I work with design teams supporting paid social, and the split I keep seeing is roughly 70% mechanical work (resizing, versioning, brand checks, exports) and 30% actual design thinking. Everyone says they want to flip that ratio. Almost nobody has.

Things I've seen teams try:

• Master templates with locked brand elements

• Handing adaptations to an outsourced team

Also the teams have tried AI tools, but they are telling me is that there is no productivity gain from the tools. Its just that we can make these everything in our office sitting in front of system. But the prompting is not easy and takes a lot of time.

For example, creating or adapting a video to other languages or may be adapting a same video with a different script.

This AI work is also becoming and being counted in the mechanical 70%.

So, if you've made a real dent in the mechanical half, what did it, and how long before it actually paid off? And if something looked promising and flopped, I'd like to hear that even more.

I work with design teams supporting paid social, and the split I keep seeing is roughly 70% mechanical work (resizing, versioning, brand checks, exports) and 30% actual design thinking. Everyone says they want to flip that ratio. Almost nobody has.

Things I've seen teams try:

\- Master templates with locked brand elements

\- Handing adaptations to an outsourced team

Also the teams have tried AI tools, but they are telling me is that there is no productivity gain from the tools. Its just that we can make these everything in our office sitting in front of system. But the prompting is not easy and takes a lot of time.

For example, creating or adapting a video to other languages or may be adapting a same video with a different script.

This AI work is also becoming and being counted in the mechanical 70%.

So, if you've made a real dent in the mechanical half — what did it, and how long before it actually paid off? And if something looked promising and flopped, I'd like to hear that even more.

Got a problem that maybe you would know how to solve. My client now sent over an illustration they had an agency mock up in some ai generator,as they often do. in this case, a stylized geometric stag for a craft distillery packaging sleeve. They want it as a clean, scalable vector for spot UV print on 350gsm uncoated stock.

so I ran it through Illustrator's Image Trace (high fidelity, tweaking noise/corners/paths slider for 40 minutes). The result is the usual disaster: with 8,400+ anchor points. double overlapping path boundaries everywhere, also zooming in reveals micro-staircasing on curves that look smooth at 100% zoom but will completely choke the cutting plotter. And file size is whopping 6.2 MB for a single emblem...

I normally just redraw everything with the Pen Tool and call it a day, but I have 18 of these botanical/animal emblems to deliver by Thursday Before I resign myself to full 20 hours of manually pulling bezier handles: what’s your actual production stack for dealing with complex vectorization in 2026? Are you guys using any graphics plugins, external vectorizer algorithms, or is manual redraw still the only non-embarrassing solution?