AI is currently embedding itself in people’s lives at a rapid pace and it is undeniably very useful. Sometimes it is brilliant. Sometimes its …not.
This is not a “don’t use AI” blog. I use it myself, I have a sort of love like/hate relationship with it. At the time of writing this, I actually have several AI tabs open. One is helping tweak some website coding to add a feature to a wordpress plugin. Another is helping me find reliable statistics for a blog post. I have one helping plan a travel route across europe for a future holiday. And another one I have got to rewrite a recipe I can actually cook from without navigating a webpage full of annoying ads, pop ups and auto play videos that make it hard to read.
So i’m not anti-AI. Used well, it is a very useful tool but it has it’s limits and it’s easy for people to get a bit over reliant on it.
One thing it shouldn’t be used for is generating graphics for your business.
AI *can* make something that looks designed, but what it creates does not necessarily *work* or really benefit your business. Many business owners are happily ignoring the AI elephant in the room, pretending the generated graphics are better than they are, lowering their standards for the sake of it being cheap.
I understand the appeal. Quick. Easy. Cheap. A dream come true for business owners when the cost of everything is sky rocketing. Why spend out on marketing when 5 minutes on AI will make you something for nothing.
But despite it’s name, Artificial Intelligence won’t create anything truly intelligent – it cannot really ‘think’. It won’t create anything unique. What it generates won’t be creative. It won’t make you stand out from the crowd. It will be bland, safe and could potentially damage your image. It will betray any existing branding you have.
I have had a few experiences recently that highlight these limitations.
…all of these social media posters looked like they had illustrations straight out a Jehovah’s witness magazine.
I was recently chatting to a friend about AI generally, and of course how its stealing my job etc. They agreed they hated seeing AI-generated “slop” everywhere and we joked that all of these social media posters looked like they had illustrations straight out of a Jehovah’s witness magazine. This friend’s partner was preparing to launch a new business, so they took my details to pass on.
The business launched. No contact with me, oh well. Anyway it popped up from a share on my Facebook feed with an AI-generated graphic… And just like a lot of them, on its own it was not *that* bad, it looked ok at first glance. It looked like every other AI-made flyer currently infesting Facebook.
When I started out in 2015 – I spoke to a start up business coach and a business bank manager, who both asked the question: “What is your USP?”. Important advice – be unique, stand out, offer something that others are not.
And now here we are, new both new and existing businesses are jumping on the AI bandwagon and removing everything unique about themselves for the sake of saving a few quid.
Last week a flyer turned up on my kitchen table. One of the kids came home from school with a flyer for a football summer camp. Complete with text cropped off at the edges (AI does not make print ready files), a boring and obvious logo, the usual layout with the usual icons, a clichéd forgettable slogan.
This flyer i guess did actually have something unique about it though… It had the price, the dates and the times. It did not have the location.
First impressions count. Amateurish is probably not the image they wanted and I feel bad saying that – they are probably nice people, but I couldn’t help but feel that if they are this careless about their marketing, happy to cut corners and do things ‘on the cheap’, do I want them taking care of my child? Everything you do reflects back on you… I probably read far more into designs and marketing than others but if my child wants to go to a football summer camp, I’d look elsewhere, so in that respect, this AI flyer helped their competitors.
And for what they were charging for just one child for one day, they could have paid a human designer to design the flyer properly. “Cheap” is not a good look.
And that brings us to the irony: AI isn’t cheap. If it isn’t costing you in lost customers, it could be costing you in other ways…
I have a client I have worked with for around 10 years, from almost the very beginning of their business. In that time, I have helped develop their brand, created a website, designed countless other printed materials and had a front row seat in watching them grow into a successful and established organisation. Through their hard work they have gained recognition in their industry nationally and also overseas. They have become a respected in their field.
Since AI has become so easily accessible and ‘mainstream’, it has become a major presence in their workflow. They recently posted an AI generated graphic on one of their channels. It was over a weekend, something they wanted to get out quickly and they didn’t want to disturb me. The logo was wrong. The fonts were wrong. The colours were wrong. New slogans had appeared from nowhere. Off-brand, mismatched and unnecessary icons. Inconsistent with their brand.
I will admit it is frustrating when work that could come to me is replaced by AI. I like being able to pay bills and keep food on the table, but that’s not really the issue. The issue is that AI-generated graphics damage brands that have been years in the making.
A brand is not just a logo. It is recognition, trust, consistency built up over years. AI can’t work to brand guidelines. It’s guardrails prevent it from copying any potientially copyrighted material, which is why it will struggle to reproduce a logo without ruining it. Your brand fonts will likely be commercially licensed. That means they have been chosen, purchased or licensed for proper use across all of your materials. AI does not have access to those font files, it doesn’t have the licencing and so cannot reproduce them. Same for brand colours – it can’t skate too close to any potential legal issues so colours will usually be slightly changed.
AI might not save you time or money.
I have a client who has me on a retainer and we had a situation occur… They use AI for content generation, testing ideas, writing and revising content – in theory this should be saving time. Because they couldn’t resist asking AI to review and refine everything repeatedly, one job got stuck in a bit of a loop.
I designed two banners for them which should have been around a two-hour job. It ended up being six hours because of the number of rounds of revisions after each proof was ran back through AI. I think my client became a bit overwhelmed with AI seeming to find problems or improvements every time and just couldn’t decide the best option, doubting their own judgement. It wasn’t Ai’s fault, it was just doing what it does – it thinks you want it to change things so it does. It will never say “yes thats perfect”. Words are subjective, there will always be a hundred ways of saying the same thing and there isn’t always a ‘right’ way. Sometimes you need to trust your own intuition and skill, you know your business and your audience better than AI does – you have knowledge, AI mimics knowledge.
A good designer is not just there to “make things look nice”. They are there to build and protect your brand. We understand consistency, layout, hierarchy, colour, typography, accessibility, audience, tone and context. We know what to do and we know what not to do.
AI can still be part of the process and is useful for certain elements with designs and workflow but its just not equipped to be the complete package. Your brand deserves better than “close enough” or “that will do”.
So use AI. have fun with it, let it help build on ideas. Let it help where it can. But do not let it take over and destroy the identity you have worked hard to build or have it camoflage your new business in the vacuous sea of its ‘one size fits all’ generic designs.
Trust your designer. And trust your own experience and knowledge. AI might have all the data about your industry but it cannot think like you or like your customers.
