Design

Designers have always sought ways to marry creativity with efficiency. Historically, designers have relied on intuition, experience, and a keen sense of aesthetics. However, times have changed. Technology now offers tools that can reshape and augment the design process in groundbreaking ways.

This is where we learn about generative AI and automation: two advancements that promise to revolutionize how designers operate. These two solutions fuse traditional design tenets and digital power. In this article, we look at ways to use generative AI and automation to streamline the design process.

What are Generative AI and Automation?

Looking at generative AI and automation examples will show a promising future of boundless creativity backed by precise, efficient execution. But what exactly are these concepts, and how do they function? Before going through any automation or generative AI tools list, we must know what these concepts are.

Generative AI is a branch of artificial intelligence that stretches beyond automated data analysis and pattern recognition. Instead of just processing and making sense of data, it creates written, graphic, or video content using natural language processing, algorithms, neural networks, and machine learning techniques.

Generative AI has become more popular over the past few months. A reported 45% of US users now use generative AI.

Contrasting the inventive capabilities of Generative AI, automation uses technology to perform recurring tasks without human intervention. In design, this translates to an array of applications. These include generating designs, integrating design elements, auto-formatting layouts, or organizing design assets. 

Automation alleviates the repetitive burdens and allows designers to focus on their work's more creative and nuanced facets. That way, you can get more design work done with less effort. Designers take this opportunity to experience more work-life balance or increase their design capacities to earn more by taking on more design projects.

Why You Should Use Generative AI and Automation in Design Processes

Designers and businesses must adapt and innovate to stay relevant in today’s changing times. Generative AI and automation emerge as essential tools that redefine the design paradigm. 

Here's why incorporating Generative AI tools into your design processes is vital:

• Efficiency — Your workflows greatly accelerate when automation shoulders repetitive tasks and Generative AI swiftly produces diverse design options. Consequently, you have faster project turnarounds, churning out designs within minutes. AI and automation enable designers to tackle more projects or dedicate extra time to refining their work.

• Innovation —  Relying on these synthesized designs alone might not enable innovation, but using it as a springboard helps immensely. Generative AI stretches the imagination, acting as an augmented intelligence to improve your designs even more. Synthesizing unique designs with AI can help ensure your designs stand out in a saturated market.

• Consistency — Automation can act as your guardian of consistency. Automation ensures the design language remains unwavering for tasks that demand uniformity, like branding elements across different platforms. Meanwhile, Generative AI provides a consistent stream of fresh ideas based on set parameters.

• Scalability — If a startup needs a handful of designs or a conglomerate requires thousands, Generative AI scales its output based on demand. Coupled with automation, it allows businesses to expand their design ventures without proportionally increasing the workload.

• Personalization — We now live in an era where personalization drives customer engagement. This is where Generative AI shines. This solution can tailor designs to individual preferences, creating bespoke experiences that captivate and retain user attention.

• Cost Efficiency — Automation and Generative AI can lead to significant cost savings by streamlining processes and reducing manual intervention. Design teams can now focus on strategic, high-value tasks, ensuring better resource allocation.

How to Use Generative AI to Simplify Design Processes

Here's a deep dive into five ways Generative AI can simplify and elevate design processes:

1. Rapid Prototyping

Generative AI accelerates the initial design stages by creating multiple prototypes based on defined parameters. Instead of starting from scratch, designers can have a foundational layout or visual scheme. This drastically speeds up your design process and helps improve your design quality. Generative AI saves time and can lead to discovering unexpected design avenues.

2. Adaptive Design Evolution

The best generative AI automation tools can adapt and refine designs in real-time by analyzing user feedback and engagement metrics. This iterative process ensures that designs are not static but evolve based on user interactions and preferences. Think of it as having a design that's alive, learning, and adapting to provide the best user experience possible.

3. Trend Forecasting

Designers can train Generative AI to scour the web and analyze prevailing design trends across various platforms. AI can use this data to anticipate emerging styles or motifs, ensuring your designs remain ahead of the curve. This proactive approach keeps brands relevant and resonant in a rapidly changing design landscape.

