Standing on the Edge… AI and the Future of Graphic Design
It’s something that is on everybody’s mind these days… AI. How will it affect our daily lives moving forward and will it be a positive or negative influence on our lives. People are generally quite nervous I think on how it will change the working environment and I am no different. But I want to process my thoughts a little further.
The world of design and print has gone through a few upheavals down through the years. Some of these have come with great benefits and opened up wonderful new avenues of creativity, but generally they have been double sided coins. Along with the benefits they have brought negatives as well, but they are not so trendy to talk about.
The first great change in living memory came with the introduction of the computer to the workplace. Up until then a lot of the work involved quite painstaking and time consuming tasks when preparing things like brochures, magazines or posters for print. Text had to be set by hand, letter by letter. Trays in the printers workplace contained each letter in the alphabet cast in metal in many different sizes… literally thousands of separate pieces. So forming sentences, paragraphs and whole magazines took so much longer.
The computer did away with this process and at the same time made a lot of people unemployed. The job of the professional typesetter changed dramatically and it must have come too quick for some companies and people to adapt. Setting type became much simpler when done on computer and a lot faster.
At the same time this must have opened up a lot of possibilities to companies who embraced the new technology. The ability to produce more material for print at a faster rate must have been a great selling point to get across to clients. And it must have reduced costs as well. And from an artistic point of view the quality of work went up dramatically. The possibilities computer software gave to graphic designers was enormous. This was the beginning of things we take for granted today like digital photo editing, vector illustration and logo design and the beautiful page layout programs like QuarkXpress (yes I do remember that!) and Adobe Indesign which came some years later. So completely transformed. In time employment issues probably stabilised as the industry adapted to the changes, but not without some casualties.
Probably the next wave of change was the arrival of the internet. This was less disruptive for jobs and really only brought positives in terms of creativity. Research and ideas were available at the drop of a hat and of course it introduced a whole new category of employment… the web designer. Web design was a different animal to the standard print design job. It was more technical and again some of the traditional print designers didn’t get on too well with the change. But the 2 skills have lived side by side for many years now. Demand for printed material has slowed down, but only gradually throughout the years, so the opportunity to re-skill has been made possible and often alongside the older traditional ways. And in fact many designers still specialise in print alone.
But now we are at another crossroads and maybe the most dramatic yet.
Some years back (maybe 5 or 6) I noticed the topic of AI entering into some of the work that I did. It started to appear at events and conferences in the brochures that I designed. I didn’t pass much remarks other than to think “what the hell is that all about?” But as the years passed the topic kept reappearing in the text I was putting into brochures and I even had to do logos to advertise mini events about it, etc.
But more recently talk about AI has exploded and almost everybody is aware of the change coming and in some places already here. So where are we now and what is coming down the road for the graphic design community? The reality is nobody knows exactly but I will try to hazard a guess.
Certainly some jobs will go, but the question is when and to what extent? There are already websites that offer up templates for people that fancy they can do leaflet or brochure designs themselves, but my impression so far has been that they normally end up falling short. A lack of good taste or design experience or knowledge has quite often led to pretty poor results. How long before this type of technology adopts AI to an extent where you put on the page the elements that you want and then the software places them in a sensible professional manner for you? And if you are not totally happy you can ask it to make tweaks in real time. I don’t think we are very far away from this as it stands and this in itself may be enough fo many companies to decide they do not need to consult a graphic designer for the task.
But I don’t think this is the full story. Real day to day experience of design work tells me that there will be many instances where AI will still fall short, in the short to medium term anyway. A typical day for me throws up many unexpected adjustments and tweaks that are hard to predict and in the majority of cases even the customer is unaware of what is happening behind the scenes, but this work is needed all the same to get a professional result. Without a depth of professional knowledge, a person trying to complete a complex design task will not even know the correct information to input into an AI system in order to get the results they need.
Also a lot of work can be so specific to a particular customer that their can be many anomalies to take into account even for AI, for now anyway. Many customers have lots of different items that need designing. Brochures, magazines, websites, leaflets, invoices, posters, web banners, signage, sales packs… the list is endless and these normally cross reference each other in terms of information and look and feel. I think we are still some way away from having this all done competently by AI. But admittedly the day will most likely come.
Illustration and imagery is another area that AI is beginning to change. I think on the surface this will be easier for AI. I have seen the technology working already for myself and it is mind boggling. You simply input some requirements and ideas into the software and it will present you with its’ idea of what you are after. At the moment the results are hit and miss, some very impressive and others a bit strange, but I think this will be refined and improved fairly quickly.
Then the only thing to ask is, will society/people in general make use of AI and fully accept and integrate it into their daily lives? To a large degree money will talk. Big companies will implement it if it saves them money. If they don’t others will and they will stand still. But for smaller businesses I imagine many people will still value speaking and working with a human. At the end of the day people are unpredictable and can come up with spontaneous and sometimes great ideas on the spur of the moment. This may still remain a valuable resource.
Will there be benefits to designers with AI? Will there be ways of implementing it into your workflow in a positive way?
I think so. I have already bounced back and forth some ideas with an online chat system in order to get some ideas on what approach to take with a logo design for a certain project. It was able in a matter of seconds to give me a list of ideas that I could look at. Some of them I had not thought of, others I had, so it was a pretty good brain storming companion I think. However the true innovation and coming up with something different on the page was then down to me.
I tried getting AI to come up with an illustration based on some simple instructions. It wasn’t great or what I wanted but I am sure some day it is something that I will go back to looking at when the technology has been refined a little.
Into the longer term, where is this going with regards to employment. The design industry is changing and will change quickly. Will there be human designers in the future… will they be needed or wanted? At the moment nobody really knows.