Your New Studio Assistant Didn’t Go To Design School
- 4 hours ago
- 8 min read
A Designer's Honest, Slightly Caffeinated Take On The Conversation Everyone Is Loud About And Nobody Is Settled On.
It was going to happen eventually. A client (yours, mine, someone’s) was going to lean over the table, or unmute on Zoom and say: “Could we just use AI for this?” And in that moment, every designer on earth had to decide, on the spot, what they actually thought about that. Not the theoretical answer. The real one.
This article is for everyone who hesitated.
Because the hesitation is valid. There’s a lot happening in this conversation: the excitement, the anxiety, the ethical murkiness, the Linkedin hot takes. Very little of it is helping designers actually figure out what to do and where to draw the line. We believe the answer isn’t to plant a flag on one side or the other. It’s to get clear-eyed about what AI can genuinely offer, what it can genuinely cost you, and how to make purposeful decisions about where it fits in your creative practice, because whether we like it or not, it is not going anywhere. Your new studio assistant is here to stay.
So let’s dig into both sides of this, because there are two sides, and they’re both worth taking seriously.
The Case For AI: Your Overworked Brain Might Thank You For This New Studio Assistant
Let’s start with the good stuff, because there’s a lot of it.
Design is one of those careers that lives in the gap between the wildly creative and the absolutely mundane. For every energizing brand identity project or tasty illustration that has you staying up until midnight because you want to, there’s a Tuesday afternoon where you’re manually resizing the same graphic for 11 different social media formats and wondering why you didn’t become a marine biologist. We believe AI tools can do a lot to help collapse that gap, and that’s potentially a real gift, depending on how you use them AND understand your role. A person still needs to art direct and have the final say on how those pieces come together. As I am sure you all have noticed, they aren’t usually foolproof. Most importantly, using AI to resize art you made. That is the distinction. We, as artists, aren’t into stealing from other brains (we don’t need to). Just because the internet can now easily aggregate existing art into a robot brain does not make it okay to do so.
Your Moodboard Doesn’t Need To Take All Day
Think about the stages of a design project where you tend to lose the most time. Moodboarding, for one. Sitting in front of Pinterest, books, and the internet for two hours while somehow ending up watching a video about vintage Italian scooters is a time-honored designer tradition, but it’s not exactly efficient. Tools like Midjourney or Adobe Firefly can help you build out a visual direction more quickly. Not to replace your taste or your curation, but to get something tangible on screen faster so you can start reacting and refining. The ideas are still yours. THAT IS KEY! The tool just helped you externalize them without the three-hour rabbit hole. Whether that actually saves you time is going to depend on how well you learn to use the tool.
Sidebar: This also may give you more time to let your mind wander on concept which is the most important part of a design process because it connects the work to its purpose.
For The Designer Who Is Also Expected To Have Words
Then there’s copywriting. Many designers are also expected to write (headlines, taglines, website copy, on occasion), even though “graphic designer” and “copywriter” are different jobs they increasingly share a desk. AI-assisted writing tools can help you aggregate information, search examples, word brainstorm, or unblock yourself when you’re staring at a blinking cursor, and give you raw material to shape into something with real personality. We do not endorse using AI to write copy for you as it pulls from things that exist, but it can give you a step in the right direction. You’re the editor. You’re the taste-maker. You know the brands you work with. You’re just potentially not starting from zero on a Friday at 4:30pm when your brain has already checked out.
Sidebar: Companies are demanding efficiency, and studios that don’t adapt have a real chance of being left behind. Don’t use AI to replace human thought, strategy, creativity that breaks through the muck, and conceptual thinking. Use it as an aid to your process of pulling information, building copy style libraries for your team to use with premium plans by teaching your AI assistant to write more as you would.
When Your Comfort Zone Needs Disruption
AI can be most useful for research and breaking your own patterns. We all have our creative comfort zones: the color palettes we reach for, the layouts that feel safe, the visual metaphors we know work. AI could surface references and directions you wouldn’t have thought to look for, which can be the nudge that pushes a project from good to actually interesting. We believe that nudge is worth exploring, but cautiously.
The Case Against AI (Or At Least, Against Using It Carelessly)
Now for the part where we keep it honest.
The creative risk with AI isn’t that it makes things, it’s that it makes things fast and fast is seductive in a way that can quietly hollow out the work without you noticing until you’re three projects deep and nothing feels like you anymore. That’s not inevitable, but it’s worth watching for. Proceed with caution when folding some AI into your process. Authenticity cannot be faked or manufactured in a processor.
Part Of The Process Worth Protecting
We believe something happens in the messy, inefficient part of the creative process that AI can’t replicate. The thinking that occurs while you’re making. When you’re sketching thumbnails by hand or trying to figure out why a layout isn’t working, or going down a weird reference rabbit hole, that’s often where we believe the real creative development happens. That’s where you have the chance to build intuition, taste, and a visual vocabulary that’s distinctly yours. If you outsource all of that to a prompt, you may be skipping the gym and wondering why your creative muscles aren’t growing.
