Having just organised an AI-themed workshop here at Taiste, our UX Designer Janne Säde writes about using artificial intelligence as a tool for better and more effective design.
Artificial Intelligence is the digital simulation of human intelligence processes. With Artificial Intelligence we can effectively perform many tasks such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation. You might already use and benefit from AI unknowingly – are you familiar with personal assistant Siri, self-driving Tesla, or Face ID on your iPhone?
AI has the potential to transform many industries and improve our daily lives, but it also raises ethical concerns about issues such as privacy, bias, and job displacement. Is our work as designers on the line?
As designers, it’s crucial to stay up to date on emerging tools in our field. Due to the prevalence of AI tools, I recently organized an internal workshop focused on introducing our designers to different AI tools. Our task was to create a website – logo, layout, content and imagery – for a fictional company using only Artificial Intelligence. We started our work with Goodbrief.io to generate a unique design brief. The platform generates random design briefs based on given preferences.
Our goal was also to use AI to create images and content for the website, while also utilizing Figma to design the layouts based on the images generated by Midjourney. Midjourney is an AI art and image generator bot that operates on Discord. With Midjourney, you can create unique images by providing text descriptions, known as Prompts. It takes about a minute for Midjourney to generate four images based on your Prompts. The images created by Midjourney have a clear style that is strongly present, although using different prompts can result in significantly different outcomes. For the design brief, we used prompts based on the individual brief received by each member of the team. For example, one of the briefs was for a company that sells art supplies and has a main color of red. So, we used prompts like: “Stylish website for an art supply company, UI, UX, color red.”
To complement Midjourney, we also used Logomaster.ai to generate a logo for our fictional company and Fontjoy to find suitable font pairings for our text content.
For the text content, we utilized ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that can engage in conversations on almost any topic. We asked ChatGPT to generate a suitable slogan and values section for our fictional company’s website, and the results were impressive. ChatGPT was extremely helpful in quickly creating good textual content for our website. Many of us could see ourselves using it real life – and many already had. After our workshop, we reviewed each other’s work and discussed our experiences with the tools. Although most of us agreed that the tools were not great for doing the designer’s job for us, they were fantastic for fast brainstorming and generating visual ideas, with ChatGPT offering excellent support for the text content.
In the near future, AI tools will continue to improve and streamline our workflows, making them faster, smarter, and more efficient. With Midjourney and ChatGPT, we no longer have to rely on placeholder text examples or stock images on our designs. However, it is important to consider potential risks associated with AI tools, such as a lack of creativity and dependence on technology, which may lead to a loss of traditional design skills and expertise.
It’s important for us designers to balance the use of AI with their own expertise and creative vision, to ensure that the final designs are both innovative and effective. Our internal design workshop was a great opportunity to explore and have fun with AI tools while also considering their potential impact on the design industry. And who knows, maybe the next big thing is already waiting around the corner!
