15 years ago, I had already familiarized myself with the basic Adobe programs like Photoshop, Illustrator etc. Their image editing and layout capabilities were already astounding. You could add artificial lighting on images of products, generate shadows, add realistic images of lemon peels to shampoo bottles to illustrate to advertise its lime fragrance etc., you know what I am talking about if you are a Photoshop user. The placement, the lighting, the realism of the edited images could be controlled to the very last detail. It would take hours for a skilled master to generate these fine digital artworks.
But now?? You just need to know how to write prompts. That’s it!! No need to spend hours in adding textures, shadows, highlights, liquid swirls etc, just type in “A front view of a shampoo bottle landing in a splash surrounded by dashes of lemon peels” and Adobe Firefly or Photoshop generates the desired outcome in a couple of seconds!! Go ahead!! Try out the above mentioned prompt in Firefly or Photoshop, and see the surprising result for yourself!! Words!! That’s all that is needed now to generate such illustrated and photoshopped outcomes, pun intended. A skilled wordsmith (called prompt engineers) can use intended combination of words like ambient lighting, depth of field to add finesse to an intended outcome and generate creatives in seconds that would have taken hours otherwise.
We designers are like skilled wood carvers now looking at gigantic CNC routers, mechanized tools that use CAD drawings to skillfully carve wood in minutes in what otherwise would have taken days. And it looks like we are already into the first few seconds of this Cambrian explosion of AI generated content.
So?? Where do designers go from here?? The only outcome is collaboration with AI. Designers need to use this power to automate the boring legwork that they may spend hours making. A great example would be generating iterations of a design using AI so that many options can be presented before clients, so time is wisely spent on working on the final few options. Hopefully, designers will come up with more collaborative options so they can use the full potential of this vast behemoth. Happy Designing!!
