Six AI Tools That Are Here To Streamline Your Design Process

AI is all anyone can talk about, and it's starting to feel like a never-ending hamster wheel of a conversation. Even now, there are so many unanswered questions that come along with it. Plenty of us know what it is—er, maybe? But, really, who's it affecting? How will it impact our careers? Is it taking over? Is that a positive or a negative? 

Well, here's the thing. AI comes in many shapes and forms. Of course, there's your ChatGPT, MidJourney, Adobe Firefly, and Canva, but there are boundless (and I do mean boundless) tools redefining the digital creative landscape as we know it. 

Today, we're leaning into some of AI's perks and its ability to shrink to-do lists at speeds we've never envisioned. Below, you'll find six AI-based tools that have the potential to not only streamline your creative workflow but also give you the possibility to deliver more compelling results—or that will at least get the creative juices pumping. 

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Colormind

Colormind is a valuable AI tool for designers that simplifies the often tricky process of generating color palettes. The tool allows designers to not only discover entirely new palettes, with the option to add pre-determined picks, but it also helps designers start their initial color-picking process for any project or design.

The tool also allows an element of human discretion, ensuring designers can fine-tune and adapt a generated color palette to their specific design needs and branding guidelines. What's more, it can learn color styles from photographs, movies, and popular art.

NVIDIA Canvas

NVIDIA Canvas is an AI tool that creates realistic landscape images, empowering designers to transform simple brushstrokes into intricate landscapes while accelerating background creation and concept exploration. With a palette of real-world materials like grass and clouds, designers can craft their vision effortlessly. 

What sets Canvas apart is its real-time AI model, which instantly generates results, allowing quick adjustments and experimentation. Layer support keeps elements separate, while the addition of 360° panoramas enables the creation of wraparound environments in 3D applications. The ability to import works into software like Adobe Photoshop and 3D apps like Blender further enhances the tool's utility. 

So, if you're always hunting for perfect stock photos or backgrounds, you might have found your new best friend.

FLAIR.Ai 

Constantly generating new content in the age of social media can feel more like a chore than anything, particularly when you're dreaming up a photoshoot or lifestyle images. Not to mention the constant need for props, a hands-on set, and good lighting can make the process all the more grueling and time-consuming. 

Flair.ai is a new free AI tool that simplifies the process of designing and creating visuals and eliminates the need for constant photoshoots to generate brand-worthy assets. 

With its drag-and-drop interface, it allows you to effortlessly stage scenes by adding images, props, and 3D assets, while AI technology helps bring these scenes to life. Additionally, Flair.ai offers features like fitting clothing onto AI-generated models, and collaboration is made easy through real-time collaboration tools, while familiar elements like background removal, image upscaling, product replacement, and variation creation help designers iterate on their visuals quickly and efficiently. 

CGDream: 3D+AI App for Stunning Visuals 

CGTrader, a 3D model marketplace, introduces CGDream, an application that uses generative AI and 3D models to create 2D images. With CGDream, users can employ 3D models to guide the design process. 

Whether it's custom product models, characters, architectural designs, or any imaginative concept, users have creative freedom. 

The process begins by selecting a 3D model from CGDream's library or importing your own, setting the scene in a 3D viewer, and providing a text description that directs the AI to generate your desired image. 

This tool works extremely well for product designers wanting to bring their visions to life in a 2D scene or to create concept art using any 3D model. Better still, it has benefits across multiple industries, allowing product designers to experiment and architects to bring sketches to life.

Claid

Initially developed to address the challenge of subpar product images for e-commerce, Claid is an AI tool transforming how designers create, edit, and manage photos.

What sets Claid apart are its benefits for digital platforms. By automating image preparation and enhancing user-generated content, Claid empowers creatives and business owners to quickly upload more images per product, resulting in a more accurate representation to customers. Claid also helps alter simple, dull product images into photoshoot-quality marketing images.

Claid aims to be an all-in-one solution for image-related marketplace needs, streamlining content creation by transforming mundane product images into high-quality marketing visuals. 

Alpaca

Alpaca is a Photoshop plugin that hosts a personalized AI toolkit within your canvas.

Sketch, its principal tool, allows designers to control outputs using your initial rough sketches. It turns simple drawings into colored, shaded, and fully rendered images built as a tool for rapid prototyping and generating project-ready assets. You can also get Alpaca to create iterations that follow a color palette by providing your own colors.

Another tool within the platform is Fill, which has two primary use cases. The first is inpainting, a process where designers can instantaneously change a piece of an existing image, such as removing or adding an object to a preexisting graphic. The other is extending an image or graphic, with the tool automatically filling the frame, much like Photoshop's Generative Fill tool. Alpaca also offers an Upscale tool that allows users to increase the resolution of their images, automatically generating higher quality works.