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I made 2,000 sketches while I took a nap: here’s how AI did my design homework for me

How I slept through my most productive brainstorming session ever.

Matthew Askari
UX Collective
4 min readNov 8, 2022

A grid of chairs generated using Stable Diffusion.
A random selection of 18 of the thousands of sketches I created with Stable Diffusion.

I’ve never been gifted at visualizing 3D objects in my head — a rather unfortunate trait for an Industrial Design college student. As a freshman, I would stay up late sketching as many new concepts as I could. The end result? 30–50 mediocre sketches.

Fast forward to senior year and now I can take a nap and wake up to 2,000 sketches that I could never even picture in my head.

How? By using Stable Diffusion! For this batch of images, I had to do 5 simple things:

  1. Download Stable Diffusion’s model
  2. Run a Google Colab notebook
  3. Set my image settings
  4. Write out a batch of prompts and how many images I want for each prompt (this time I did 8 prompts with 200–300 results each)
  5. Fall asleep
  6. Wake up to my thousands of “sketches”

And just like that, I experienced the most creative, ingenious concept exploration session of my life.

What is Stable Diffusion?

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Matthew Askari

Recent graduate, designer, A.I. enthusiast. If you would like the free link to any of my paywalled articles please reach out!

Responses (3)

What are your thoughts?

So in the corporate world there will be many times when designs are met with challenge. That challenge is usually of the emotional type from non-creatives who have the majority if not all decision making power. How would you take a design conceived…

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Phosphorus surely sounds interesting, but I doubt that you're the only one trying to do it, and I bet some of the others that are trying it have much deeper pockets and more resources than you do. Does Phosphorus have some unique use-cases? Does it…

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can you do a walkthrough or how to video of the 5 steps? not as tech savvy

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