5 things that’s h(AI)ppening in design | by Pavithra Aravindan | Jul … – Medium

Pavithra Aravindan
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Hello world, after 4 years (Published an article last in 2019)!
I have been a UX designer since 2016. I have been at 3 jobs since, published papers and a ton of articles, shared my design knowledge through YouTube & Medium, and spoke and attended design conferences. But, I stopped all this when I joined Amazon 3 years back.
The reason wasn’t Amazon, I was finally happy with my job, so I wanted to focus on my personal life. I turned towards my other passion, food. I started a food blog in the pandemic, sharing recipes and stories from all over world and more than 250k people seemed to really like it and subscribed to me. In the meantime, I also met a great guy and got married. And, I moved to New York City.
But suddenly I looked up in February 2023 and realized so much has happened in design & tech and I haven’t been involved in it. I have been doing my job, yes, growing in my job, yes, but I haven’t really absorbed or been a part of everything that’s going on outside of my role at Amazon. I suddenly feel like I am behind or lost. So I wanted to catch up!
And if you feel like you are in the same place as I am , here are 5 things I learnt so far,
If you haven’t heard of Chat GPT, you have been living under the person who’s been living under the rock (me). It’s literally taken over the tech world by storm. It’s a website/app that answers literally any of your questions (accurate or not). I know what you’re thinking, wait google does that, but unlike google, this only gives one answer which is perfect for our overwhelmed minds. It’s almost like an assistant.
I personally have been using it to craft emails, write case studies, getting design ideas, advise on dealing with stakeholders, UI copy, content creation, pull data on users, learn about specific tools and more.
I am both immensely impressed and scared of this feature. The videos I have seen on this have been completely insane!! And, that’s an understatement. It literally can change a picture entirely with your prompts and make it look completely flawless. People have been using it to remove humans from the background, add objects, change objects and complete the picture. This feature also gives you multiple options for each prompt which is crazy.
My deep condolences to all the picture editors and professional photoshoppers out there. It’s brutal but we can use this to expedite our work and make more money with more projects. Because lets face it, not everyone wants to pay for the Adobe license and no one has the skills or patience to make it look flawless.
Midjourney bot is by Discord and you can give it a prompt with multiple adjectives and it will generate an image for you. It’s amazingly accurate! You can create multiple variations of it too. People have been using it to create hyper realistic images, logos, UI screens and web pages.
At first I thought, my deep condolences to me and all the other UI, UX, Product designers out there as well. But luckily after seeing my husband use it to create a website, I realized people are creatively challenged and can’t really do much with it. Or maybe I am just very naive! But even if they can, unbeknownst to most people, we designers are not just here to change the button color or push pixels, so this app could just help us deliver our ideas and results faster and make us focus on more important things like improving experiences for our users and influencing stakeholders.
Magician is a plugin by Figma which is supposed to generate an icon, image or copy using a prompt but it’s in beta version and am unable to get access (If someone has access code, I would be super grateful if you could share it with me). I am excited about this but not as much as the other tools because I can already do these things with the other tools but I guess it will be easier as I am designing in Figma. I need to be able to test this out to figure out how useful it is.
Diagram is a set of AI-powered design tools and figma plugins like Genius, Magician, Automator and UI-AI. They are supposed to help us create better UI web and mobile designs and patterns. All these tools seem promising but they’re all either in Beta or coming soon, so I haven’t tried it out yet. If you have, let me know in the comments.
And, that’s everything I learnt and they all seem related to AI. But, that’s the world we live in. Soon we will stop adding the word AI in front and just call it as it is and it will be understood that it’s an AI tool.
But if you know any other design tools or news that we need to be aware of, let us know in the comments and also how you feel about this shifting design culture.
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UX Designer at Amazon. YouTuber at /paviarav.
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