Rob Eisenbach is a seasoned marketer and designer with his own consulting company, Iron River, focusing on brand strategy and UX Design. Wanting to expand his visual skillset when it came to generative AI tools, Rob enrolled in our four-week AI for Visual Design course.
His goal was to gain hands-on experience working with industry-standard tools, and gain a mastery of prompt engineering, particularly when it came to adding animation to visual work. After completing the course, he is much more confident working with generative AI tools and looks forward to offering these services to his clients.
Rob’s Motivations for Upskilling
As an entrepreneur who wants to ensure that his skills are up to date with the current market, Rob was motivated to embrace AI learning in an environment that would be hands-on and offer guardrails for active learning and accountability.
On deciding to take the AI for Visual Design course, Rob shared “If you're not using AI, you're off the boat, and I wanted to be on the boat. More importantly, I was looking for a way to fast-forward my learning in AI. I felt four weeks was a perfect amount of time to really dig into it, and also be forced to use tools and actually create projects. I definitely wanted to have things to put into my portfolio.”
The Learning Experience: Effectively Building Proficiency
One of the key elements of AI for Visual Design is working with a variety of industry-leading tools in an extremely hands-on way through guided, practical lessons and projects. As someone coming into the course with limited experience working with generative AI, it was important to Rob that he walked away from the course feeling as though he could now successfully integrate working with tools such as MidJourney and ChatGPT into his client offerings.
“A lot of these tools, like MidJourney were not super user-friendly when I took the course, and unless you have use cases, it’s hard to spend time working with them all day. But I proved that I could do the learning curve, and it really is wild how much time and energy it saves you. The imagery you can get with MidJourney… was fantastic.”
The Value of Live Feedback
AI for Visual Design gives students the opportunity to work collaboratively with peers in weekly live sessions facilitated by an expert mentor. Being able to receive live feedback on project work was helpful throughout the duration of the course, as it allowed for active problem-solving and seeing how different tools functioned in real time.
Of the live sessions, Rob shared “I was super comfortable asking questions or being asked questions, and from a learning standpoint, I think it's key to have that give and take when you're experiencing new material. And anytime you're talking to a live person, it's much more engaging.”
Rob also mentioned that the weekly live sessions gave him something to work towards in terms of project completion and overall accountability.
Key Takeaways to Use Within His Role
For Rob, one of the biggest goals was to be able to feel confident using AI in client-facing work, and staying ahead of the curve when it came to generative tools—and AI for Visual Design gave him those skills.
“Big picture stuff, learning that you can use AI as a brainstorming partner—I was blown away. After taking this course, I asked myself, ‘Why would you ever take a white sheet of paper approach to do anything?’ You can use these tools as a great starting point.”
One of the final projects in AI for Visual Design involves animating imagery, which was one of the biggest takeaways for Rob overall. Of his work, Rob shared, “Putting a social media campaign together with live video but doing it with AI, and being able to present that to a client—that’s why I love this project. A lot of what I do is strategic marketing, but having ChatGPT or other AI to actually execute some of this stuff and use it as an example—that’s crazy.”
Through understanding effective prompt crafting, Rob was able to hone in on how he could best utilize generative AI for his project work, and put those new skills into effective action.
Want to harness the power of AI in your visual design work? Learn more about our AI for Visual Design course.