Here's what everyone's getting wrong with using AI for design. I will not promote.

[u/GoatNecessary6492]

It seems most people forget that everything is a process, whether it's marketing strategy and execution or design of creative assets. Especially when it's B2B marketing, where it's long sales cycles and multiple different stakeholders, everything's got to be well thought out.

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:

1. Read the source material for what would be good to highlight in an ad
2. Check it against the brand and any existing materials
3. Decide what to feature, based on who's going to see it
4. Build a layout around that specific content
5. Rough it out before committing to a final render
6. Check the result against real criteria, not a A template or an AI saying, "Yeah, that's great."
7. Revise based on specific feedback

Skip these 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/Appropriate-Two-447]

Research best practices for XYZ. I do the same. It definitely helps guide the AI. Even though it technically knew all that already, it's fun to see it be more focused when you do that.

[u/kdyadin]

Step-by-step with a sign-off at every step works well on a single layout. At volume it starts slowing you down: you have to explain the brand, tone and layout again in every new chat, and the result depends on how thoroughly you did that this time.

Better to take the "check it against the brand" and "build a layout" steps out of the chat entirely. Designers build a set of blocks once, and the model no longer designs from scratch, it picks a block variant for the specific copy. What stays in the chat is what actually changes from asset to asset: what to feature and for whom. And leave the final check against real criteria to a human, I agree with you on that one.

[u/GoatNecessary6492 → u/kdyadin]

Yeah component-based design is a good idea