4. Personalized User Experiences

Generative AI excels in crafting designs tailored to individual user profiles. Analyzing user behavior, preferences, and past interactions can generate design elements or layouts that speak directly to the user, creating a unique and immersive experience bound to increase engagement and brand loyalty.

5. Visual Content Generation

Generative AI can produce content like banners, graphics, or even animations. Today, 52% of business leaders use generative AI tools like ChatGPT to produce content. Imagine having a tool that designs a banner for a campaign and suggests the graphics, taglines, and animations to use. By streamlining content creation, designers can focus on fine-tuning and strategy, ensuring a cohesive and compelling final product.

How to Use Automation to Simplify Design Processes

Aside from generative AI, you can use automation to simplify design work. Here are several ways automation can drastically simplify design processes:

1. Repetitive Task Elimination

Tasks like resizing images for various platforms, applying specific filters, or even batch-processing files can consume significant time. Automation tools can handle these repetitive chores seamlessly. By automating such tasks, designers can focus on more nuanced, creative aspects, ensuring efficiency without compromising quality.

2. Asset Organization

A well-structured design library can be the difference between a smooth workflow and chaotic inefficiency. Automation can categorize, tag, and organize design assets. This system simplifies file retrieval and ensures consistent asset usage across different projects.

3. Feedback Collection and Implementation

Design often involves multiple iterations based on stakeholder feedback. Automation tools can streamline this feedback loop, collecting comments, tracking changes, and implementing simple revisions. This systematic approach reduces the chances of oversight and ensures that every piece of feedback is addressed.

4. Design Testing

Ensuring designs are universally responsive across various devices and resolutions can be challenging. Accordingly, you can use automation to test how designs render on different screens and spot any potential issues or inconsistencies. Proactively testing in this manner ensures designs are adaptive and versatile.

5. Version Control

Tracking the various versions of a design becomes pivotal, especially in collaborative environments. Automated version control systems help document changes, archive previous versions, and highlight differences between iterations. This simplifies the revision process and provides a safety net. That way, designers can revert or merge different versions with confidence.

Navigating the Future of Design with AI and Automation

We’re in a time where creativity meshes intuition with technology. Online computer science degrees will change as generative AI and automation stand out as powerful allies in this journey.

Designers and businesses alike can confidently navigate the complex waters of the modern design landscape. As we stand at this intersection of art and technology, it becomes clear that the future of design isn't just about creating. it's also about innovating, adapting, and constantly evolving. Embracing these tools today prepares us for the design challenges of tomorrow.

Introducing the newest feature in Sivi AI - seamless switching between light and dark themes!

Whether you're a night owl burning the midnight oil or a daydreamer chasing the sun's rays, Sivi AI effortlessly adapts to your preferences, adding a touch of style to your AI experience.

Here's how you can effortlessly switch between the themes.

We hope you love this exciting update as much as we do!

I am Tejaswini and I am the co-founder of an experiential travel company called Unventured Expeditions. My background is mostly in Advertising and Marketing. As a founder of a young start-up that has seen the highs and lows of the many seasons of the pandemic, it's fair to say our growth graph has been a roller coaster ride and one filled with many lessons. Indulge me while I briefly take a philosophical turn, it's when you hit rock bottom you either stay there or grapple in every which way to get back up. 

Having chosen to claw our way up, finding sustainable means of marketing our niche experiential offerings which are guided walking and cycling tours became our priority in mid-2021, with bare minimum staff and the many variants still looming over us, “revenge travel” was beginning to pave the way, we could just about sustain operational staff and had to restart our marketing campaigns to reach our audience. With COVID-specific protocols, multi-destination restrictions, having copy that kept to our brand language and replicated our compassionate yet assertive communication needed a copywriter and a design team to churn out Instagram posts, LinkedIn articles, and guest posts on various travel blogs. 

We were using Canva but copy and diversity of use became a challenge and not to mention the overwhelm of a blank page. Generative design was our need of the hour, multiple outputs with minimal tweaks and multi-platform adaptability were what we were wishing for. I’ve always been curious about design tech and one such procrastinating google search for AI generated design platform I stumbled upon SIVI. Instant designs for posters, LinkedIn articles, Instagram posts, and Facebook ads in less than 3 minutes was a dream come true. In time-crunched 12-hour work days and looming design spend SIVI brought down both to 1/4 the time spent and price. What I personally like about SIVI is the essence of augmented intelligence, easy A/B testing, sustained efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and the freedom to “co-create”.

