ai design

In this episode of Podcast Mark, host Mark de Grasse has an extensive discussion with his long-time collaborator Brad Ball, focusing on artificial intelligence and its impacts on industries like branding and design. They explore the current capabilities of AI—as well as its limitations—and caution that it is not magic, still requiring significant human input and creativity.

TOPICS:
- What AI is and isn't, and its current limitations: They explore the current capabilities of AI like accelerating processes and generating ideas. However, they note AI still requires extensive human creativity, planning, and editing to shape the output in a useful way towards desired outcomes. It is not magic—it has boundaries in its abilities.
- How AI can be used for ideation and accelerating creative processes: AI tools can rapidly produce ideas, concepts, and drafts to significantly enhance and expedite creative workflows. As an example, Brad discusses quickly mocking up visual concepts to demonstrate for clients rather than only written explanations. The key is crafting thoughtful prompts and parameters to guide the AI.
- The potential of AI to transform education by personalizing lessons: They envision AI enabling customized educational approaches tailored to individuals' interests and comprehension levels rather than one-size-fits-all. Mark gives an example of struggling to grasp abstract moon-phase terminology until it was framed as a house construction analogy. AI could perpetually re-frame concepts until they "click."

LINKS
Brad Ball: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iambradball/
Ardent Creative: https://www.ardentcreative.com/

🧠 WHAT WILL YOU LEARN IN THIS INTERVIEW?

 1. Challenges of designing for AI

2. How to get a job as an AI Designer 

📢 WHY IS HENRY MODISETT A ROCKSTAR? 

Henry Modisett is the Head of Design at Perplexity AI. Previously he worked as a designer at Quora and Google.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 
(00:00) Interview trailer
(01:39 )Why designers should not use Dribble for design inspiration?
(5:08) What designers can learn from wine stewards? 
(6:14) Former Google employee reveals design process at Google 
(11:25) Why should designers learn to code? 
(16:41) Why handoff to engineering is faster when a designer knows how to code 
(18:54) Why Henry Modisett joined Perplexity AI as the founding designer? 
(21:47) What it's like to design for a billion users? 24:01 How to get a job as an AI designer? 
(28:38) How to deal with job rejections as a designer? 
(36:40) Reality of working in San Francisco as a Designer

🤝 CONNECT WITH HENRY MODISETT 

Twitter -https://twitter.com/henrymodis

 LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/in/henrymodisett/

🤙 CONNECT WITH JAYNEIL DALAL 

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayneil 

Twitter - https://twitter.com/jayneildalal

📺 INTERVIEW VIDEO:
https://youtu.be/4BH454Kw-90

4:00) - Most Interesting | 126. Amputees Feel Warmth In Their Missing Hand

(8:40) - Listener Favorite | 118. Robotics & AI in Sheet Metal Forming

(12:23) - Most Impactful | 112. Bringing Humans Back Into The Loop For AI

(16:30) - Hidden Gem(s) | 135. Reinventing Retail in The Connectivity Age & 144. An implantable device could enable injection-free control of diabetes

Key Points

• The conversation begins with an introduction of the UX Writing Hub and its resources, including a blog, a podcast, a weekly newsletter, and courses with AI components. (00:24)
• Nick Babich, a UX consultant and influencer, shares his approach to product design and his passion for sharing valuable information with the design community. (01:22)
• Nick discusses the role of AI in his design process, particularly how he uses GPT for user research, ideation, and prototyping. He shares how GPT helps him speed up his design process and prototyping. (01:58)
• The conversation shifts to the use of AI tools like Mid Journey and Stable Diffusion in design. Nick shares his experience with these tools and how they have impacted his design process. (03:24)
• The importance of UX writing in the era of AI is discussed. Nick believes that UX writing will be a top skill in the next decade as the quality of prompts has a direct impact on the output that AI tools produce. (19:14)
• Nick shares his content strategy, which involves identifying challenging tasks, finding solutions, and sharing these resources with the community. He encourages others to share their work and not be afraid of criticism. (23:39)

Links

Free UX Writing Course

Free AI for UX Course

Check out the UX Writing Academy

Follow Nick Babich

Highlight Quotes

RUSS: Simplifying inputs so that the experience is much smoother

"It's how do we normalize the inputs and make sure the inputs are as great for any experienced client and we found that creates such a better output. For the inexperienced client that isn't thinking about the details, our process gets all the information required every single time. Then for the experienced client, what's really nice is that it's very repeatable."

RUSS: Avoid platforms or tools that have a lackluster brief process

"Many of those poor experiences, when you're using other platforms, are self-inflicted. You're just not giving enough information. So whatever you're using, review the input. What signal are you communicating? Are you communicating something that's clear or are you expecting people to guess? And if it's the latter, the experience is probably going to be a little bit more work to try to get that up to speed"

Get in touch with Russ:

LinkedIn

Connect with Kevin and find out more about his work:

Kevin Groome | Pica9 | Pica9.com

Manage and scale your distributed brand with Pica9, the brand-to-local marketing platform that helps by providing consistent branding and localized experiences across every location.

BOOK A DEMO NOW!

Today is a conversational treat. We are joined by Gary David, a sociologist, professor, professional speaker, and co-host of the popular podcast Experience By Design.

