AI tools have already found use in a wide range of fields and, if you are an artist or a creative professional, it is impossible to avoid discussions of AI and its role in the industry. This article aims to help prospective professionals, designers and artists learn how AI can be utilized as an important supplemental tool to improve their workflow and increase their productivity on the less engaging aspects of any given project.
Best AI Classes for Graphic Design
If you are looking to learn how to use AI to improve your graphic design skills, there are several different options available to you. All of these classes aim to supplement other training, since AI is a supplemental tool, so if you are enrolling in a course that teaches you how to best utilize Firefly in Photoshop, it is likely that you’ll need to know at least a bit of intermediate Photoshop before enrolling.
If you are looking for a focused AI class that can help supplement your existing design skills, consider a course such as Noble Desktop’s AI for Graphic Design program. This course aims to provide students who already have experience working with Adobe Creative Cloud applications focused training on the use of Firefly, ChatGPT, Dall-e and other generative AI tools. Students will learn the affordances and limitations of each model, how they have evolved and changed over the years and how to write effective and succinct prompts. One of the challenges of using AI is figuring out how to actually improve your productivity with the tools since spending too much time on too fiddly of a prompt will often be more time-consuming than simply taking care of the task on your own. This course covers a range of different subjects and AI techniques, so regardless of the kind of projects you are working on, you will walk away with some new applicable skills for their next design project.
Students looking to learn how to use AI while they are mastering the basic tools of the trade (which is to say, aspiring graphic designers looking to learn all they need to know to pursue a career in professional design), look no further than the Graphic Design Certificate program. In this immersive, career-focused training program, you will learn beginner and advanced skills in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign and you’ll receive lessons in design principles and theories. This training can then be further supplemented with AI training in the AI for Graphic Design program. Since this is a career-focused program, all of the lessons are aimed at getting students ready to find work on professional graphic design projects or to begin freelancing. In addition to the practical skills training, students will have the chance to refine their work in a portfolio development program and they will be able to take advantage of one-on-one mentoring opportunities with their instructors.
If you are looking to learn more about AI as a productivity tool for a wide range of different professional tasks, you may wish to consider enrolling in the Generative AI with ChatGPT program. This course offers a high-level approach to understanding what generative AI is, how it works and what applications it has across a variety of different fields. This course focuses mostly on the basics of working with generative AI and it serves as a useful introduction to the technology for students who are interested in becoming more accustomed to using it as part of a variety of different projects. This course will need additional supplemental training if you want to use ChatGPT for any specific professional purpose, but students looking for an all-purpose introduction to the application will want to consider this course.
Finally, if you want to master the use of generative AI, consider the Generative AI Certificate program. In this program, you will learn all of the most common professional applications for AI programs including their functions in design, development and financial contexts. In addition to learning generally applicable skills, like AI for workplace productivity and AI for marketing, you will also have the chance to study AI in specific contexts, including its uses in graphic design, video and animation and even data analytics. This course aims to provide students with a comprehensive overview of professional uses for generative AI applications and it lays the groundwork for students to easily learn new techniques and modify their existing routines as newer and more advanced models are released to the public.
What is Graphic Design?
Graphic design is the art of using images, text and iconography to facilitate mass communication. This can be as simple as designing a logo for a business or as complex as creating all of the posters and banners for an advertising campaign. It also encompasses traditional print media projects like page layouts for magazines or creating covers for books. It also covers things like promotional fliers, mailers and, in essence, anything that is designed to use visual imagery to communicate with a large audience (either informing them of something or making a rhetorical argument that they should buy a product, utilize a service or support an issue).
Graphic Designers regularly make use of digital design tools like Adobe Creative Cloud programs (including Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign) to facilitate their designs. These applications are gradually integrating generative AI tools into their base functionalities (Adobe, for instance, is updating and training their Firefly AI) and the capabilities of these AI applications are expanding fairly regularly (an article written even a few months ago would be several iterations of Dall-e behind). These tools are poised to cause significant shifts in how graphic design projects are undertaken, so you 'll want to prepare yourself to utilize the new tools and to be prepared with the essential skills needed to leverage whatever new advancements in the technology develop in the future.
What Industries Use Graphic Design?
Since graphic design concerns itself with visual and mass communication, it is utilized in virtually every field that requires companies and organizations to interface with large groups of people. This means that it is an essential aspect of most advertising work and large amounts of PR and communication jobs. In most cases, this work is outsourced to firms that specialize in graphic design, but many larger institutions and companies will have their own in-house designers.
