMBs. whether you are looking to create social media posts or want to design ad campaigns from scratch, AI-powered graphic design tools allow you to use premade design templates for a variety of marketing and branding needs.

At a fraction of the cost and slashing the design time in half, these tools represent more agile ways for brands to launch and promote their offers.

● Dynamic content

Design was always supposed to be dynamic — created specifically to suit different users’ behaviors and preferences.

Advancements in AI technologies have made it possible now.

Proactive brands can harness the creative power of AI to generate multiple variations of every single graphic design piece for the brand. With differences in color, imagery, text, and other features, each variation can be used to create dynamic ad creatives (based on users’ location, past interactions with the brand, and behavior), personalized banners, and more refined product recommendations.

All of this can happen in real time, providing an enhanced brand experience for the user.

● AI ethics

So far, there are a lot of blurred lines when it comes to AI-made graphic design. Brands, in most cases, aren’t coming forward to declare a design AI-made, unless they need to do that for marketing purposes. Example: Nutella’s jar labels.

But it will change. As the AI culture permeates deeper, brands will feel more comfortable accepting their AI graphics.

Similarly, designers will do their part in helping AI engineers create ethical algorithms free of bias, prejudice, and misinformation.

● Emphasizing AI comfort in design hiring

In the future, companies and brands will want people on their teams who are comfortable working with AI. Designers who have created efficient workflows where AI plays a critical role are going to be in high demand.

These designers will help write the rules of the game, per se. We’ll look to them to test AI’s creative capabilities, charter ethics of working with AI technologies, and innovate ways where AI becomes the foundation of responsive design systems.

● Data-powered design decisions

AI’s main power lies in analyzing massive amounts of datasets. These analyses will be used to share insights into which design pieces are more popular with the users, what part of the design is receiving the most engagement, and why one design piece is performing better than the other.

Based on these insights, designers can run prompts to create more user-friendly and user-centric designs, with a higher potential for engagement and brand connection.

When design decisions are based on what the data says, not a lot of room remains for mistakes. A/B testing becomes stronger and gives more accurate results.

● Rapid artwork localization

We talked about dynamic content. As it becomes more commonplace, brand collaterals can enjoy rapid localization so visuals are more contextual and cultural. You can create variations of your brand merchandise that will be customized to different user segments, ensuring you are giving each one something that they’ll most likely enjoy and connect with.

Netflix is already doing that with personalized artwork for its shows. Based on your behavior patterns, engagement with certain genres and themes, and your interests, etc., Netflix gives you title artworks that you will most likely click on and watch.

Nutella did something similar when it used AI to create seven million jar labels — each one different and unique from the other. The jars sold out in a month.

● The evolved role of the designer

With more widespread AI acceptability, a new role for graphic designers will emerge — from creators to curators.

Instead of having a creative role in the team, designers will assume leadership of the design process. While AI does the grunt work, designers will have the executive power to make final decisions. They will approve, reject, or modify what AI tools create and even green-light brand design systems for AI to work on.

Conclusion

AI and graphic design have a promising future together. But for that to become a reality, designers have to remain proactive and in control. By taking charge of the narrative and continuously learning and evolving, designers can use AI to harness their creativity and improve user experience with the design.

Through dynamic content, accessibility, and real-time personalization, AI can make the future of graphic design all about custom experiences.