AI isn't replacing my work, its expanding it


The last year completely changed how I work as a designer:
I’ve upskilled. Expanded what I offer. Sharpened my approach. Reduced my timelines.

And honestly grown more in the last year than the previous 5 combined.

What’s wild is not just the growth, it’s what I’m now able to offer solo.

Things I never imagined doing on my own:

1. Video and animation
Now a huge part of my work
Social content, paid ads, ecommerce
High-end pack shots and scroll stopping motion

2. Website development
From brand guidelines to wireframes to fully functioning sites

3. App prototyping
Taking ideas from rough concepts to something founders can actually show investors

4. AI-generated brand asset systems
Hundreds of on-brand visuals and videos for campaigns and content

5.Deep research and strategy
Competitive landscapes and creative direction baked into the work

The reality is simple

AI has pushed me into full E2E creative

Strategy → Brand → Execution → Rollout

All done in weeks, not months

At a fraction of what a mid-sized agency would cost

Here’s the stack I actually use daily:
• Nano Banana 2
For hyper-real product, lifestyle, and model imagery

• Kling 3.0
Best for controlled, high-quality video and animation

• Grok
More experimental, looser creative outputs

• Loveable
For prototyping apps, websites, and product ideas

• ChatGPT
Prompting, structuring ideas, research
• Canva
Client-ready templates and presentations

• Figma
Web design, structure, and handoff

• Adobe Illustrator
Still the core for logos and vector work

Year one of freelancing has been a bit mad
Can’t wait to see what year two looks like...

Which AI tool has made the biggest impact on how you work as a designer?
What changed your workflow the most, not just your speed?

#AI #designer #AIdesigner #branding #freelance #creative

My design workflow looks different now.

Brainstorming → Claude
Breaking down UI references → Gemini
Wireframes → Lovable
Working prototypes → Antigravity

What used to take days now takes hours.

I'm not using AI to replace my design thinking. I'm using it to move faster so I can spend more time on the decisions that actually matter.

The designers who figure this out early are going to be very hard to compete with 🤔

What's in your AI stack right now?

AI tools are everywhere right now.

But some of them don’t actually fit into real design workflows.

So instead of listing everything I’ve tried,
I broke down the 9 top AI tools I actually use in my UX workflow, from idea to prototype to code.

Not hype.
Not theory.
Just what’s working for me right now.

One thing I’ve learned:

AI doesn’t replace design thinking.
It removes friction so you can focus on what actually matters.

#AItools #AI #UXDesign #Designworkflow

I used AI design tools every day for 60 days.
No hype. Just real work.

Tested:
→ Figma Make
→ Google Stitch
→ Framer AI
→ Claude skills

Used them on actual product flows — not fake concepts.

What worked 👇
— Instant first drafts ⚡
— Quick layout ideas
— Helped when I was stuck
— Decent starting copy

What didn’t 👇
— No real user understanding
— Breaks flows beyond 1–2 screens
— Zero product thinking
— No consistency across screens

Here’s where it got frustrating:

I wasn’t designing anymore.
I was fixing.

And worse — I was fighting code 👨‍💻
instead of thinking about actual design problems.

Faster output… ⚡
but slower progress.

That’s when it clicked 💡

AI is great at generating screens.
But product design is about decisions.

Now I use it for:
— Quick drafts
— Exploring directions

And I keep the thinking:
— What problem matters
— Why this flow exists

AI won’t replace designers.
But it will expose the ones who don’t think.

Use it as a tool.
Not as your brain.

For a long time, I thought AI was something separate from my design work. Something advanced, technical or something “future me” would eventually learn. But the more I paid attention, the more I realized something surprising:

I was already using AI — almost every day.

Not in an obvious, “I’m designing AI systems” kind of way. But in small, subtle ways that had quietly become part of my workflow. And I think a lot of designers are in the same position.

Best AI design tools in 2026 - these are the 7 AI tools I use to run my design studio every single day. Not demos, not sponsored picks - real tools that ship real client work.