Advertising is likely the single most common use of graphic design that most individuals will utilize and interact with, since it will encompass everything from brand logos to billboards to signs on the outside of a storefront advertising sales. These projects will require graphic design professionals who understand the process of communication and rhetorical persuasion in order to create content and designs that are visually compelling and communicate what companies want them to communicate. Since every project will involve different specifications and end goals, every project is unique, meaning that professionals in this field will need to be adaptable and have a solid understanding of design principles.
As a subset of advertising, graphic design is also an important part of building a brand identity, either for a company, an institution or an individual. Creating materials, logos and other iconography that can be easily associated with a specific product, service or organization is important and this is why companies and institutions spend so much time and money on designing the perfect branding for their given purposes. Again, these tasks are likely to be outsourced to professional studios, so anyone working in this field will likely need a wide range of design skills and a good understanding of why certain design elements communicate certain things to their audiences (since, as you might expect, a cloud-based computing firm will want a very different brand identity from a bait-and-tackle shop).
Graphic design is also a key part of activism and campaign infrastructure, particularly given that this is one of the few fields that still heavily utilizes direct mail advertising. Visual communication is fundamentally a persuasive practice and campaigns and activist organizations rely on this kind of content to reach their audience and persuade them to align their actions with the organization's goals. City and local governments also regularly employee graphic designers to help produce content that serves as reminders for important events and almost all nonprofit institutions rely on fundraising and, therefore, employ graphic designers to assist in producing materials to communicate with potential donors.
Professional Graphic Designers, including freelancers, earn approximately $61,000 annually and the BLS expects the field to grow slightly over the coming years (though slower than the national average). Freelancing is common for graphic designers, so students interested in the profession may want to consider the resources offered for anyone looking to become a freelance Graphic Designer or looking to find work as a freelance Graphic Designer.
What is AI?
Artificial intelligence is a wide category of different types of computer applications, ranging from simple recommendation tools that have become standard across the industry to complex data analytics algorithms that teach computers how to work without direct operator inputs. When discussing modern applications of AI, most people are referring to generative tools like ChatGPT, Dall-e and other large language models that are capable of responding to user prompts with completely new content created by the algorithm. This technology is rapidly advancing and it is becoming more common in professional settings everyday. While, for example, two years ago, Dall-e was barely capable of creating a picture that looked roughly human, its training allows newer models to create complex figures and motion graphics and 3d animated generative AI programs are currently being developed and refined.
Most modern AI applications run on a subscription service, so you’ll expect to pay a monthly fee to utilize the service and there are certain limitations on the afforded tokens, differing depending on the individual application and subscription service. This won’t be a massive regular fee during your classes, but it is something to consider. More significantly, you’ll want to get a sense for how frequently you can utilize these AI tools before being locked out for tokens to regenerate.
Why is AI a Useful Skill to Learn?
Artificial intelligence applications have a wide range of uses in a number of different fields, and, in graphic design in particular, they are being utilized to help smooth out tedious aspects of projects, handle early drafting phases when a lot of sample designs need to be generated quickly and for creating useful placeholder content. Learning to utilize generative AI will help speed up the graphic design process in a number of ways and it will demonstrate to prospective employers that you have an understanding of the various emerging technologies that are poised to alter the industry in noticeable ways.
AI is also a useful skill to learn because it is broadly applicable in a wide variety of different tasks. While you may not use it to create designs or even to modify your work, you might use it to draft emails, structure proposals or synthesize information into a report for the rest of your team. Even outside of the direct projects that you are working on as a graphic designer, it can pay to learn how these tools can be used to improve productivity.
In addition, since AI is becoming a big deal in all corners of the digital space, more and more companies are directly integrating it into their applications and software, including Adobe, meaning that any new versions of major design programs like Photoshop will be built with generative AI in mind. This means that, regardless of your personal feelings on AI, it will behoove you to at least understand what may well become a standard part of the graphic designers’ toolkit.
Most AI classes focus on the use of generative AI, which requires no programming or computational skills, since the algorithm has been programmed and trained by someone else. This makes the classes ideal for students without significant backgrounds in data science or Python. Students who are looking to work on the technical side of AI should consider enrolling in a program such as the Python Data Science and Machine Learning Bootcamp.
How Can AI Assist with Graphic Design Projects?
