AI won't replace designers because it lacks taste and subjective opinion. Instead, as AI gets better at generating highly opinionated (though not perfect) designs, it will serve as a powerful exploration tool. This plants more flags in the option space, allowing human designers to react, curate, and push the most promising directions further, amplifying their strategic role.

Instead of being limited by off-the-shelf software, designers can dramatically accelerate their process by building bespoke tools. MDS used the AI tool V0 to create a custom bitmap icon builder, enabling rapid prototyping of a unique interactive element.

Tools like Notebook LM don't just create visuals from a prompt. They analyze a provided corpus of content (videos, text) and synthesize that specific information into custom infographics or slide decks, ensuring deep contextual relevance to your source material.

At Perplexity, the brand team's strategy is to use AI tools for 'velocity and volume,' according to VP of Design Henry Modiset. This allows a small team to produce a massive amount of creative assets, making the brand feel ubiquitous and loud in the market without a huge budget.

To create unique, on-brand invite cards at scale, the designer chained multiple AI tools together. She used Midjourney for initial concepts, trained custom models on Civit AI, then used FAL AI to blend models and variabilize prompts for generation. This demonstrates a sophisticated workflow beyond single-prompt image creation.

AI tools that generate functional UIs from prompts are eliminating the 'language barrier' between marketing, design, and engineering teams. Marketers can now create visual prototypes of what they want instead of writing ambiguous text-based briefs, ensuring alignment and drastically reducing development cycles.

Leverage AI as an idea generator rather than a final execution tool. By prompting for multiple "vastly different" options—like hover effects—you can review a range of possibilities, select a promising direction, and then iterate, effectively using AI to explore your own taste.

The true creative potential for AI in design isn't generating safe, average outputs based on training data. Instead, AI should act as a tool to help designers interpolate between different styles and push them into novel, underexplored aesthetic territories, fostering originality rather than conformity.

The rapid pace of change, accelerated by AI, demands brands become more fluid. Rigid, static brand guidelines are obsolete, replaced by generative systems that can evolve with user needs and market trends while retaining a core identity.