I tested over 50 AI design tools and narrowed it down to 7 that cover every part of the web design workflow: ideation, layout, assets, visuals, design, building, and the one tool that connects everything together. Each tool earned its spot by surviving real client projects at my studio, Klime.

My AI workflow I use to 10x my design work:

1. Inktrail.ai - For brainstorming, understanding PRDs, conducting market and competitor research and creating user flows

2. variant.com - To curate a moodboard of design directions and UI flows

3. figma.com/make - The HTML and CSS code that aligns to my need from the moodboard and curate a complete prototyping

4. figma.com - For creating the design artifacts, aligning with brand standards and design system

Inktrail.ai - To write the UX copies for the designs

Worthy of mention; windsurf.com - Creats a design.md file and implement the UI on frontend level.

This workflow cuts my design time from days to hours and still maintain the same level of quality.

Designers should perform human oversight and not manual work.

What’s your own process?

Repost to help a designer from your network.

How I actually use AI in product design.

Most teams are using AI to move faster.
That’s not the hard part.
The hard part is not making the product worse in the process.

Here’s how I actually use AI in product design right now.

1. I use AI for structure, not decisions:

Layouts, variants, responsive states.
Anything repetitive.

That used to take hours. Now it takes minutes.
But I’m not asking it what the experience should be.
That’s still on me.

2. I treat the first output as a draft, not the answer:

AI gives you something that looks right.
That’s the danger.
Spacing might be fine. Flow might be off. Edge cases are missing.

If you don’t know what “good” looks like, you’ll ship it anyway.

3. I stay close to the system:

Design systems matter more now, not less.
Tokens, constraints, patterns.
If the system is solid, AI outputs improve.

If it’s loose, you just get cleaner-looking chaos.

4. I use it to explore, not finalise. It’s great for:

• Trying directions quickly
• testing layout approaches
• getting out of a blank state
• But the final 20% still needs taste.

That hasn’t changed.

The shift isn’t that AI is designing for you.
It’s that it’s removing the parts of design that were never the point.

Less time pushing pixels.
More time deciding what actually matters.

Most people will use this to skip thinking.
The advantage is using it to think better, faster.

Curious how others are actually using this in real workflows — not just the flashy demos I'm seeing on socials 👍

These tools are powerful, but each one only works well when you know exactly what job to give it.

I’ve been using AI tools as a core part of my design workflow. Here’s what actually works and what doesn’t.

ChatGPT: My content partner. Great for UI copy, microcopy variations, and translating engineer-speak into user-speak.

Figma Make: Good at generating initial wireframes and scaffolding a starting flow. The frustrations: credit limits are brutal and burn fast when iterating (which is… the entire point of design). It struggles with large context, you need to feed it bite-sized chunks. No plan mode like VS Code, so you can’t orchestrate a multi-screen flow strategically. For these reasons, it’s much easier to go from Figma Make to VS Code than the other direction.

Figma: Still the source of truth. After Make generates a starting point, I always move into Figma to manually refine. AI-generated layouts need a human hand- spacing, hierarchy, consistency.

VS Code + Claude: Where designs come to life. Like Figma Make, works best with focused prompts, not massive context dumps. But the speed is transformative. Things that used to require a developer friend and a weekend now take an afternoon.

Google Stitch: Strong at generating polished visual UI and great for design system exploration. But the content and UX structure is consistently weak- page hierarchy, flow logic, information architecture all need significant rework. Better for visual inspiration than building experiences.

A lot of AI-generated designs look polished at first.

But once you try actually to ship it, the cracks show.

You start running into things like:
• Accessibility issues
• Missing states • No real system behind it
• Gaps between design, product, and engineering

AI can put together nice-looking screens quickly. But it doesn’t take responsibility for how things actually work.

In the kind of work I do, especially in regulated environments, the challenge isn’t just the UI.

It’s making sure everything holds up:
• Through compliance reviews
• In real-world usage
• Across edge cases and at scale

AI doesn’t solve that. Designers do.

AI is a multiplier, not a replacement.

The real shift is this:
If you don’t understand systems, constraints, and behavior, AI will quickly expose it.

If you do, it makes you dangerous in a good way.

How are you balancing speed vs. quality right now?