The New Age of Design
With the emergence of AI in the design industry, designers are searching for new ways to serve their customers.
On the one hand, it initially appears to be a threat to their livelihood - many skills that take dozens of hours to perfect such as photo-shopping image changes and generating new graphics are handled instantly by the new technology.
However on the other, and especially looking across the field at content writers - many designers are adopting AI as a cost-effective solution that can allow them to focus on what they do best - creativity and innovation - and spend less time on the banal, mundane tasks that aren't fun, but pay the bills.
Designers can also use AI as a design assistant to generate ideas and concepts for their projects. It is also used by many companies as a way to automate repetitive tasks like generating colour schemes or coming up with new logos. With this insight, designers are now using AI to improve their skills, create new designs and bring value to the design process.
As the internet found out in a storm of coverage, AI is not just a tool for generating text anymore - it can also be used to generate images. These AI-generated images can be used in many different ways such as background images, logos, illustrations, etc.
Behind this advancement sits the breakthrough in generation caused by computational structures known as Diffusion Models. Diffusion Models are generative models which have been gaining significant popularity in the past several years, and for good reason. A collection of research papers in the 2020s alone have demonstrated to the that this technology is now the kingpin of image synthesis, beating even Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) of Deep Fake fame.
Most recently, practitioners will have seen Diffusion Models used in DALL-E, OpenAI’s famous image generation model, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, the model behind Depyct.
As this technology is a recent development and has not yet seen wider adoption within design teams, the time savings it can afford to designers - and cost savings it can provide to design customers - ensure that this will be a space to watch in the coming years.
