Upcoming Events
Wed, Feb 21st: 🧠 GenAI Collective 🐰 Design Buddies 🚀Ansh Mehra 🧠 The GenAI 🤝 Design Workshop You've All Been Waiting For
Thu, Feb 22nd: 🧠 GenAI Collective 🧠 Community Town Hall 🏛️
Fri, Feb 23rd: 🧠 GenAI Collective 🧠 Broken Dreams, Loose Ends, and Horror Stories: The Worst from the Best
Tue, Feb 27th: 🧠 GenAI Collective 🐰 Design Buddies 🚀Ansh Mehra 🧠 The GenAI 🤝 Product Workshop You've All Been Waiting For
🗓️ Hungry for even more AI events? Check out SF IRL, MLOps SF, or Cerebral Valley’s spreadsheet!
Step into the future of our community with the inaugural GenAI Collective Community Town Hall this Thursday! 🌟 This is your golden opportunity to engage directly in shaping the collective's trajectory, making it more inclusive, welcoming, and impactful. As our community flourishes, your insights and contributions are more valuable than ever! Whether you're brimming with suggestions, curious about getting involved, or eager to hear the latest collective updates, this town hall is the perfect platform. Let's co-create a vibrant future for AI innovation together. Mark your calendars and join us in this exciting experiment to voice your thoughts and help steer the direction of our community. Sign up now and be a part of something truly transformative! 🚀
For this issue, we are thrilled to feature a fellow community member Grace Ling, the founder of the largest design community, Design Buddies, with a total audience of 150,000+. Grace dives into the impact of Generative AI on designers and how Design Buddies is working to upskill and empower the ecosystem. All of the graphics in the article are Grace’s hand drawn designs. 🎨
The Impact of Generative AI on Designers
How to use AI to become more productive as a designer
The jury is out. Designers will be replaced by designers who use generative AI.
AI-enabled platforms enhance creativity by automating routine tasks and busy work, freeing up time for the creative process. These platforms can also help us create more personalized and accessible experiences by analyzing large volumes of data, unlocking valuable insights in the design process.
I don’t think generative AI will ever completely replace creatives and critical thinking. There’s always room for human creativity. We’re designing for humans, and everyone’s preferences are different. Even AGI systems will struggle to completely understand our individual needs and human experiences. Design is a highly collaborative process and involves taking feedback from many functions of the business—product, engineering, marketing, sales—and current AI systems still struggle to connect the dots across all key stakeholders. I don’t see this changing in the near term.
Where AI can fit in our workflows
Creativity
Got designers block? You don’t need to start from scratch and reinvent the wheel every time. Current AI-enabled tools can create a variety of designs from a textual input. This may not be the final product but is a great way to get the creative juices flowing.
For example, there are tools like text-to-UI design tools by Galileo, unique icons by Magician, and color palettes generated for you to use by Khroma.
However, as an artist, I understand the complexities surrounding AI being trained on creative content without the artist’s permission. It’s still an area that’s being defined and boundaries will need to be set around training practices. For now, my recommendation is to use AI as a starting point where you come in after to add your unique creative flair!
Automating research workflows
Designers often collaborate with researchers or are the researchers themselves, especially on smaller teams. This is an area where AI is already bringing us a significant amount of value. By helping us analyze data, categorize user actions, and surface insights across a diverse user base, these tools allow us to create more personalized experiences on-the-fly!
For example, Research AI can analyze data from surveys and social media in real-time, which is critical during the discovery phase.
In the testing phase, tools like Visual Eyes can help generate eye-tracking studies to provide attention maps on your design.
More aspects of human-AI interaction are being uncovered every day!
Automating design workflows
There are some areas in a designer’s workflow that can already be automated by AI tools!
For example, Visily can generate wireframes from hand-drawn sketches. Uizard can generate high-fidelity mock-ups from wireframes. Fronty can translate your designs to front-end code. Jasper can add copy based on your band.
Apply this to your life
The technology ecosystem for designers is exploding and every designer should leverage AI to become more creative and productive! Feeling overwhelmed? You should start by documenting where in your design workflow you’re spending the most time. Is this process tedious and distracting to your creative process? If the answer is yes, you should explore AI-enabled tools that can help automate that task.
AI is a tool. It’s there to help you accomplish more, not replace you. Also, these tools are far from perfect. Always make sure to fact-check whatever the AI generates.
It’s an exciting time to be a designer! We see new products coming out every day that leverage AI to make our jobs easier. Communities like The GenAI Collective and Design Buddies are providing the platform for like-minded people to share ideas, stay up-to-date with the latest and greatest developments, and most importantly build lasting relationships. We would love to see you all at our upcoming events!
We would love to hear how the designers in our communities have seen Generative AI platform change/augment/disrupt their daily workflows. Are there new technologies that have already become essential in the industry? If you would like to share your thoughts, hit up Grace or Eric on the community Slack or reach out via email at eric@gaicollective.com for a feature in our next newsletter!
Events Recap
Much like the GenAI Collective’s first ever event exactly one year ago to the day, we gathered together in a cozy San Francisco living room to discuss the future of AI and connect with like minded folks! 55 events and counting! 🥳
Thank you to everyone who joined us last night and partook in SF’s favorite “timelines and P(doom)” debate – under three years to AGI??? 😅
Value Board
Our friends at Peer2Peer - a social hiring platform where you can help your trusted network connect with great opportunities - are looking for great AI/ML talent to join some exciting early-stage startups:
Christian Griset is looking for founding AI/ML Engineers to join his company, Elliptic Labs (backed by First Round, Slack, Stripe, and more)
Lucas Ochoa is looking for a founding Applied AI/ML & Full Stack Engineer to join him at Automat (backed by YC, Initialized Capital, and more)
Nic Seo is looking for Machine Learning Engineers, Data Engineers, and an Engineering Manager at Imbue (backed by the Astera Institute, Lightspeed, Nvidia, and more)
Hire, get hired, and help hire through people you trust. See all opportunities
About Grace Ling
Grace Ling is a designer, founder, and content creator born and raised in Silicon Valley. She’s passionate about designing experiences that bring people together. She founded Design Buddies, the world’s largest design community (150,000+ total audience) helping designers improve their craft and land jobs. She creates content (60,000+ total followers) about design, career, lifestyle and travel. Grace’s work has been featured on the Wall Street Journal, New York Times Square, Adobe, Dell, Discord, and more. She’s also a UX Designer at Electronic Arts, building products for creators. In her free time, Grace loves to draw, run, and travel (30+ countries). Connect with Grace on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter! ✈️
How can I start my own GenAI community in my specialization