Blog | Technology
11th March,   2024
Luis Roy, a British-Portuguese forward-thinking design leader, is Managing Director and Global Head of Design at Brillio. With a two-decade career, he refined his skills during an 11-year stint in London, where he studied and worked with different design agencies before moving to Asia from 2013 to 2023, serving multiple clients in other markets, Asia, the US, and the EU. His expertise spans from digital products with technology integration to creative services.
GenAI in design
In today’s dynamic digital design landscape, GenAI’s integration reshapes how consulting firms deliver creative solutions to their clients. At Brillio’s Global Design Studio (GDS), this transformative technology has profoundly impacted how our design teams approach creative pursuits. GenAI fosters a new era of creativity, collaboration, and efficiency that will reshape our design thinking.
This article will highlight the tools that empower our designers to focus on ideation and problem-solving rather than meticulous pixel-perfect tasks that we now call ‘design factory work.’ At GDS, we are investing in learning and embedding new GenAI tools to help us do a lot more creative work that helps our clients innovate and be more creative while working with us. GenAI is crucial for our teams and significantly enhances our ability to assist clients. Here are five compelling reasons why.
GenAI liberates designers from the time-consuming aspects of their work, enabling them to invest more energy in the creative process. With the automation of repetitive tasks such as layout design, color schemes, and typography, our designers are free to explore innovative ideas and push the boundaries of their creativity. This focus shift from manual tasks to creative thinking empowers designers to bring fresh perspectives to their projects, allowing them to be more like leaders and less like task performers.
Collaboration is central to the success of our design projects. We never work in silos when it comes to designing a solution for our clients. GenAI tools facilitate seamless collaboration among design teams in the office or remotely. We provide a centralized platform that allows real-time sharing and editing of design elements. These tools break down geographical barriers and ensure all team members are on the same page. This increased collaboration leads to more diverse and well-rounded design solutions. Figma’s new AI plugins are a great example of how to generate real-time design flows that designers across our different design studios can work on simultaneously.
Traditionally, designers spent hours perfecting every pixel. With machine learning algorithms and data collected from design communities worldwide, GenAI tools can automate time-consuming tasks, delivering pixel-perfect designs in a fraction of the time. This efficiency boost accelerates project timelines and allows designers to allocate more time to strategic thinking and problem-solving. Ultimately, this improves the overall design quality and our relationship with clients and project teams.
Numerous generative design tools have emerged, catering to different aspects of the design process. For example, tools like Adobe Firefly, Runway ML, and DALL-E offer creative inspiration by generating unique visuals and designs. On the other hand, tools like Sketch2React and Framer streamline the prototyping process, allowing designers to iterate and test their concepts quickly. The availability of these diverse tools in our teams empowers designers and project teams to tailor their workflow according to project requirements. This year, we are running an initiative to ask our designers to find their BFF (best friend’s forever) GenAI tool.
Our designers explore different tools and produce their own or team’s off-the-shelf GenAI tool to expand their creativity and efficiency at work. Here’s an interesting example: One of our designers recently used Adobe Firefly to create an end-to-end illustrated user journey for a client. Something that takes weeks to do took her a day. Through this well-defined user journey mapping, we could contextualize the user’s emotions, and in each situation, we narrated and explored them along the journey. This was a massive change in the way we represented our user journeys. We moved from text-heavy, clunky user journeys to a well-illustrated narrative describing the client in their context. Things that need to be written can be visualized simply through GenAI tools, creating more impact and a solid recall for the project teams.
GenAI leverages data collected from design communities globally. This wealth of information enables these tools to understand design trends, user preferences, and emerging styles. We stay ahead of the curve by tapping into this collective knowledge. By incorporating the latest design elements, we ensure that our work resonates with contemporary audiences, constantly evolves, and remains relevant. GenAI is undeniably transforming the digital design landscape and is here to stay. It’s already a paradigm shift in how design teams operate, and we experience it at GDS. Designers can channel their energy into more meaningful and strategic aspects of their work as they are liberated from mundane tasks. The future of digital design is undoubtedly shaped by the creative, collaborative, and efficient potential of GenAI. It will usher in a new era of innovation and limitless possibilities for design teams in companies and consulting setups.