Design is the ever-changing landscape that, as designers, we have to embrace whilst still keeping our creative principles. Obviously, to a non-designer this all sounds ridiculous and quite pompous.
With a little bit of jargon thrown in you would be entitled to think that I’m a bit of an arrogant designer.
Fortunately, I am not. I’m just an average designer trying to create in an evolving world. The worry though is that we will get left behind; AI will take over and our jobs be redundant. The fact though is that designers will be needed whether simplistically tweaking designs by AI and using it to support us or directing AI in the way that we need it to.
AI has been used for decades though, from the spellcheck on your Word doc with that little paperclip telling you how to spell ‘onomatopoeia’ or Publisher telling you how to reconstruct a paragraph. Anyway, I digress.
‘Adobe Create Now’
Recently I attended the ‘Adobe Create Now event’ in Leeds, an opportunity for designers, creatives and people that love seeing into the future, in a non-dystopian, Star Trek sci-fi way. The basis was to see how we could use Adobe alongside AI to support us in tasks that for some reason take far longer than they need to.
Quite frankly it was incredible. The use of Adobe Firefly across Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign and the new member of the family, Adobe Express, really opened my eyes.
The event was hosted by the superb Kladi – she took us through the creative ideas using Illustrator. Using Firefly to create mock-ups of cups and any stationary then adding a vector logo to it using the ‘Preview Mock-up’ tool. It creates a situation where we as a design team can produce assets to go into decks, produce assets to showcase opportunities for clients, and create whole new brand propositions within the matter of minutes without using the stamp tool in photoshop, adding weird bits of colour and then warping the logo. This gives us a seamless effect.
We can then work with this in Photoshop to tidy it up and tweak it to make it even more realistic. The truth is we’ve already started; we can take our AI into Photoshop, we can take a bus with branding on it, give the us the Generate button to remove large sections of branding, it then means as a business we are able to really give our clients an idea of the creative ideas Hatch can produce for them and what we can bring to the table when pitching. The ease of putting branding on a bus for example to invigorate the imagination and bring to life the ideas we have and express them through imagery in the client’s mind is incredible.
Obviously social is a massive part of what we do as a business. The daily effort put in by us is testament to this, and the ways we can speed this up whilst keeping the quality was always key too. With Adobe Express this will give us the opportunity to once again delve into a world beyond Canva and build a bridge between the Creative Suite and engaging social assets for our clients. But to be honest, there is so much in this – I feel like this could be part 1 of a 2 stage blog.
So, I’ll speak to the powers that be and fingers crossed you’ll get another one next month to further enforce the powers of design at the edge of our fingertips using AI!
Keep an eye out for a coffee-addicted designer around Leeds Armouries and let’s just have a chat. Mine’s a flat white.
Get in touch at hello@hatch.group to chat more!
