16 AI tools for designers to 10x their creative output
For the past few months, I have been fascinated with the advancements in AI and the tools that have emerged from this trend.
From photorealistic artwork generated by DALL-E to human-like conversations with ChatGPT, we have come a long way from the days of Clippy.
As a designer however, I have been contemplating the implications of AI in the creative field and how best to leverage it within our current workflow.
That’s why we’ll explore 16 AI tools that can help designers automate and improve their workflow.
From color selection to image editing, font pairing to generating game assets, these tools can help designers to streamline their process and create better designs in less time.
Color Palette Generation
One of the most basic and essential tasks in design is creating a good color palette.
However, even experienced designers and brand specialists may spend hours selecting the right colors. The inclusion of AI has made this step in the design process less painful and easier.
1. Huemint
Huemint uses machine learning to generate colors for brand, website and graphic design. Instead of generating a flat palette and leaving you to figure out how to apply it, it can generate colors based on how each color will be used in the final design. Transformer, Diffusion and a non ML algorithms can be selected as generation options.
2. Khroma
Khroma is another AI-powered color tool that helps designers to create a personal custom color palettes. Unlike Huemint & other color palette generators, users can train their own model by selecting 50 colors.
Khroma then uses the model to generate an unlimited number of color palettes and display the palettes on templates for popular design use-cases.
Font Pairing
Although subjective, font pairing is a science in of itself, and learning to get it right takes significant time and effort given the infinite combinations involved.
The considerations a designer must go through to find the balance between contrast and harmony between two fonts can be quite extensive. Using AI can make the task of font pairing less difficult.
While hand-picked pairings still retain the tailored made experience, AI can help those with less expertise make better pairing decisions and inspire those with more experience with unique selections.
3. Fontjoy
Fontjoy is an AI-powered font pairing tool that helps designers to select complementary fonts for their designs.
Based on the principles of typography and design, Fontjoy uses deep learning algorithms to suggest font pairings that work well together.
Users can choose the ratio contrast to harmony a pairing has on a slider and have
4. Monotype’s Font Pairing Generator (More)
Another tool is by established typeface design company Monotype.
Their Font Pairing Generator is a continuous work as they leverage their expertise in typography to improve upon the AI pairing engine.
Using the experience of Monotype’s designers, their own typeface collection and input from the users, the AI tool helps speed up font selection and aids with inspiration and insights.
https://www.monotype.com/font-pairing#
Image Editing
We’ve come a long way from manual image manipulation using Photoshop CS6.
As Adobe increasingly embraces AI, Photoshop and its 20 other editing tool cousins have made photo and image editing less skill-intensive and time-consuming.
Having said that, it can be too much for simple tasks, which is where some niche tools can come into play.
5. Vance AI
Vance AI is an AI-powered image editor that can help streamline designers’ workflows when editing images.
Utilizing deep convolutional neural networks trained on photographs, Vance AI is ideal for dealing with real-world details.
With Vance AI, designers can remove noise, enhance colors, and even upscale low-resolution images without losing quality.
6. Let’s Enhance
Let’s Enhance is another AI-powered image enhancement tool that can help designers to improve the quality of their images.
With Let’s Enhance, designers can upscale images up to 16x without losing quality, remove noise, and enhance colors.
Editing (with Prompts)
With the advent of ChatGPT, the interest in conversational interfaces have risen.
Due to the ease of use, generation via natural conversation prompts has produced some interesting use cases and one of which is editing via prompting.
7. Flair
Flair is a tool that combines photography with prompt generated visual content.
It helps designers to construct scenes and recommends prompts, making it easier to create compelling visual content.
8. Vizcom
Vizcom is an AI-powered tool that allows users to take designs from sketches to high-fidelity designs quickly.
With Vizcom, designers can edit their designs using prompts, live render their sketches, and convert 2D designs to 3D.
This tool can save designers time and increase their productivity.
Generate 2D assets
Content is king, especially if you’re in design.
They help communicate information and engage the audience
For visual content, there are tons of image-generation tools out there, from Dall-E to Stable Diffusion to Adobe’s Firefly.
