Before I get into this, I want to make one thing very clear: I won’t be using AI to design brands for my clients. My values as a designer lie firmly in design being human, thoughtful and created with intention. For me, the ideas, decisions, personality and craft behind a brand are just as important as the finished result.
What I did want to experiment with was using AI to create design mockups. I’m currently updating my portfolio and mockups can be surprisingly time-consuming to create, so I wondered whether AI could speed up that part of the process or even help me present my work in more interesting, realistic ways.
I went into the experiment as a huge sceptic, but I wanted to see what all the hype was about for myself. Could AI genuinely save me time and improve how I presented my work? After spending quite a few hours testing it this week, I think I have my answer.
Why I tried using AI for design mockups
If you’re not a designer, mockups are essentially how we show you what a design could look like out in the real world. Rather than actually having a billboard printed, a sign installed or 500 beautifully branded coffee cups produced before you’ve approved the design, we create realistic representations of them instead.
They’re a really useful part of the design process because they help you imagine how a brand will actually live beyond a logo sitting on a screen. They also happen to take quite a bit of time to get right.
As I’m updating my portfolio, I’m creating lots of these. You need to find the right photography, backgrounds and mockup files, then carefully add your designs to them, so AI seemed like a pretty sensible shortcut. Perhaps it could even help me create more interesting settings for the work than the traditional mockups I was already using.
Did AI actually save me time?
The short answer is no. I tried a few different AI tools with varying levels of success, but instead of speeding things up, I found myself spending an enormous amount of time trying to persuade AI to actually do what I wanted it to do.
I’d ask it to change one thing and it would helpfully change three other things I hadn’t asked it to touch. I’d ask it to keep something exactly the same and, a few generations later, it would look completely different.
Every time I regenerated an image, things also seemed to get a bit weirder. The quality dropped, details changed, strange little faults appeared and gradually the image moved further away from what I’d originally wanted.
AI-generated design still looks like AI to me
I know the quality of what comes out of AI is heavily influenced by the quality of the prompt you put in, and there is absolutely a skill to using these tools well. But for me, this was supposed to be a time-saving exercise, not another skill I needed to spend hours perfecting.
If I’m spending longer writing prompts, regenerating images and fixing mistakes than I would creating the mockup myself, it’s not really solving the problem I wanted it to solve. There was also something else I couldn’t quite get past: I could still see the AI.
There’s a particular polished-but-not-quite-real quality to a lot of AI-generated design and imagery that I can spot a mile off. Of course, the technology is changing incredibly quickly, but right now that feeling is almost the opposite of where I want my own work to go.
Why I’m moving towards more human-made design
This experience doesn’t mean I’ll never use AI in my business. I already find it genuinely useful for things like brainstorming, organising thoughts and exploring ideas, but for me there’s an important distinction between using AI as a tool and asking AI to be the designer.
The latter isn’t where I want Studio Lago Design to go. In fact, I’m moving deliberately in the opposite direction.
I want my work to become more art-led, more tactile and more human, with more hand painting, illustration, collage, texture, craft and those little imperfections that show a person was involved in making something.
As AI makes it easier and easier to create something polished in seconds, I actually think the human elements of design are going to become even more important. The thinking, the curiosity, the strange little idea that comes from nowhere, the hand-drawn line that isn’t quite perfect and the creative decisions that come from understanding another human and their business.
And there was one final thing that really made my mind up. Even after multiple attempts, tweaking prompts and eventually getting to a result I was semi-happy with, it still looked AI-generated to me. I could still see that slightly-too-perfect, slightly-not-quite-real quality, and I found myself questioning why I’d spent so much time trying to make something artificial look more human when I could have just created it myself.
So my AI experiment wasn’t completely unsuccessful. It just taught me something different from what I expected. Instead of showing me how much AI could become part of my design process, it reminded me what I want my design process to be about: human ideas, curiosity, personality and craft.
And those things will continue to sit at the heart of Studio Lago Design.
What’s your stance on using AI for design? I’d love to know what you really think…
