Co-creating with machines: which tools should you use?
An overview of the latest AI Technologies to help designers and creatives supercharge their workflow in 2023.
The advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is impacting a wide range of industries tremendously, and the design field is no exception.
AI capabilities are transforming how companies create digital experiences by providing new tools and techniques to help designers and developers build products and services more efficiently. This phenomenon is creating new relationships between humans, machines, and the products they create together.
Today, AI is mostly about optimization and speed, and it is already changing the way product designers work. Automating certain tasks and processes allows them to focus on more creative and strategic work rather than spending time on tasks that can be automated.
The intellect of AI systems and humans are very different. AI systems can quickly and efficiently do repetitive jobs, while humans are better suited to execute complex activities that require judgment and compassion.
For instance, when it comes to organizing and displaying data, artificial intelligence in user experience will always be ahead of human capabilities. However, AI cannot create something new without human input or understand the emotional impact of a change in the user interface.
There has been some backlash from traditionalists who think these new tools are taking away from the artistic process, but many believe AI will only enhance creativity.
The big question designers should ask is how to use AI tools at different stages of their creative process to get better results with less effort. In recent years, many of these technologies became known to the masses.
In this article, I’ve compiled a list of my 10 favorite AI-powered technologies available to help designers, product builders, and creative entrepreneurs get ahead in 2023:
1. Attention Insight
Attention Insight helps uncover website and mobile apps usability issues and improve design performance with pre-launch analytics.
Its predictive heatmaps generated by AI enable you to make user-centric, data-driven decisions about your designs, without the heavy labor of the data collection process.
Attention Insight is great for discovering performance breakdowns with your designs and validating the hypotheses in layouts.
Highlights:
- Detailed data on user behavior: attention heatmaps, percentage of attention, focus map, clarity score, design comparison (AB testing), team collaboration, and attention report.
- Plug-ins for: Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, and Photoshop. They also have a super handy Google Chrome extension.
- User-friendly interface: The interface is easy to navigate, and the data is presented in a clear, easy-to-understand format.
2. Uizard
Uizard allows you to transform your hand-drawn wireframes into editable mockups, high-fidelity UI, and interactive prototypes automagically! ✨
Uizard uses computer vision and machine learning algorithms to transform your sketches into high-fidelity mockups. It offers a built-in style guide system to customize components in the UI and a prototype engine to build an interactive user flow.
Uizard is a great solution for creating and iterating in different designs and testing different solutions with their prototyping tool.
Highlights:
- AI-powered design assistant that allows you to:
- Extract design styles from screenshots
- Attention Heatmap to help you make data-driven decisions
- Import your existing design assets
- Create themes from images
- Generate text for your UI Mockups
- Turn sketches into editable mockups
2. Real-time team collaboration.
3. Rapid product prototyping and ideation.
4. Pre-made and personalized templates.
3. Kroma
Khroma is an AI-powered color palette generator that draws from your selection of colors and thousands of human-made color combinations across the internet to generate a personalized list of colors for you.
By choosing a set of colors, you’ll train a neural network-powered algorithm to generate colors you like and block ones you don’t, right in your browser.
Khroma is an easy-to-use and visually pleasing solution to help you curate beautiful color combinations for your projects.
Highlights:
- View mode: You can view them as typography, poster, gradient, palette, and image.
- Search engine: to help you filter by keywords, such as color names.
- Name ideas: A wide range of color name ideas.
- It’s free!
4. ChatGPT
ChatGPT uses artificial intelligence to understand and respond to natural language by generating human-like text, which makes it useful for creating realistic simulated conversations and generating personalized responses.
ChatGPT is a great solution to help designers generate text, such as product descriptions, headlines, and summaries, in a variety of styles and tones.
Highlights:
- Generating product ideas: it can generate new and unique product ideas based on a given prompt or inspiration.
- Writing product descriptions: it can write clear and compelling product descriptions that effectively communicate the features and benefits of a product.
- Conducting user research: it can help conduct user research by generating interview questions, analyzing survey data, and synthesizing findings.
- Creating user personas: it can help create detailed user personas that can guide product design decisions.
- Assisting in user testing: it can assist in user testing by generating tasks and questions for users to complete and analyzing the results.
- Automating documentation: it can help by generating design specifications, user manuals, and other technical documentation.
- Coding: it can help designers by generating code snippets for certain design elements.
It’s important to note that while ChatGPT can assist in these areas, the designer is still needed to interpret and make the final decision on the output of the model.
Now that ChatGPT is here, can we finally say goodbye to Lorem Ipsum?
P.S: ChatGPT helped me write this article 🤖
5. Runaway
Runway is a content creation suite that offers 30+ AI-powered tools for real-time video editing in your browser.
