How Artificial Intelligence Is Affecting Graphic Design
Artificial intelligence is becoming more and more integrated as part of the graphic design world. There is absolutely no denying that. I’ve made a couple of posts on how AI is potentially taking over and how designers can pivot to work alongside AI. But today I have five real-life examples that show how without any doubt artificial intelligence is moving ever deeper into our design world.
PicsArt is an artificial intelligence service that allows its users to make imagery in various different ways powered by Ai. Essentially it’s the lazy way or potentially the only way for those who lack skill. Now I’m not telling you about PicsArt because of their imagery. They recently announced a new collection of typefaces created entirely through AI and machine learning. It currently has created about 30 AI-generated fonts accessible to paid subscribers of their premium plan. Having a browser with these creations it’s quite obvious they are pretty low quality.
This script font here with the flowers has issues with certain characters overlapping each other. As you can see on the e and the a as examples. Love certainly isn’t in the air when I look at the kerning and the quality of the lettering on this font in red.
Sure it pretty much is just a trial run by picsart and i’m sure they’re going to look to perfect it from here onwards. The initial stages of any technology are almost always sketchy. But what do you think about these ai generated fonts in the future.
Next, what about this AI-powered tool that apparently can analyze your logo designs for
- Uniqueness
- Legibility
- Color and contrast
and then an overall score at the end. Now i have doubts on whether or not a machine can work out the intricate details that determine the logo’s effectiveness or not. Let’s send the Nike logo through this thing and see what happens.
So we have a uniqueness score of 92 and that’s really quite high. It says here that the ai compares the design against over 1 million icons.
But i do agree with the legibility caption found here. The Nike swoosh is very simple and very bold and having something like that in a logo. Makes sure it’s recognizable and also memorable.
Now color contrast isn’t much of an important aspect in my honest opinion. But colour psychology is.
But of course not always and as this tool goes on to say in the overall section. it isn’t necessarily crucial to adhere to every aspect in this list. again this technology is likely in its infancy. so expect more like this in the near future so do watch this space.
Next up a very controversial entity in the logo design world. FLD or freelance logo design. They have launched a logo design contest situation where if you are a client. You come along and you set what is called a prize amount. Then designers can submit to their competition entries and hopefully win the prize amount. This system could be a great way to abuse designer’s time and slow down their careers. Any designer will likely be competing against tens or hundreds of other people and often without any financial gain of their expended time.
Okay, this might be fruitful for those just starting out to gain some kind of experience. But for those who want to take their career seriously, this just isn’t it chief. Furthermore, FLD has partnered with logo ai. Which is one of the largest artificial intelligence logo makers out there. So we pretty much know where their morals stand. Somebody could technically come along use this ai to pump into the competition hundreds. If not thousands of ai made logos and i have to ask myself what is this corner of the industry actually coming to.
Next, up we’re heading to Japan a Tokyo-based company called media back office. Has made an ai driven fully automated and highly precise background removal tool. That’s found at imagematting.com
Now the aim is to help with e-commerce graphic design and photography and it’s one in many other background removal ai tools. However, they claim that tests show a significant improvement in resulting quality when using imagematting.com. For a catalog of hundreds of products or portraits, imagemating.com will save graphic pros hours of mind-numbing work well apparently.
Here’s a direct quote from one of their team, other companies may design the right algorithm. However, it can’t be very precise without using real images or before and after background removal. It would take these tools years to close that precision gap. They don’t have the legal access to the library of manually completed top quality jobs. Where the background was removed and verified by trained humans.
So we see that now trained humans have been brought into the mix along with ai. So for now at least it isn’t entirely artificial intelligence based. Photoshop already has a pretty decent algorithm for its background detection and background removal. This is only going to improve in the future and likely move to other aspects of the design process. Imagebatting.com is also available as a ps extension. So it would be interesting to test that against photoshop and see how it compares over time.
Lastly, something is pretty funny to try out for yourself. Here is an ai tool (InspiroBot.me) that has been made to generate inspirational posters. We’ve all seen these posters shared on social media for years and years. But it looks like this ai hasn’t quite got the hang of it it depicts how random and lousy an algorithm can actually be. And i’m sure if this was actually somehow integrated with machine learning it could become better at the task. But for now it’s pretty bad albeit funny.
Then also the mindfulness mode just gets even funnier. What are your thoughts on ai and the graphic design world and what do you think the future is going to look like. Now you might know that i’m really a big fan of nice juicy motion graphics. Also you might know that i’m a very busy person with a very tight schedule but i’ve actually been using.
