Our Designers vs ChatGPT
Generative AI (GenAI) is possibly the greatest innovation of the 21st century, leading to massive improvements for efficiency and innovation in professions everywhere. Graphic design is no stranger to this new technology, and our designers have been hard at work figuring out how it could supplement their work and take it to new heights.
At Squarebird, we believe understanding what GenAI can do – and what its limits are – will lead to better workflows for our designers and better outputs for our clients. We gave ChatGPT and our design team a series of questions about how GenAI is changing graphic design, and in this blog we explore the similarities and differences in their responses!
Key advantages of GenAI for Graphic Design
1. Overcoming creative blocks
AI says:
“Generative AI helps designers overcome creative blocks by providing fresh, diverse design suggestions and inspiration. It offers new perspectives, generates unique ideas, and allows experimentation with styles, which can spark creativity and guide designers toward innovative solutions when they’re feeling stuck.”
Our designers:
“Creative block is something all designers experience during the creative process. Understanding this process can reveal why creative block happens, and how to overcome it.” – Dan Collings, Head of Design
The answer lies in stimulus. When experiencing creative block, the best thing to do is find new ways of observing your environment – or changing it entirely. You can accompany this with a focus on content relevant to the problem you’re trying to solve, which can increase your awareness and break through the block.
GenAI acts as a useful tool for gathering this focused content, but it isn’t a ‘golden egg’ – the prompts you provide are the greatest deciding factor in how effective it will be.
By offering various prompts, you’re made to think about the context surrounding your problem. This can include:
- Visualising a market
- Analysing the visuals and messaging of your competitors
- Finding related keywords and idioms (basically, acting as a thesaurus)
When done correctly, these prompts will generate outputs relevant to your task, enhancing your creative lateral thinking and providing both insight and justification into the methods of overcoming your block.
2. Speed
AI says:
“Generative AI accelerates design processes by generating instant outputs, automating tasks like image manipulation, and providing rapid access to design elements. This allows designers to quickly iterate on ideas, produce high-quality visuals in less time, and meet tight deadlines more efficiently.”
Our designers:
“Personally, the Generative Fill function in Photoshop has been a game changer – it makes it so much easier to edit images. It’s not perfect, but when it comes to things like removing or expanding backgrounds, or removing an object from an image, Generative Fill can produce an almost seamless result instantly.” – Rhiann Wiltshire, Graphic Designer and Artworker
As the AI also indicated, GenAI has had a huge impact on the speed of design – from improvements to image manipulation to a reduction in the tedious parts of design work that, until now, have been all too common.
Doing tasks manually would require a lot of time in photoshop – ensuring lighting remains consistent, making sure it isn’t obvious that the image has been edited, and actually creating the visuals themselves. Meanwhile, GenAI tools like Generative Fill can produce a better result in almost zero time, eliminating the headache and wasted time on what is ultimately simple image editing.
3. Effectiveness and Efficiency
AI says:
“Generative AI enhances design effectiveness and efficiency by automating tasks, providing data-driven insights, and offering tailored recommendations. It speeds up workflows, enables rapid prototyping, and refines visuals based on feedback, leading to high-quality, targeted designs that align with project goals and boost overall productivity.”
Our designers:
“Using AI in my work routine has become more important than I originally thought. I’ve used it in various ways across my projects, ranging from extending images with predictive generation to coming up with placeholder copy using ChatGPT.” – Stephen Harris, Graphic Designer
However, while AI has been very useful in speeding up projects, adding functionality, and even increasing the creative output of our graphic designers, it does come with a few glaring drawbacks.
Primarily, it can be frustrating to make AI understand the task you’re asking it to do – especially without proper training in AI prompt engineering. This can decrease the effectiveness of results and the efficiency of achieving them, often taking many attempts to get the desired outcome even when approaching it with different prompts.
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Applying GenAI to graphic design at scale
AI says:
“Generative AI should be used in graphic design for tasks like ideation, automation of repetitive work, rapid prototyping, and enhancing creativity. It complements human designers, handling time-consuming tasks, but shouldn’t replace them. The scale of usage should balance efficiency with human creativity to maintain originality and nuance.”
Our designers:
“When Generative AI was introduced into Photoshop, it expanded the way we can take on image manipulation. Its biggest strength and use for us as a website agency is the ability to expand images and fill in the gaps in a better way than content-aware fill.” – Hope Manning, Graphic Designer & Illustrator
GenAI is perfect for completing tedious tasks, aiding with ideas, and enhancing creative outputs. However, our designers have found that the ways it can be applied within graphic design aren’t as endless as they once seemed.