Gary is one entertaining human and delivers a conversation that is rich in intellectual stimuli. We explore the keys to a deeper understanding of the people, cultures, and context for which we design. We also go deep into future thinking and how AI will impact our society. At one point, Gary actually says that we should be less concerned with what AI means to us and more concerned with what it says about us.

The last 15 minutes get pretty sci-fi, and we touch on why we need to write with more soul, heart, and purpose… and why it might important to our very existence.

It’s a long conversation and I hope you can make time for all of it – It just kept getting better.

Click here to get your FREE copy of the Imagine a Place journal

Follow Imagine a Place on LinkedIn

Connect with Doug Shapiro on LinkedIn

Follow Doug on LinkedIn.

Click here to get your copy of Doug's children's book—Design Your World.

Follow Imagine a Place on LinkedIn.

(0:48) - Bringing Humans Back Into The Loop For AI

Ran Segall’s design YouTube channel Flux Academy has reached a whopping +450K subscribers. He shares how he got there and what you can do to break into the industry – whether you plan to become a UX designer or UX writer or something else. 

He also talks about his enthusiasm for artificial intelligence. As AI starts doing the heavy lifting for designers, we can focus on the innovative side of design.

• Ran’s background and his journey to +450K subscribers (from 1:50)
• The role of UX writing in design (from 7:36)
• How to become a full stack UX person (from 10:50)
• Finding your first client (from 12:30)
• Content creation as a way to build trust (from 14:10)
• Why consistency is key and why you gotta love what you do (from 15:25)
• AI and the future of design (from 19:30)

Links

Follow Ran on LinkedIn
Flux Academy on YouTube
 

Try our free UX writing course

Episode Highlights:

• 02.10: May tells the listeners a little bit about her journey in tech as a founder.
• 02.22: May and her co-founder have been building tools for writers in some way or other during their whole entrepreneurial journey. 
• 04.11: Many teams are building their own quality content style guides, or some call it content design systems, which is the kind of product teams take for brand book but only for a digital product. 
• 05.45: The goal of the content strategy is that the person owning the systemization is to enable them to do good writing on their own. The best practice for setting up the system depends on where the team is, says May.
• 07.18: May explains that they are doing a templates library that their customers and their community is contributing, and they will be able to quickly build a very deep style guide in Writer, even if a user is starting from the scratch.
• 08.04: We have got teams that are taking 200 pages of style guides and getting them into Writer in one day, and then your end-user has that at their fingertips while they are writing, says May.
• 09.27: Yuval inquires from May, if we have 200 pages of a content style guide and people in the company would follow the guideline, how do you guys solve that issue and make the content accessible for everyone in the product team?
• 10.45: May explains that they have got a chrome extension that is a sidebar that kind of lives alongside various apps and underlines things while a user is writing in chrome, and the same works in Figma.
• 13.01: You have a content style guide connected to some database operated by the content style guide team, and then you could use it in your Figma because it is integrated with that in the frame of writing, says Yuval.
• 14.47: Yuval asks May, based on her experience and clients, how do people use Figma to work with their copy management these days?
• 18.57: Yuval asks May’s take on the future of AI and writers who think that all these AI tools would replace them at some point?
• 19.58: Everything on the market today on language generation piece is at best one layer of rules on top of the very broad-based API of GPT 3, affirms May.
• 21.38: An accelerant to your workflow has a lot to do with your native writing ability and creativity. At this stage, it is not an out-of-the-box solution that writers for a living think are great.
• 22.31: AI is not convinced to replace us this year, or even in the next few years, but the question is for writers or designers that oversee creating digital experiences, “what kind of challenges do you think they will have in the future?”
• 24.23: The quality input is what is required for anything that is helping you on the consistency side and under a scale on the enablement side, says Yuval.
• 28.29: Yuval has been reading a lot on strategy, design, content space, and rereading stuff. AMP IT UP is his favorite entrepreneurship book in general.
• 34.20: UX writers are real contributions to their product team because what they are doing is important and amazing. 

3 Key Points

1. With Writer, it is the first time that we have gone straight to put in the words on a page as a world, and it has been so extraordinary to get to know the community, whether they are knowledge-based writers, support writers, content strategists, content designers, UX writers, explains May.
2. When you load up a writer plugin, it just kind of shows up in your Figma app over to the side, and it lets you know when you run it on a frame or a component if there are errors in the writing, says May.
3. The Writer is an AI writing assistant where privacy is a big feature. We don’t save any customer data, and it is a big differentiator against the Grammarly release of the world. We are world-class at synthetic data creation, says May.

Tweetable Quotes

• “We still are kind of in the same place where overall leadership doesn’t understand the power that words can have to drive business objectives.” – May
• “If you don’t have a style guide, you can work with our support team and us or our CS team to use the writer product to define rules.” - May
• “The beauty of having everybody in Figma who’s writing and reviewing is that it has much higher fidelity. You don’t have to have iterations once it goes into development.” - Yuval 
• “I like the idea of leverage, and it is hard to internalize what leverage means and kind of nonlinear scenarios, especially in the startup world.” - Yuval

Resources Mentioned:

• May Habib: Website | Linkedin
• Podcast Editing