Artificial intelligence and generative AI applications have become a somewhat hot button issue in the field of graphic design. As the programs become more and more sophisticated, they are able to handle an ever-increasing amount of the grunt work associated with creating and modifying content. At the same time, it requires training from a wide range of different sources which can cause ethical issues concerning the process of training these algorithms. However, ethical concerns aside, it is impossible to avoid the fact that these applications are reshaping the graphic design industry and professionals will likely need to understand the affordances and limitations of these applications.
AI tools have been utilized in graphic design almost as long as computers have had the capability to perform simple tasks on their own. Simple automated color correction, gradient shifting and automated blur alterations, for example, have been part of Photoshop for quite some time. While the tools have become more sophisticated over time, they are a natural evolution of the kinds of digital design assistance functionalities that have existed for almost as long as digital design. In this way, you’ll be learning how to better utilize existing AI infrastructure to speed up the design process and handle the slower and more tedious aspects of the process. For example, AI tools can be used to quickly check over an image for errors or inconsistencies, alter the arc of lines and other vector assets to align more perfectly with one another and ensure that duplicated images are correctly sized, as a few examples.
In terms of larger, newer functions, generative AI is largely making a splash for its ability to create images from nothing, using simple prompts and extrapolating that into a completely new image based on the data it was taught. This gives creatives a number of opportunities to create quick sample designs, build large repositories of sample images, create figures and models to based designs off of and create placeholder images that can be added to an in-progress document as samples. It can also speed up the process of creating mock-up designs for internal use and building a wide range of different samples for stakeholders to use in place of a number of complex completed designs. It can also produce simple copy for advertisements and mailers, further speeding up the process without worrying about generating errors in spelling and grammar.
Learning how to properly write prompts, modify the output and take advantage of native AI design tools in applications like Photoshop can help improve your workflow and make your finished projects better, as you have the ability to iterate on samples and sketches significantly faster. You can also use AI as a broad research tool, since even experienced designers won’t know everything there is to know about design principles and you may wish to cast a wide net when doing the early design planning. Additionally, you can use AI to quickly analyze hundreds of samples (including existing design projects) to find commonalities that would be impossible for a human being to parse in a reasonable amount of time.
What are the Limitations of AI for Graphic Design Projects?
It is, at this point, common knowledge that there are things that generative AI art applications are just very bad at. Aside from obvious issues like determining how many fingers a human being has or what letters look like, it can also have issues with perspective and composition. While it can be useful for creating large amounts of samples or models to base more specific work on, it won’t be able to replace the work done by a team of skilled graphic designers. This is especially true of complex, unique projects that require the final product be personalized to a specific business, institution or cause. AI also doesn’t understand the social context that an image or set of images exist in nor can it make the kind of creative, informed decisions that a skilled artist will make, so you should understand that learning how to use AI tools is not a substitute for learning how to use design application or knowing the design principles that artists leverage to create finished projects that contain a specific human element.
AI is also limited by the training it has received, so you’ll need to understand that every model is going to have limitations and preferences based on the dataset that it was originally trained on. This usually isn’t an issue, since the companies training the algorithms have become more attentive to this concern, but it is still worth keeping in mind that sometimes the training that an algorithm undergoes will bias it towards certain designs, assets and ideas. Considering how this may, in turn, impact your own design process is an important step in the process of leveraging AI as a tool to improve on your design projects.
What Other Skills Will You Need for Graphic Design Projects?
Since generative AI tools won’t be enough to get you started on a design career, you will also want to learn a handful of other important skills that will be foundational to your future work and training. These skills include technical training so that you can use the tools and applications that are most commonly used in the industry (and are being used to develop the most cutting-edge, application-specific AI features) and soft training in the design principles, theories and practices that have been shaping the look and feel of visual art for centuries.
The most important skills to learn are the digital design tools that are most frequently utilized in the field. These include Adobe Creative Cloud applications, such as Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, as well as more specialized tools for individual projects (such as page layout applications or motion graphics tools for online projects). This makes sense, given that Adobe is currently part of the vanguard when it comes to integrating AI tools into their design programs, and these tools have dominated the graphic design industry for the last few decades. Learning how to use these tools will be necessary for anyone looking to work on graphic design projects at a professional level.
In addition to learning practical skills and the use of common applications, you’ll also want to learn theoretical design principles, like color theory, design theory and ideas surrounding typography and text. While you won’t need to invest the time in getting something akin to an art history degree, understanding why certain choices are made and why designers approach different tasks in different ways. This training will help designers make informed decisions and it will help them avoid relying too heavily on AI for aspects of the design process that it is not well built to handle. These lessons are often included as part of the practical skills training, so you will learn how to use advanced features of Photoshop while learning more complicated theories of color, for example.