The Old Process

Let me talk about the old process of building a brand identity. The old process was all about creating and adapting everything manually. Your work was divided into two parts: the part you loved and the part you hated. Why did you hate it? Because it involved repeating one element that you designed so well, as production needed it in multiple different forms.

Let’s say you have to create a logotype. You spend maybe weeks, maybe a month, on the process: creative explorations, negotiations, revisions, and debates with higher-ups. After all of these tiring stages, you are… guess what? Not done!

Now, if you are lucky and the team has agreed on the logotype and concept, you need—or should I say, must—to create brand guidelines. They are the bible of your logotype and brand’s visual identity. The identity lives and breathes through them. It follows their rules. But the problem is that you need to create them: gathering all the information, rules, guidelines, and vision in one document.

What kind of world would make a designer want to do that? In a perfect scenario, a designer would love to pass this task to a team that gathers all the copy and creates a huge document with all the instructions. But the problem is that this work is very technical and fully dependent on our own vision.

If this depends on our own vision, it means that we need to sit down and write it ourselves, because gathering a team around it would require twice as much willpower as creating the brand guidelines ourselves.

Burnout

On a project I was doing for my friend, I faced the same issue. I had neither the willpower nor the motivation to sit down and create everything manually. Therefore, I was burned out. After spending a long time doing a lot of boring, purely manual work—creating PDFs, presentations, brochures, and constantly negotiating—I really wanted this project to be fun. However, how can it be fun when you also need to create brand guidelines with multiple slides explaining every scenario in the identity’s life?

Separating the Work into Love & Hate

So I sat and looked at the AI images that my friend had created as a kind of moodboard to explain his vision for this logotype. I wasn’t really feeling like this project would be a fun job until I saw his AI image with an approximate logotype, colour system, and mockups. That’s what he provided as his vision: AI slop.

So I asked myself…

What if I could benefit from this AI slop 🤢 and reverse-engineer it so it could benefit my creative process? 🤠 What if I created one style and multiple guideline slides using an AI agent?

Me doing the things I love

So I began. I decided that if AI agents were so powerful, the only thing I was going to do was focus on the creative part that I really liked. And the most important part of creative work is freedom of movement: being able to create and draw in the way my mind sees. Every little detail matters. Every point, every pixel, every colour decision matters. This is why I want direct access to it—not through prompting or navigating a robot, but by working directly with my own hands. Words are an interesting form of communication; however, they are not enough when it comes to explaining visually complex ideas and visions. Also, I don’t have time to learn how to speak to a robot and explain what I can do with my hands.

So I sat down and reorganised a few parts of the process. I kept certain crucial parts entirely for myself and labelled them as creative. I gave the other parts entirely to AI. To make it easier to understand, I gave everything involving copy, exporting, preparing documents, and numbers to AI. I kept parts like moodboarding, competitor analysis, mapping, and drawing entirely for myself. So the principle is:

The Result

As a result, I had more time and confidence to play around with my moodboard. I’m not claiming to be the best moodboard designer, but it was more than enough to discuss the direction we were taking. That allowed me to have more discussions with the client (my friend) directly about the vision and direction.

I felt like I had more control over my vision and a better understanding of how my friend saw his identity in a corporate sense. I had control over how it all looked. And it didn’t feel like another episode of impostor syndrome in which I doubted my creative skills. As they say, “AI should do the dishes and clean the toilets while we make art.”

By art, we can also mean making meaningful design decisions that require multiplication—like a logotype, for instance. You have to make one meaningful decision that will later cost a lot of money to promote, and going back will cost just as much as it did at the beginning, once production and materials have been multiplied. So that decision must be made with care and time, not through generic choices.

AI Did Its Job Well, but It Can Do Better

What do I mean by “better”? Most of the prompts that you see on the left side of the screen in the video are prompts where I had a huge problem explaining what I wanted to do. At the beginning, I was trying to create a template—a wireframe for my guidelines. However, that didn’t work so well because it was a bit vague and general. So I wasn’t pleased with the results.

The next thing I did was research existing guidelines that I could personally follow and adapt for my project. This brought me back to competitor analysis. I wasn’t really invested in that, since I found one that I really liked in terms of style and layout, and I simply told AI to use the same structure. And it did! 🏆

The part that should—and I think will—get better is mockups. Mockups are a necessary part of visually displaying how a logo is used on different platforms. Once I asked AI to use an SVG file and generate a few mockups, it began to give me absolute crap. The logo was completely modified, changed, and broken. So for this part of the guidelines, you have to find your own mockups and place them inside the brand guidelines without entrusting them to AI.

The other part of the process is document preparation. For this, I used the AI Assistant in Adobe Illustrator. It worked perfectly and saved me a huge amount of stress and willpower. So I have nothing else to say, except that I recommend everyone start using it because it’s fast!

🦅 Conclusion

To conclude everything I’ve said in this report, I want to say that AI must be treated consciously and always used with human review. Quality work requires meaningful decisions, not generic ones. As a designer, you have to learn how to deliver quickly, but also how to use your time wisely and take as much time as needed for creativity—even if it makes you look like a turtle to your client. Fast work doesn’t always mean the best work; however, slow and meaningful work often does.

See you on the other side!