Workflow
Part 1: Reflect
What parts of your practice make you feel most engaged and creative?
- I find the most flow when taking my work from paper to the screen. I enjoy using the sketches to map out my work and seeing the development of my ideas.
When do you ‘actually’ feel like you’re designing?
- I feel the creative process begins when I pick up a pen/pencil. My process begins with gathering inspiration from research and sources. So when I move from the computer to sketching out ideas thats when the design process begins for me.
What pain points do you identify in your own workflow?
- Pain points for me are mostly creating iterations of my work. I tend to have an idea and just go from A to B with it and then in my mind it is done. Once I am stuck on an idea I struggle to stray away and come up with other ideas that could improve my work.
What tasks or steps feel like obstacles to designing?
- I struggle to keep my files organised, this ends up in me taking valuable time opening up multiple files and clicking around until I find what I'm looking for. Often it makes me frustrated and breaks my flow. I also find using new software can break my flow, if I don't know where things are located or how it works, I find it easy to give up.
Part 2: Research Tools
What tools, techniques, or strategies did you find in your research?
- I found that using grids in Adobe Indesign helped structure my work and allow the pages to flow better since they followed the same guidelines. The templates created by the module leaders also sped up the process, it would be helpful to create some of my own. I used Onedrive in an attempt to organise my files, which did help but I failed to keep on top of things which lead to it being less helpful. By getting into a routine of using it I feel it will become more useful to my practice.
How could these be integrated into your practice?
- By having a system of organising my files, it will speed up my design process as I can quickly identify what I need and use it instead of wasting time finding the documents that I need. Similar with the templates as it will speed up the process of getting to designing since I wont need to set up the document each time. The grids create consistency throughout my work allowing it to look more professional.
Part 3: Question
The use of generative AI specifically is taking designers out of the design process. Businesses will no longer feel the need to spend money on hiring a professional as they can now type a sentence into ChatGPT and have a logo or brand created for them in seconds.
Having ChatGPT or other similar websites create a design for you is removing authenticity and uniqueness. AI has a style, everything is produces has similar features and a soulless feel because you can tell it was not made by a human but an algorithm.
AI has to be trained, it cannot create on its own - despite what people may think. To train it the AI must be fed work that already exists meaning that these AI companies are profiting from artists who do not know that their art is being plagiarised.
Sometimes AI can definitely be used as a tool, if its used in the right way. For example in the spider-verse movies, Sony trained an AI using their own character references to allow it to draw the black lines around each frame of the characters. AI was used to save time and do the job a person would find tedious, it is one of the few uses of AI in animation that is used for good.
In a world that is increasing in it use of AI it is becoming ever more important that there continue to be real designers. For me, seeing something that has clearly been designed by a person or a studio its refreshing. Knowing that someones hard work has gone into creating something makes me hopeful for my own future. If it is a logo or brand identity that has been designed, it gives me respect for the business knowing that they paid someone rather than cutting corners and getting AI to do it for them. Seeing AI in a company's branding is immediately off putting to me.