9. Midjourney
Midjourney is an AI-powered chatbot on Discord that designers can chat with to create custom visual content such as illustrations, character art, and even whole interfaces.
With Midjourney, designers can generate unique visuals to use as concepts for quick prototyping.
10. Magician by Diagram
If you work in Figma, there’s a plugin for generating both visuals and copy.
Magician by Diagram is an AI-powered tool that helps designers to generate icons, images, and copy.
Using text prompts, designers can quickly generate unique visual and text content, saving time and effort.
Generate game assets
For designers in the gaming industry, game asset creation can be a complex and time-consuming process.
Assets range from graphical user interfaces to entities, worlds, and characters, and each requires a different skill set.
Yet at the same time, a game’s assets need to be both consistent in look and feel yet diverse enough to be engaging.
AI tools can help shorten the time-consuming process by rapidly generating a ton of coherent assets that maintain a consistent theme.
11. Scenario.gg & 12. Leonardo.ai
Both Scenario.gg and Leonardo.ai are tackling the problem with game assets creation.
To tackle the issue of consistency across assets, a bespoke model is trained based on the existing asset that acts as the source look and feel.
Variations of the asset can then be quickly generated, shortening the effort of iteration.
Testing
Another space where AI is making inroads in is user research and testing.
Whether it be the use of AI in transcription during user testing or using AI for analytical purpose of understanding existing user behavior and preferences, Ai has already been in use for quite some time.
The use of AI in user research and testing has saved countless hours by automating away tedious tasks.
With the amount of data on hand now, there’s more innovation in the research and testing space.
13. Predict by Neurons
Predict by Neurons is an AI-powered tool that helps designers to predict user behavior and attention.
The predictive AI model has been trained on a database of eye-tracking recordings of over 20,000 participants on consumer-related items, allowing the AI model to predict the attention span of a user.
It can generate a predictive eye tracking heat map and also benchmark the design against competitors.
While real testing is still valuable and needed, designers can use Neurons’ Predict to quickly validate and run a preliminary test.
Design Assistants
As mentioned earlier, the launch of ChatGPT has caused a new wave of AI-powered solutions that focus on extremely human-like interactions.
For instance, GitHub launched Co-pilot, which allows for pair programming with an AI.
We are witnessing the rise of AI tools that serve multiple use cases, not just a single one.
These tools are transformative and have the potential to disrupt current roles and workflows.
14. Uizard’s Autodesigner
Uizard has been around for sometime with AI powered UI design solutions.
They’ve leveraged AI to convert hand drawn sketches into user interfaces, shortening the time it takes to go from ideation to Hi-Fi.
Their upcoming Autodesigner takes AI automation even further.
By describing an app, website, or design idea in plain English, multi-screen mockups can be generated.
The designs can then be edited with drag and drop components within Uizard’s editor.
https://uizard.io/autodesigner/
15. Galileo AI
Similar to Autodesigner, Galileo also generates UI screens via text prompts.
By leveraging large language models, Galileo can output a full product screen complete with fully copy and AI-generated visuals.
The output can then be imported into Figma and be iterated upon.
16. Genius by Diagram
Introducing another tool by Diagram: Genius.
Genius acts as a design assistant and companion within Figma.
The AI assistant understands what is being designed in the Figma file.
If there are already existing components within the design file, Genius will make suggestions to help complete the current design.
Conclusion
We are at pivotal moment in time with AI being used more and more. Some may say that AI is a threat to creatives, that it lacks the human touch of creativity.
The truth is that AI is here to stay and has already been a mainstay for quite some time. Working smart is something we all strive for, and AI is the extension of that desire.
But just like there’s a difference between cutting corners and running lean, there’s a difference between using AI tools to augment and enhance our work, versus solely relying on them to replace the human touch in the creative process.
I believe that AI has the potential to revolutionize the creative field. By automating repetitive tasks, it can help designers to focus on the more creative aspects of their work.
It can also provide new tools and techniques that were previously unavailable, such as the ability to generate custom color palettes, font pairings, and even entire illustrations
Automation won’t stifle creativity; rather it can fuel it. Embracing AI will help designers work more efficiently and creatively.
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