Factors like copyright issues, prompt engineering, and fictitious results all feed into the flaws that are prevalent throughout AI in its current form. We’ve all seen how bad it can be at guessing how many fingers a person is meant to have, or at continuity between one frame of a video and another.
Despite that, GenAI’s obvious strengths cannot be denied. For example, it can be used to expand images on Photoshop, filling in the blanks with generative fill to create a quality, full-size image. This means that once you finally find the perfect picture, only to discover it isn’t the right size, you can now edit it to match your needs.
Another great use is for background elements in displaying work. An example of this is in case study work, where supportive assets in the background are needed to fill in a space, but the time needed to make them can add in extra pressures and time that could be put towards more productive outputs.
Are graphic designers at risk?
AI says:
“Graphic designers aren’t at risk of being replaced by AI but must adapt. Generative AI handles routine tasks and offers creative support, but human creativity, intuition, and design thinking remain essential. Designers who integrate AI as a tool will thrive, enhancing their capabilities rather than being replaced.”
Our designers:
“Gen AI is without a doubt making waves in the world of graphic design. It can automate and replicate patterns, which is the backbone of great UX and UI design. This means that GenAI, at the hands of a designer who can prompt it well, will generate impactful digital designs at breakneck pace.” – Dan Collings, Head of Design
Despite the confidence of AI that GenAI won’t put graphic designers at risk, the reality isn’t quite so simple.
On the plus side, adopting GenAI as a tool for graphic designers to speed up their workflow leads to a more thoughtful and strategic process and result. It forces designers to think about their problem in detail ahead of time due to prompts for inspiration, creative direction, design variants, and visual identities. Graphic designers that follow this process become better at their role, developing their proactive critical thinking and ability to think on and around their task.
On the other hand, graphic designers could risk becoming obsolete if they:
- Only perform pattern-based tasks which don’t require much strategic thinking.
- Are style-cast and struggle to innovate.
- Are late to adopting a GenAI workflow.
The reason behind this boils down to speed, quality, and cost. GenAI will decrease the average project duration, leading to a situation where old-school design is longer, more expensive, and eventually priced out of the market.
In reality, the ones most at risk from GenAI are the clients themselves. Overreliance on this technology and cutting out graphic designers would lead to a loss of creativity and soul, generating designs that don’t resonate with the audience. So the best way forwards for us all is a world where graphic designers and GenAI work together to achieve the greatest results.
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How to effectively utilise GenAI for graphic design
AI says:
“To effectively utilise GenAI for graphic design, integrate it as a creative partner for brainstorming, automating repetitive tasks, and speeding up workflows. Use it to generate ideas, explore design variations, and refine concepts, while keeping the human touch for final decisions, originality, and emotional impact.”
Our designers:
“One of my favourite – and perhaps less obvious – ways to use AI when I’m designing is for copy generation. Designers don’t typically write copy, and up until now if we didn’t have copy for a website or brochure we’d use ‘lorem ipsum’ placeholder text. Now, ChatGPT can easily generate relevant placeholder copy for our clients.” – Rhiann Wiltshire, Graphic Designer and Artworker
While what AI says is true, and GenAI does play a role in enhancing the design process itself, the main way that designers can see value is by using it as a tool to aid them with tedious tasks or fulfilling roles they can’t themselves.
With text generation, this is important as it can massively change the impression a client has of a design. It contextualises the visuals, making them feel more real and understandable. Not everyone has a keen eye for visuals, so providing this context is crucial to providing a well-rounded design that lets clients envision the final product. This has the added bonus of providing insight for the final copy as well, allowing clients to pick bits they like and tailor the direction of the written words.
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Bespoke graphic design for your brand and website from Squarebird
GenAI boosts the speed, efficiency, and effectiveness of graphic design, helping designers to overcome their creative blocks and produce results that incorporate the full scope of the client’s needs and the market climate. Without graphic designers to tailor and utilise GenAI, however, the results will never reach the standards you’re looking for.
At Squarebird, our in-house design team is made up of talented creatives with a keen eye for the details, and a firm knowledge of the abilities and limitations of GenAI. The best graphic design will always from attentive professionals with extensive experience in the field… which is exactly what we deliver. Get in touch today!
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