Where Did This Image Actually Come From?
There’s also a real conversation to be had about where these AI tools get their imagery. Models like Midjourney, DALL·E, and ChatGPT were trained on enormous datasets of images and text. Images and text created by human beings, many of whom never consented to their work being used as training material. That’s not a hypothetical ethical concern. It’s an active, ongoing legal and moral debate in the creative industry, and if you’re a designer, it’s worth knowing that your fellow designers are on the front lines of it.
Using AI-generated visuals for commercial work, especially when those visuals may have been influenced by a living artist’s distinctive style, doesn’t sit in murky ethical territory, it is unethical. Not necessarily illegal, depending on the jurisdiction and the situation, but worth thinking carefully about before you hit export.
Sidebar: One place we are seeing this show up a lot is by our clients using the generators to include ideas in a brief. This does feel murky. While we understand that someone not versed in creative programs may use communication, use caution when producing work based on these “mock-ups” to ensure it truly reflects a genuine design for the brand you work on.
Clean, Competent, And Completely Forgettable
Then there’s the homogenization problem. AI image generators are trained on what already exists, which means they tend to produce what looks like the average of everything they’ve seen. If everyone is using the same tools with similar prompts, the visual landscape can start to flatten. It can all start looking like a tech startup designed by a committee of algorithms: clean, competent, and utterly forgettable. Whether that happens to your work is, again, entirely up to you, but we don’t want that for you, so please resist.
So How Might You Use It Ethically And Respectfully?
Here’s where we get practical, because “have complicated feelings about AI” is not actually a creative strategy.
The Difference Between Using AI And Leaning On It
We believe the designers who navigate this well tend to share a few things in common. They use AI as a starting point, not a finishing one. They stay in the driver’s seat. They’re clear with clients about when AI tools are part of their process. And they maintain a distinctly human point of view, which means continuing to develop their own creative voice rather than outsourcing it.
Treating AI as a collaborator (rather than a replacement or a shortcut) is the frame we believe serves creatives best. You wouldn’t let an intern make final decisions about a brand direction without your input. AI can be a very fast intern, one that requires even more editorial oversight than the human kind.
And on the question of other creator’s work: we encourage you to be thoughtful about prompting AI to mimic specific living artists’ styles. Stay aware of the sourcing debates. Support the conversations happening in the creative community about regulation, attribution, and consent. Your voice matters in that space, even if it’s just staying informed.
Put It In Action
This article is not here to give you an existential crisis and then walk away.
Here’s how you might actually move forward:
Audit your current workflow for genuine time-sucks. Not the conceptual parts, the seriously tedious ones. Those are likely your best candidates for AI assistance. These are areas you can bring some additional efficiency to your work and stay up to date with the ever-evolving world of tech.
Run a side-by-side experiment. Take a current project and try using an AI tool for just one phase of it. See what happens. Not to replace your process, but to understand what the tool does and doesn’t do well for you. First-hand experience is worth more than any opinion piece, including this one. Your experience is what makes your work sing so don’t use AI without experiencing it and what it could or can’t do for your process.
Establish your own AI use policy. Decide. What will you use AI for, and what will you keep entirely human? Write it down. When client questions come up you’ll have a real answer instead of a vague one.
Stay in the discomfort. Next time you’re stuck creatively, try sitting with it for a little longer before reaching for a prompt. The stuck feeling is often where the interesting stuff lives. AI can become a crutch that robs you of productive struggle. That’s something only you can manage.
Download the e-zine. We put together an unglamorous amount of real resources, tool recommendations, and practical tips for using AI in your design practice without losing what makes your work yours. It’s waiting for you below, and we think it’s the kind of thing you’ll actually use.
Credits
Editor: Jenn Hart (More About Me)
Associate Editor: Sarah Dawoud
Art: Sharon Bakas
Author: Hannah Heine
Hannah is a writer and digital marketer living in Northern California. For the past decade, she has partnered with brands across industries to help them show up online with authenticity and purpose. After living in Italy, Spain, and South Korea, she brings a global perspective to her storytelling. A Kentucky native at heart, Hannah enjoys traveling, hiking, and chasing her toddler with her newborn in tow.
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Everything we share here is meant to be helpful and inspiring. We’re speaking from experience and past proof of concept. We respect each other's works, cultures, and opinions. The trends, examples, and observations in this article are provided for educational and inspirational purposes only. Mentioned brands, businesses, and cultural references are not affiliated with or endorsing this content. Opinions on all subject matter, audience behavior, and strategies are general observations and may not apply to every audience or situation. Always consider your brand values, goals, and audience sensitivities before implementing changes or creating new visual content. Please consult a qualified professional when needed to help make decisions. You are responsible for how you choose to use this information, and we are not liable for any loss, damages, or issues that may arise. We can’t be responsible for how things play out, but we’re always rooting for your success!
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