Creative projects often reveal more about a process than we expect.
Recently, while designing a poster for my daughter’s student film (a pub-based tale of transatlantic love tension in 1940s wartime Britain!) I decided to pay close attention to what actually happened when I invited AI tools into the workflow.

I trained as a graphic designer many years ago (art college in nineteen hundred and something something… ahem!). Poster design isn’t something I do much of these days, but this felt like a fun opportunity to revisit the craft while seeing how these new tools behaved inside a real creative project.

The results were...quite interesting!
And the interesting part wasn’t the speed, but other stuff - like how much judgement, knowledge and taste were still required after getting back ‘instant’ results. How converge and diverge really matters, and how slowing down and 'incubating' is still very much a thing.

You'll see that some of the AI mock-ups were genuinely helpful, others completely off the mark, though even the misses occasionally suggested something I could build on.

Instead of writing a “how-to”, I decided to document the process: the good bits, the frustrating bits and the slightly surreal experience of collaborating with machines that can create images but don’t actually understand anything.

If you’re after a guide to prompting or a comparison of tools, I’m gonna be honest and unapologetic here - look elsewhere!

I’m no ‘AI expert’ (plenty of them around it seems these days!) but I experiment and noodle about - I'm a creative person playing with the tools available and reflecting on what that achieves and what it actually feels like.

All that said...you might find it interesting if you are:
• a designer wondering what all this means for your craft
• someone curious about where AI might fit into a creative process
• a leader thinking about how these tools will affect the people you work with
• or just someone trying to make sense of the hype without either existential panic or blind optimism

I certainly don’t have definitive answers. But I do think there’s value in exploring all of this with curiosity, and paying attention to what actually happens when these tools enter the creative process.

The more we experiment, notice and reflect, the more we can begin to understand how to work with them. I’m convinced that if we can do that, we may well feel a little less intimidated by them.

So, if you are curious...
Read all about it 👉 https://lnkd.in/eknT-mEn

And if you like it, please feel free to subscribe!