If you were or are still skeptical of generative artificial intelligence integrating into a designer’s creative process, you’re not alone! This new mega-trend is completely changing the way we think about getting work done. Yet, it’s not as daunting as it seems. For example, AI tools were already essential to our digital lives long before platforms like ChatGPT and Midjourney hit the market. AI has influenced our consumption habits and purchasing decisions for years via personalized product and content recommendations, support chats, and news feeds, so why not embrace it to further our creativity and innovation?
Let’s be honest: creative challenges can be intimidating. Whether you’re tasked with reimagining a familiar message or striving to convey a unique visual concept that defies conventional stock imagery, there are moments when words fail you, and your mind’s vision remains unexpressed. This is where the power of generative AI tools shines and can provide a wrecking ball to your creative block in minutes!
How can marketers start weaving AI into their creative process?
The journey can feel daunting as an individual learning to use these technologies for the first time. The prospect of harnessing their full potential, sidestepping potential pitfalls, and employing generative AI with sensitivity can feel like too complex and too big a battle to tackle. However, you can effectively unlock their creative possibilities and navigate this new terrain with the right guidance and approach and the right tools or partners.
Successful strategies for leveraging AI tools to spark new creative thinking
- Play into your strengths
You know your product and your brand best! No AI tool could replace your subject matter expertise on your specific product or service. Use that knowledge to provide a detailed creative brief, letting AI and designers build off that information. You can use this information to create an outline or a prompt for your AI tool to fill in the rest.Not sure where to start? Design Pickle recently added an AI ‘Request Assist’ tool. With this tool, you can draft a few sentences explaining your vision as a prompt for the AI, and ‘Request Assist’ will break the information down into more detailed and actionable items for your designers. You can add these directions to your creative brief before submitting it to your designer, supplementing with any other information you feel is pertinent.
- Leverage AI tools as a starting point
In today’s landscape, you can’t expect your generative AI outputs to be your final designs. AI shouldn’t (and can’t) replace a designer or a creative collaborator. However, we believe it is very valuable when it’s leveraged as as an enablement tool to help you create, enhance, and communicate your vision while saving time.Not only is it challenging to communicate a visual idea with words, it can be stressful for a designer to receive a request that isn’t clear. Both parties benefit from a little AI infusion in the process. A detailed brief requires time, but it will save you time in the long run because you’ll save countless revision rounds and games of telephone (not to mention, headaches).With Design Pickle’s new text-to-image generative AI tool on the platform, users can prompt the tool with words and quickly get 4 potential images back that could be added to a brief to give your designer a peek inside your vision. The tool, because it’s AI, delivers very literal results based on inputs, which can take some getting used to if you haven’t worked with prompting AI before. The good news is you can prompt the tool until you get results that work for you to attach to your brief. Plus, once you have a decent foundational image to run with, you can build more guiding parameters to help AI or your designer refine it, which can spark an idea for another set of directions! AI isn’t the solution to getting a final output necessarily (yet), but it is a fantastic springboard to get your vision going! - Be intentional and have a purpose in mind.
To use AI as a tool that adds value to your creative process, you need to start with an idea of what goal you are trying to achieve. Copyright infringement can be an issue for any finished product from these tools, so it is important to understand and define your reasoning for using them. As professionals in the creative space and as people who respect intellectual property rights, we think it’s acceptable to use generative AI as a source of inspiration and ideation, but the real magic is having a human take it to the finish line (otherwise, you could risk ethical and legal hot water).Begin your projects by outlining how generative AI can assist. Ask yourself how these tools can help ideate topics or a direction, help you develop different ideas if you’ve hit a roadblock, or suggest corrections and look for errors. By doing this, you can help jog designers’ creativity without replacing it or inadvertently taking ideas from other creators.Used correctly, AI can help you reach new heights and supply you with the tools you need to reach them more affordably, efficiently, and effectively than ever before. It can also be reassuring to know that we’ve been using AI for many years, so this is just another natural step in the process of its evolution. It is probably how you found some of your favorite new songs, movies, and… maybe even Design Pickle!
Book a demo to see some of our in-app AI tools that use generative AI in real time!
