AI in graphic design: It surprisingly unlocks more creativity

How I use AI in my creative business to reduce cognitive load, speed up the boring bits and leave more room for the work that actually needs me.

Why is AI such a polarising topic?

Sometimes the conversation around it feels a little like we’ve just invented the World Wide Web, circa 1990-something. We’re all trying to decide whether this internet thing is going to catch on.

Whether you love AI, hate it or remain deeply suspicious of it, I don’t think we’re putting this particular genie back in the bottle. It’s here and developing extraordinarily quickly. Increasingly, I think the more useful conversation is not whether we should use AI at all, but how and where we choose to use it.

There are plenty of places where I don’t think AI belongs. There are others where it has genuinely made my life and work easier.

We’re already using AI more than we realise

It’s easy to think of “using AI” as opening ChatGPT and typing in a prompt. But artificial intelligence and machine learning have been woven into everyday technology for years.

Think about your email filtering out spam, Google Maps predicting traffic, your phone organising photographs or predictive text suggesting what you’re about to type. These are all familiar examples of technology using forms of AI or machine learning behind the scenes.

We generally don’t think twice about those things anymore. They’re simply tools that make another task quicker or easier.

That’s largely how I think about AI in my own creative business.

AI gives my brain scaffolding

I love AI for the scaffolding it gives my brain, and for fast-tracking the boring bits. That leaves me with more time and, perhaps more importantly, more mental capacity for creativity.

In my business, I think of AI as my little assistant.

It can organise information, help me find something, check work, summarise, troubleshoot or generate a starting point. It can also take care of repetitive tasks. From there, I use my own experience and judgement to decide what to do with the result.

The distinction is important to me because I’m not using AI because I can’t do these things myself. In most cases, I’m using it precisely because I can.

I know what the task involves and what a good result should look like. I’m also ultimately responsible for checking the work. I just don’t see much value in spending my finite time and brainpower doing something manually when a tool can get me there considerably faster.

How I use AI as a graphic designer

Coding is a simple example. I know how to code. But if AI can help me write or troubleshoot something in a fraction of the time, why would I manually type every line simply to prove that I can?

The same applies to Photoshop and brand presentation work.

Sometimes I’ll find a brand mock-up that is almost exactly what I need, except for one or two distracting details. I could continue searching through hundreds of alternatives or manually retouch those areas myself.

Increasingly, I use generative AI tools to make a minor replacement or adjustment instead. Then I can move on to the part that actually requires my creative judgement: how the brand is being presented.

AI isn’t making the strategic or creative decisions for me. It’s simply removing some of the production friction around them.

I think that distinction gets lost surprisingly often in conversations about AI and graphic design.

The value I bring to a branding project isn’t my ability to spend twenty minutes manually Photoshopping an unwanted object out of a mock-up. It’s knowing which image is right in the first place. It’s understanding how the brand should be represented, what we’re trying to communicate and whether the finished result supports the strategy we’ve developed.

That’s the work I want more capacity for.

AI can also be a second pair of eyes

Another example came up recently while I was working on the Spanish edition of a book.

I can proofread and cross-check the translated text myself. Ultimately, I still take responsibility for what I send to print. But having AI perform another check before that proof leaves my desk is incredibly useful.

Rather than blindly accepting what it tells me, I treat it as another pair of eyes.

There’s a fairly significant difference between outsourcing your judgement to AI and using it to add another layer of support to your own judgement.

For me, the latter can make a lot of sense.

It’s not just about saving time

Some of the most valuable ways I use AI have very little to do with design.

My kids are all neurodivergent and have different therapy needs, school needs and medical needs.

If I’m looking at pages of reports, assessments and documentation when my brain has precisely zero capacity left, AI can help me understand the structure and key information first. Later, I can read the original documents properly with that initial framework already in my head.

As I am neurodivergent myself, that helps my brain enormously to process information effectively.

I’m still considering the source information and making the decisions myself. AI simply makes a cognitively demanding task more accessible when my bandwidth is limited.

Even something as mundane as a small BAS question can benefit. Instead of sending every minor query to my accountant and waiting a day or two, I can use AI to understand the terminology or mechanics first. Then I go to my accountant when her actual expertise is required and she still gets to do her job.

Again, it isn’t replacing the expert. It helps me use that expert’s time, and mine, more effectively.

AI and creativity don’t have to be opposites

I understand some of the discomfort around AI, particularly within creative industries. There are legitimate questions around authorship, copyright, ethics and originality. There are also questions about what happens when businesses use AI as a cheap substitute for human expertise.

Those concerns shouldn’t be dismissed simply because the technology is useful.

But I also don’t think our only choices are rejecting AI entirely or handing over everything we do to it. There’s a large space in between, and that’s where I’m most interested.

For me, AI is useful when it handles more of the sorting, searching, checking, scaffolding and repetitive production work. Meanwhile, I retain responsibility for the thinking, judgement, strategy and creative direction.

Perhaps that’s why I don’t see AI as something that is replacing my creativity.

In many ways, it’s protecting it.

It protects some of my finite attention from disappearing into repetitive tasks. When there’s too much information in front of me, it gives my brain somewhere to start. It can also shorten the distance between having an idea and being able to explore it properly.

In a creative business, my thinking is ultimately one of the most valuable things I have to offer. I’m very happy to protect as much of that capacity as I can. x