Machine Learning: Are designers even needed anymore?

You, a design principal, have just got off a Zoom call with a skincare client. They love your work and want you to pitch. You already know what they want to hear: a campaign to capture the hearts of the environmentally conscious Gen Z and a logotype that’s simultaneously bold and elegant. You traverse your studio – a chilly converted warehouse with workstations optimised for collaboration – to tell your most trusted designer the good news. Sparks fly, you exchange ideas. You’re proud of your now-mature team that operates like clockwork, a utopia of synergy and creativity.

But there’s a niggling sense of disappointment in your heart. You’ve seen the future. You have a feeling that your output will disappear in the swarm of skincare brands. All of them bold. All of them elegant. Maybe yours will lean towards mauve, rather than the more commonly used nude (whatever that means), but you feel like you’ve seen this all before.

You ask yourself: Are designers even important anymore? It seems like the design and advertising industries have fallen into the same old habits. We mine the internet for references, build the same mood boards and ultimately create the same pastiche work using the same tools. If we’re all copying and pasting the same ideas in exactly the same way, why don’t we just automate the whole process?

If designers are merely required to create the pastiche and repetitive, perhaps we can leave that to automation and lighten the load on graphic designers and creatives. But where does that leave designers in the design process?

“I often feel like designers themselves don’t want to copy other designers,” says Somnath Bhatt, a designer and artist who has used custom scripts and software to help him with his animation and illustration work. “But usually, it’s the client who insists that because this is so-and-so brand, it should look like this other so-and-so brand. I would hope that this bridge between the client and the designer’s vision can become clearer.”

Software that uses machine learning to aid design choices, or create full-blown designs, already exists. Netflix has previously used computer vision (a type of artificial intelligence) to determine which frame is most suitable as a thumbnail, scoring each frame based on a character’s expression to narrow down choices for its creative team. In the advertising world, services like Pencil and Bannerbear instantly create complete designs and visuals with only a few inputs.

On a larger scale, Alibaba’s Luban has created over six million banners for 200,000 merchants on its platform using its one-click image generation service, bypassing the merchant’s need for a designer to iterate promotional images for their hundreds of products. It seems like we’re at the precipice of being at the mercy of the full-service hub of content creation, where all clients need to do is enter a few keywords and are all set for the next product cycle.

Daniel believes that good designers shouldn’t feel threatened by automation. “I’m convinced that AI is more than capable of designing the world’s most legible typeface, but it is still not capable of curating something objectively wrong as subjectively good,” says Daniel. “That’s where I see the real art in type design – designing a typeface with character that stands out from the mass of soulless Helvetica clones.”

For all the advances made in AI, we are still pretty far from generalised intelligence. AI and automation are good at executing specific tasks, but not as good when applying what they have learned in different contexts, or in ways that make sense to humans. It will take years for automation to arrive and replace entry-level designers.

In the meantime, as the industry begins to shift, it’s perhaps the right time to reconsider what good design education looks like. If designers are willing to learn motion graphics and 3D software to keep up with the latest design trends and fulfil the needs of clients, perhaps they are able to adapt to a new role where they can act as curators of AI-byproducts rather than being mere executors during this transition period. Courses, apprenticeships and mentors ought to train new designers in what they should expect in the coming years.

We can thus treat automation and AI as partners in experimentation, offering new perspectives and unexpected results outside of the language that we’re already familiar with. For instance, in a recent work, Somnath wanted to replicate how a seashell grew, an almost pixel-by-pixel process, and employed the help of his friend Ted Wiggin to translate this metaphor into a creative process. “Whenever I draw something, it starts to grow in the same rhythm that a seashell grows over time,” he says. Far from the pinnacle of efficiency that we often associate with automation, the tool instead gives Somnath the opportunity to create fascinating illustrations that evolve autonomously. “It’s not very utilitarian or streamlined but I can’t myself grow a drawing without automation. The byproduct of that is that it creates these really interesting shapes, movements, lines and colours by this automated logic of growth and I can use that as the fodder for whatever final composition that I’m interested in generating.”

“Personally, I am happy when I no longer have to move pixels – when you no longer have to do anything yourself, except for being creative,” says Daniel. Take the Dall-E Mini image generator, which allows us to see images that we can only previously imagine, from babies doing parkour to a Teletubbies coat of arms – scratching an itch in our brain we never thought we had. We might be in a sweet spot where these tools are too naive to be fully autonomous, but can serve as prompts to reignite our creative thinking that has been dulled with endless Instagram stories that we had to resize. So, if a certain type of design was to go extinct, perhaps that is something that we should celebrate.

So how do we stop making the same thing over and over again? It’s important to take a step back and see design not just as an event of visual execution, but as a way to engage with our environment, one that falls outside of the realm of AI and automation. Designing doesn’t start when you open Photoshop and it doesn’t end when you save the final deliverable on your laptop. “When we send files to print, it’s already an automated process, but to be able to print in a very bespoke way, we all have certain halftone processes or Pantones that we mix as our creative bypass to this standard design-to-print thing,” Somnath says. Perhaps more designers will feel a bigger responsibility for the concepts that they come up with and this starts with how we navigate the world in the first place.

In fact, automation is already an essential part of how many designers work, just not in the way that they expected it to be. Perhaps automation is what got us to this mess in the first place. “The [social media-based] algorithm definitely prefers a very specific thing. If a work looks a certain way, the algorithm boosts it more than if it looks another way. Maybe a factor why work keeps looking the same is because the algorithm is perhaps feeding us work that gets audience engagement in a specific way?” asks Somnath.

“The first step should be to stop referencing contemporary design. If everyone references each other, we will only go in circles and will never be able to break out,” Daniel says. “I think it’s super important to find references outside of your own bubble, whether it’s from architecture, sports, pop culture and so on. That’s also what currently separates us from AI. We are able to create ideas from the most unrelated things, experiences or impressions that only emerged as we as humans interact with society. Life is the best mood board and it’s unique to everyone.” It’s easy to understand why a Dall E image of Jack Black playing blackjack is so funny to us, but that’s a gag an AI would find impossible to explain.

It’s only human to have a fear of the unknown and this is especially true when it comes to an uncanny Lovecraftian piece of technology that threatens to replace us. More often than not, however, we find that technology ends up sitting within our existing practice as it intensifies our already-existing relationship with one another and the world. So if design feels too formulaic, perhaps it’s time to shake up what we understand it to be, starting with how we situate ourselves within this world and how we navigate it.