RunawayML offers insanely powerful AI tools for basic video editing and advanced post-processing productions. As they say, it is “everything you need to make anything you want.”
Highlights:
1. Powerful video editing features:
- Automatic video stabilization
- Object detection
- Scene recognition
- Motion Tracking
2. AI Tools:
- Text to Image: Generate images from text descriptions.
- Erase and Replace: Erase and replace parts of an image with generated content.
- Frame Interpolation: Create an animated sequence video from uploaded images.
- Text to 3D Texture: Generate an original 3D texture via a text prompt.
- Generate Subtitles: Transcribe spoken content into video subtitles.
- Inpainting: Remove people or objects from any video.
- Remove Video Backgrounds: Instantly remove the background from any video.
- Paint Out Objects: A mind-bending tool that lets you remove any object from any video.
- And more…
3. Team collaboration: Real-time team collaboration.
4. Innovative company: They have new tools being added every week.
6. Durable
Durable is an AI website builder that generates a website for you in seconds.
Durable helps you generate an entire business website with images and copy in seconds. It’s a great alternative for everyone who needs to kick-start a project for themselves or to present an idea to a client prospect.
Highlights:
- Website builder: Durable’s AI detects your location and generates a unique website layout tailored to your business type.
- AI business name generator: By describing your business in a few words, Durable’s AI creates a list of business names.
- Copywriting: Durable’s AI generates catchy headlines and product descriptions to help you sell your idea.
- Photo & Icon Libraries: The AI curates images and icons from a massive library and allows you to upload your own.
7. Luma AI
Luma creates 3D views (and models) of any object from your photos and videos. It’s an entertaining use of the latest technology applied to 3D rendering.
Luma AI captures three-dimensional images using a technique known as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). Unlike previous NeRF methods, it does not require a large number of photos as input, but rather a video tour around the desired object.
After capturing and processing, the object can then be viewed interactively both in its environment and isolated from all sides. It is even possible to zoom into the object.
It’s a great tool for generating three-dimensional views of an object that can be used in your product, presentation, marketing material, or business website.
Highlights:
- High-quality details: Capture in lifelike 3D with unmatched photorealism, reflections, and details.
- Game Assets: Generate visual assets and export them to any game engine.
- Mobile app: Everything can be done with your phone.
8. Astria
Astria is an AI tool that allows you to generate digital art that starts with your own images and videos.
Similarly to DALL.E and Midjourney, Astria is an advanced text-to-image model, to enable high-quality visual outputs, which allows users to experiment, modify, and fine-tune their creative concepts and images from a given text prompt.
Astria is great to generate AI art that starts with your own images. You upload pictures of yourself (or anything else) and get hyper-realistic digital art from it. This could be a great tool to experiment with visual concepts for product shots.
Highlights:
- Concept art: You can create super-specific concepts starting from an image of choice that can be enhanced with a text-prompt description.
- Video production: Concept scenes, lighting, and visual composition
- Product shot: Concept visualization for products
9. Fronty
Fronty converts your designs into HTML and CSS code.
Once your design is loaded, Fronty will automatically generate the front-end code (HTML / CSS) in minutes.
Furthermore, through their UI editor, you can easily modify the content and design of your website online. Fronty is able to return clean code with semantically correct source code.
It’s a good alternative for designers to quickly generate an online version of their website projects to present to clients or to use as a prototyping option to validate their ideas.
Highlights:
- Image-to-code converter
- Online layout editor
- Website Hosting
- Custom domain
10. Remove.bg
Remove.bg is an AI solution that uses computer vision technology to automatically remove the background from any image, at scale.
Can we agree that manually removing the background of images is one of the most time-consuming tasks designers have to do? Not anymore!
You can definitely rely on this magical tool to remove the background from product images, making it easier to present the designs, improve presentation materials, and enhance your prototypes without the distractions of a busy background.
Highlights:
- Easy to use: The service is user-friendly and requires no prior technical knowledge.
- Fast processing: Remove.bg can process an image in seconds, making it a quick and convenient solution.
- High-quality results: The service produces high-quality results with accurate edge detection and smooth transitions.
- Plug-ins for: Figma, Sketch, Photoshop, and Gimp. They also have desktop apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
- Affordable pricing: Remove.bg offers competitive pricing for its services, making it accessible to a wide range of users.
Conclusion
While AI can certainly assist designers by providing them with new tools and techniques, AI is unlikely to fully replace the creativity and human judgment designers bring to the process.
It’s the designer’s job to provide the necessary empathetic context with a focus on the user needs to drive innovation — this is core to building a product that people genuinely use and love.
Designers should concentrate on solving problems and allow the machine to do the analytical, automated, and repetitive work.
This way, AI will not replace them, but another designer using AI possibly will.
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