The design industry is having a collective moment with AI. Scroll through LinkedIn or X and you’ll find a steady stream of posts about AI-powered, hyper-efficient workflows, and tools that supposedly compress days of work into two hours.
It feels like everyone is ten times more productive, everyone has cracked the code, and everyone knows something you don’t.
Yet when you speak to designers in real life, away from the performance of professional social platforms, the story becomes more complicated.
There’s no denying the genuine breakthroughs.
Tools like Visual Electric and Midjourney have reshaped how designers generate imagery, explore references, and communicate visual direction. Claude has become a quiet companion for coders and technical creatives, while ChatGPT has made writing, ideation, and language refinement significantly lighter.
On a purely practical level, these tools are useful. They expand the scope of what a single designer can do in a short window of time. They make iteration faster. They open up new creative pathways that were previously inaccessible without a team.
At the same time, there’s a tension between this reality and the social performance around AI adoption.
Sherin Joseph Roy captured this neatly in a piece for Medium:
“The public narrative about AI adoption follows a predictable script. Someone discovers a tool. They experiment with it. They refine their prompts. They integrate it into their workflow. Suddenly they are accomplishing in two hours what used to take them a full day.”
The problem is not that this is false, but that the narrative encourages comparison.
When you read these stories, the subtext is that you should be doing the same. If you’re not, you’re behind.
There’s also a status component. Saying you use AI in your workflow signals that you’re forward thinking, innovative, and efficient. Yet in quiet 1:1 conversations with designers, the picture softens. Many people dabble. Many test tools. Many enjoy parts of the AI ecosystem for research or concept generation but default back to their familiar workflows when the real client work begins.
The idea of being an AI-powered designer is more common than the reality.
Creative Boom recently surveyed over 25 creative studios of varying sizes to understand how AI is being used in practice. The broad trend showed studios using generative image tools and language models to accelerate ideation, strategy, and visual exploration.
From an art direction standpoint, these tools are powerful. They allow ideas to be articulated more quickly and visually, especially in early client conversations where clarity is currency. Instead of moodboarding existing references, designers can prototype ideas directly from imagination to screen in minutes.
But when it comes to producing the final work that goes out into the world, AI plays a smaller role.
In branding, identity design, product, editorial, and campaign work, most designers still lean on their established software, rhythms, and instincts. This isn’t necessarily about resistance or fear. Often it’s just that the old workflow works. It’s also where the nuances of typography, composition, visual identity, legal approval, and client taste come into play.
AI can assist the thinking, but the execution still needs to be human-led.
Another angle is that AI tools require time to learn. Prompting is its own craft, and even talented designers have to experiment repeatedly before results feel aligned. This may explain the rise of image-based tools that provide curated packs of pre-made visuals.
They remove the difficulty of operating the system and integrate neatly into existing workflows. In a way, these products acknowledge that designers want speed and inspiration without adopting an entirely new creative discipline.
So where does this leave us? AI is clearly here and increasingly influential, but its adoption in design is more layered than the social narrative suggests. It lives most comfortably in research and early concept development.
It is less embedded in the final craft. And that might simply reflect the nature of design itself, where taste, culture, and instinct refuse to be automated cleanly.
Next time you see a post about someone 20x-ing their output with a new tool, don’t read it as a judgment on your process.
Creativity is personal.
Tools can support that process or reshape it entirely, but they don’t define its value.
Whether you integrate AI into your workflow or ignore it completely, the important part is that the work remains thoughtful, intentional, and your own.
Shot of the good stuff.
