Amping Up Creativity: 10 AI Tools for Designers

By Ashlea Spitz RGD, Creative Director, Design Educator and Director for Modern Design Academy.

Note: The RGD encourages the use of technological tools to help designers’ creative process and expand the practice of design. However, the subject of Generative AI is uniquely complex. We intend to foster more discussion around the inherent flaws in these systems as they are currently deployed: bias, compensation and overall transparency. As it stands, there are deep flaws in these systems and the RGD will be part of the conversation demanding improvements for creatives. 

Today we're shedding light on the powerhouse players of the design world: AI tools and resources. These digital sidekicks are here to enhance, not replace your creative genius. They’re here to supercharge your creativity and productivity.

PromeAI

As a designer, the process of transitioning an idea from a simple sketch to a fully-fledged digital concept can be time-consuming. However with the revolutionary tool PromeAI, you can now breathe life into your imagination effortlessly. With its sketch rendering, you can transform your initial sketches into some pretty cool creations with just a few clicks. It offers a range of render modes to cater to specific needs such as Precise mode —accuracy with conservative use of imagination, Concept mode — good results through creative sacrifice of precision, Space mode — suited for real-life photos or 3D model screenshots, Outline mode — preserve most of the outline with some creativity.

Runway ML

Runway ML is your personal AI wizard. With its AI Magic tools such as Gen-1, you can transform a video's style using text or images. I tried taking a short video of a few dancers at a music festival and turned it into a whimsical dream-like scene in minutes! Take it even further with Gen-2 and create some imaginative videos from scratch using text prompts. It's perfect for making quick and engaging social media campaigns. Another cool feature is "Scene Detection", which automatically splits your footage into smaller clips creating bulk content in seconds.

Dovetail

Meet Dovetail, the Sherlock Holmes of user research and customer feedback. It hunts down patterns and insights from vast amounts of data, unearthing valuable information to improve your UX/UI designs. Say you're redesigning a fintech app. Dovetail can analyze user feedback to pinpoint those pesky pain points like a clunky login process or a confusing payment interface.

Midjourney Prompt Toolkit

The ultimate toolkit of easy how-to’s, prompts and tips for Midjourney. Over 700 copy/paste of the best prompt keywords and over 60 full artistic prompt generators. It is perfect for designers. You can mix and match the custom prompts to get exactly the output you’re looking for. Generate your own ultra pro stock photography for that perfect editorial piece or generate custom product, packaging and fashion photos to combine with that new brand moodboard you’re creating. There are also prompts for seamless patterns, icons, tech illustrations and so much more!

Adobe Firefly

We all know how Adobe Firefly takes care of the mundane tasks in Adobe's suite of design tools but imagine the ability to generate custom vectors, brushes and textures simply through text prompts? Now that is a designer's dream! Use simple text prompts in over 100 languages to make unique images, transform text and apply styles and textures to them, generate colour variations of your vector artwork and so much more.

Canva's AI Tools

Canva, that Creative Cloud rival, now packs a powerful AI punch. Here are some standout tools:- Magic Eraser: Save hours of tedious editing in Photoshop. Need to remove a cluttered background from a product photo? Magic Eraser gets it done in seconds and does it well.- Magic Edit: Want to change that soda can into an apple? Just say the word and Magic Edit makes it happen.- Magic Design Presentations: Feed it a text prompt and it generates an entire presentation. Planning a pitch for a client who loves sustainability? Input "eco-friendly business solutions" and watch the magic happen.- Magic Beat Sync: This feature ensures your video hits the high notes by syncing peak moments with the soundtrack's beat. Perfect for creating engaging product demos or event highlights. Upload your own beats or let it generate a custom set for you.- Magic Translate: Need to make your designs global-friendly? Canva Translate lets you convert content into 134 languages. Quite handy when creating multi-lingual marketing materials or geolocation ads and posts.

DI-D: Digital People Platform

DI-D lets you create and interact with talking avatars using Generative AI. It's perfect for generating cost-effective, personalized video content. For example, you could transform a CEO's picture into a video presenter for a company-wide message. It's engaging, unique and doesn't require a full day of filming.

Tome

Tome is your AI-powered presentation genie. Just feed it a text prompt and it whips up a captivating presentation. Use text to describe what you want changed and tweak as necessary. Sort of like a personal assistant at your fingertips! Need to make a compelling case for your creative brand strategy? Give Tome the brief and sit back as it crafts a visually stunning one-pager.

Pictory

Pictory takes your long videos and distills them into concise, engaging summaries. It’s great for repurposing content across platforms. Suppose you've got a 2-hour webinar on "The Impact of AI on Design." Pictory can turn it into a bite-sized video summary, perfect for your social media channels.

AI in Figma

Figma, the darling of the design world, has joined the AI bandwagon. Whether you're looking to automate design tasks or leverage machine learning models, AI in Figma is your secret weapon. Say you're building a wireframe for a new e-commerce site. Figma's AI could help you auto-generate components based on your design system. Or try out FigGPT, it’s a tiny plugin that connects ChatGPT to Figma and helps you to compose and edit copy and a cool part is that you can configure FigGPT to respond in over 40 languages!

Tailwind AI

Tailwind AI is like a marketing genius merged with a design wizard. Create better marketing materials in half the time. Got a brand with unique aesthetic guidelines? Tailwind AI can generate on-brand social media designs for Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest saving you a ton of time and effort. Plus it has copy on command with a built in ghostwriter that instantly creates the copy you need.