AI as a Creative Partner: Interview with RehabAI Senior Designer

tl;dr: In this article, I interview Marc Weiss, a Senior UI Designer at RehabAI. We discuss AI’s role in the future of design and the creative industry as a whole and how he uses the technology on a day-to-day basis.

Are creatives in competition with AI? How can AI tools accelerate the design process? What’s the role of a designer in 2023? Find out in our interview below.

Interview with Marc Weiss, Senior Designer at Rehab

Can you please introduce yourself and share a bit about your background in design?

As a young kid, I was always drawing, as most kids are, but I started to get encouragement once I began school from peers and teachers. I realised early on that art in some form would be what I would pursue.

So, I followed that path. I did art class in school, then went on to do a foundation course that opened up the creative world a bit and helped me dabble in multiple crafts, from fine art to fashion to pottery. Eventually, I decided Graphic Design made the most sense and haven’t looked back since.

I joined my first agency called Feed (now part of Dept) as a junior, which specialised in digital marketing for large clients like eBay, Gumtree, Uber and more—exposure to these brands and what actual agency life was like helped me grow a lot. Over time I applied myself, trying to learn as much as possible. I saw my craft and understanding of digital design improve and it became apparent that I could nurture and eventually excel at it. So that has always been my priority as a designer - to aim for a body of work that in 5 or 10 years, I can still say I’m proud of.

What attracted you to join Rehab?

In 2021, new opportunities led me to Rehab, who had a significant body of work coming in but also always seemed to be in the space where innovation led the topic of conversation with some fantastic clients like Nike (every designer’s dream), Google, Spotify, WWE and many more, it seemed like a great match for me with room to develop my industry knowledge, especially in new tech like Web3 and AI.

What sparked your interest in incorporating AI into your design work?

AI is still in an exploratory phase; creatives are coming up with new ways to use it almost every day, and there have been excellent outcomes, such as the Heinz ‘draw ketchup’ campaign. We are starting to see the value of AI in real-world examples that can be effective. To some degree, I think there will always be a need for human intervention because that’s where the magic will come from—the ability to turn a visual into a story.

Personally, I use AI as a tool to amplify and aid design conversations. People are visual and it helps to have something visual when showing a concept or explaining an idea. The speed at which you can ideate or spin up unbelievably complex visuals using the wide variety of AI tools available now is pretty amazing. I think it will only get better and better over time.

What AI-powered tools or software would you say is your go-to?

I use Midjourney the most because we tend to do a lot of fast-paced ideation and proof-of-concept work, so quickly visualising an often complex idea that could otherwise take days to mock up helps my productivity enormously. We used this and other AI tools to help us rapidly prototype our Cannes Idea Validator, which drastically reduced our time-to-market for the campaign.

What challenges or limitations have you encountered when working with AI in design, if any?

Often, the results are only as good as the prompts, so it can be a case of spending time making micro-adjustments till something falls in your lap. Because we use language to generate the prompts, it can be challenging to articulate a specific design aesthetic in words, hoping the tool understands what you're looking for.

I’m sure there will soon be, if not already, methods for using visual references within prompts, which will be very useful. No one has yet managed to have an all-in-one solution for design. I think Firefly has come closest, but I get questionable results much of the time.

Do you feel like you're ever in competition with AI?

AI isn’t something I feel I compete with. It has great uses, but ultimately unique, tailored ideas to a specific need will most likely always come from or at least need intervention from people to make them valuable. AI can speed that process along and help us ideate in much greater variety, but I doubt it will be a one-size-fits-all solution to every creative challenge.

Good creative examples for me are simple ideas that no one else thought of - those “Aha!” moments.

What advice would you give to aspiring designers who want to incorporate AI into their work?

A designer's role will have to spread even wider than it already is, with knowledge of a huge variety of AI tools coming into play. Specialists in specific areas of design are a dying breed, with agencies on the lookout for designers who can offer multiple skill sets, and AI will open that door wider.

My advice to aspiring designers is to get stuck in. You learn by doing so try out different tools to see what works for you, what adds value to your process and you may even come up with new ways of integrating AI into your design process. There’s no right or wrong way of using AI so join the party.

Join the conversation

If you are curious about how to integrate AI into your creative process, we’re helping clients unlock their most valuable AI use case with our half-day Discovery workshop; industry-proven to be the fastest route from theory to prototype.

Contact our team to discover more about Rehab’s market-leading AI consultancy.