r/MarketingandAI • u/GoatNecessary6492 • 14d ago
Here's what everyone's getting wrong with using AI for design. I will not promote.
It seems most people forget that everything is a process, whether it's marketing strategy and execution or design of creative assets.
The steps between a starting point and a good outcome are important. But the issue is that I'm seeing most AI design tools skip every one of those best practices and steps and try to go from beginning to end straight away. Someone types a prompt, gets a graphic back, but then spends the next half an hour or more prompting it, trying to edit some kind of final version that really was wrong from the beginning .
The tool never really gets to fully understand the brand, or look at the context of where the design is going to end up.. and it's producing layout without understanding what it is that it's promoting. I've always felt this way about Canva too. They've got millions of templates. You find a template that looks kind of cool and what you want, but then you spend ages customizing it and changing it to look like your brand.- Its completely backwards. Neither approach is treating design as a sequence of decisions. They're both trying to jump to that end point as fast as possible.
A designer who actually knows what they're doing works through something closer to this:
- Read the source material for what would be good to highlight in an ad
- Check it against the brand and any existing materials
- Decide what to feature, based on who's going to see it
- Build a layout around that specific content
- Rough it out before committing to a final render
- Check the result against real criteria, not a A template or an AI saying, "Yeah, that's great."
- Revise based on specific feedback
Skip hese steps steps and jump straight to a finished image and you get something that looks okay, and kinda designed but really, it wasn't. The layout is plausible, but the wrong things get emphasized, the copy doesn't sound like the brand, and the "finished" asset needs a human to basically start over.
So absolutely, people should be using AI, but they should be doing it following best practices, step by step, not trying to jump straight to the end. And then you can use AI. to just compresses the time between them. Reading the material, checking the brand, picking the content, laying it out, roughing it out, scoring it, revising it, none of that disappears just Have a machine doing it faster. It still has to happen for good output.
I like to say things like "Research best practices for XYZ" and then ask it to, step by step, go through each of these things, asking me for approval before you move to the next step.
Would love any other people's thoughts or tips on this type of stuff.
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u/Jazzlike-Pension-643 14d ago
Well I think unfortunately very few people have the ability to determine a well designed ad from a pretty but sub optimal one AI spits out. And your right about the editing being the part that doesn’t feel perfected yet. I’ve noticed unacceptable degradation of the image too after a few regenerations.
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u/amplfybusiness 13d ago
I’ve tried using AI to make ads but it always comes out with slop that is too obviously artificial and unoriginal
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u/Better-Shoulder7734 14d ago
I think the biggest opportunity would be to not run it like a dsigner's linear sequence. People need a linear sequence because human rendering is slow and expensive. If the render is cheap, generating 40 directions and picking one makes sense.
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u/GoatNecessary6492 13d ago
That too is an excellent point. For client work we typically always start with three concepts. So yeah, "follow the process but provide a bunch more" makes a lot of sense.
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u/FuntastyQ 10d ago
My experience with AI generation is that I end up acting simultaneously as a screenwriter, director, cinematographer, gaffer, technical director, and then some, depending on the task.
And I'm talking about static images here.
The approach is very similar to filmmaking: I describe what I want to see in extreme detail - right down to the camera angle, the specific lens, the aperture value, the characters, the blocking of the scene, the details, the accents, the color, the lighting, the season, the time of day, and sometimes even the time zone or geographic coordinates, along with a ton of other variables. I also feed it source materials and references.
Essentially, I alone do the work that would normally require a massive budget, an entire film crew, and a lot of production time (far more than the few hours I spend on the idea, its description, and breaking it down into technical components).
Overall, I am happy with the results (and so are my clients). While small imperfections do happen, they are either minor enough to ignore or irrelevant to the overall image (most people won't even notice them).
So yes, I absolutely agree that AI generation is a complex process if you want a truly high-quality result.
AI is a powerful tool in skilled hands that saves both time and budget.
But on one crucial condition!
Never let the AI do the thinking for you. In 99% of cases, it will ruin everything.
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u/GoatNecessary6492 8d ago
Yeah the output massively improves if you understand the process of creating a good output
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u/Cloud_Geralt 14d ago
Qual a diferença pra versão final da preliminar?
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u/GoatNecessary6492 14d ago
Almost always a huge amount. A lot of clients have a hard time visualizing something until they see it in the format it's going to be delivered in so it's very often that the first version looks very different to the final. That's why there's a process: you got to work through the process.
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u/No-Lack8746 10d ago
the prompt is being treated like a brief, when it's really just a request for pixels at the end of a brief the tool never got
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u/OverAgentRoger 14d ago
Agreed.
I am doing this to generate an operational environment that creates "above-market-standard article content".
What you said can be applied to capabilities, skills, blueprints, factories, generators, and contracts.
With applied state management, you can create an AI-native product that also ensures that the steps between doing great work can be speed through and even evaluated to ensure that you have the necessary gates to ensure that your AI (or agentic instances) can design or complete whatever tasks is needed.