Every perk of AI in design has a price tag on it, and someone else paid. These models were trained on huge amounts of creative work: illustrators, photographers, type designers, much of it collected without asking the people who made it. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But there is one corner of design where you can use AI completely guilt-free. Because the only thing it steals there is the job us designers hate.
Print production.
You know the drill. A 14-page spec sheet lands from the fabricator. You squint at it, map the space in your head, then build files one by one, triple-checking that size, bleed, color code and resolution match the spec. Then you do it again at a scale of 20, 40, 60 files, some of them giant-format, trying not to burn your laptop and hoping Adobe won’t crash before you hit save.
Nobody became a designer for this.
For the past 6 months, I’ve been offloading almost all of it to AI. Here’s how, including the times it got things wrong.