You know what, Sivi now generates designs instantly and emails them to you within a minute or two.

Take a look at some of the latest ones.

Want creatives for your campaigns, social posts, and others? Get it here.

Moreover, we are proud to announce that, as of this launch, we are 100% bootstrapped.

HelloWorld version:

Novice: It showed that it’s possible to generate designs by following the human design process.

Here are some designs from our very first version:

Version 2:

Amateur: As a next step, we developed the proof of concept.

Latest version:

Intermediate: At present, we believe that the designs are a little closer to human standards.

And yes, creatives for our social posts are #generatedBySivi. You can generate yours here.

We hope you like the evolution!

It is our pleasure to announce that we have launched our on-demand visual design service at a fraction of the cost. Users can convert ideas into beautiful designs simply by providing text content and a brief. Three design styles are delivered within three hours.

Feel free to try it here and spread the word if it's useful.

Thanks!

Here’s how we gave our lucky charm a makeover.

1. We touched upon the hairstyle to match better with the personality.

2. In order to add function and uniqueness, we detailed the braid brush.

3. Lastly, we added depth with gradients to make it come alive.

Sivi instantly turns text content into designs. We needed an interface where the user can add the text content. We had a few goals and constraints:

1. The interface needs to be simple and familiar.

2. It should match the user’s mental model.

3. The generator should understand the user’s intent.

Content Editor

With these goals and constraints, the traditional way of using input fields seemed boring and tedious. Typically, marketers and content writers use word documents or notepads when they come up with ideas and they share that with the designers. So, we wanted to design an interface where the users can add content just like they type in a word document. That’s when we came up with the content editor.

Saved Snippets

For new users, we saved some snippets so that they could start by selecting one from the saved snippets. And of course, users can save their own snippets as well.

We wanted to give some samples to new users. So we saved some snippets. It helped the users to start by choosing one from the saved snippets. And of course, they can save their own snippets as well.

Content Semantics

Okay, we now made it easy for the users. But, what about the generator? Does it understand the intent?

As and when the user types, we wanted the editor to analyze the content and add semantics. We also wanted to give the user the option to change the semantics.

Content Scoring

Great, we now have the editor that takes content input and suggests semantics. But, what if the content is too much? Let’s say the users want creatives for their LinkedIn Profile Banner. Would it make sense to add too much content? So, we scored the content. It would let the user know whether the content is just right for the purpose. And again, just like the semantics, the scoring is also real-time.

Would you like to try our content editor and generate designs? Feel free to do it here.

A few years back, to showcase a proof-of-concept to a potential customer in a short timeline. We started working on the design and data model at the same time. Expecting the changes from the design would only affect the screens and UI state, but eventually, it changed the data model as well.

Learning: Do not work on the data model before the Information Architecture (IA) stage of the design.

Designers play the role of a catalyst; they must have empathy towards all the functions of the business. I have created an infographic to depict the relationship with other stakeholders.

Yesterday night a taxi driver asked for directions to a destination a bit away from our current place. I assume he doesn’t have a phone or maps at that time. I gave him the route in full detail, it goes like this; take a left and in the second signal take a right, then left, and so on. Within a moment, I could see his face, looks like he might drop the plan of going there. Then I just gave him the next two turns. Take a left and in the dead-end take a right then ask someone. His face turned bright.

I believe this is true in life, design, and entrepreneurship as well, even though we know in full detail and we might need to tell less.

The problem is not at the information-sending end, but it is at the receiving end. Our human brain is tuned for patterns and abstraction. Energy is required to consume information; detail works only when the incentives are clear.

Designers call it Minimalism, but many think it is a trend. It is not a trend, it’s a way of life.

Let’s say we want to design a brochure for a B2B product event. A standard way is to use the brand identity and create a professional-looking design. To stand out in an event, we might need a playful design to attract the audience to our booth. Both have their own merits and demerits.

Most real-life problems have more than one solution. Arriving at an optimal solution without hitting anyone’s ego is key. This scenario is typical in the creative field.