📰 3 THINGS TO CHECK OUT
What AI for Visual Design Students Are Creating
- A new body of student work from our AI for Visual Design course demonstrates how experienced creatives can integrate today's generative AI tools into a thoughtful visual design process.
- From a sparkling water brand to a Crocs campaign to an art-inspired fragrance concept, students learned to direct and orchestrate AI across an end-to-end campaign workflow. They developed visual identities, generated consistent imagery, transformed stills into motion, and built a reusable, production-ready system for creative direction with AI.
- The next AI for Visual Design cohort launches August 21. Reserve your seat.
How to Decide When an AI Tool Is Worth Keeping
- With new AI tools arriving constantly, and growing pressure to adopt them, Nielsen Norman Group's Caleb Sponheim points out that trying a tool once isn't enough to know whether it belongs in your workflow. He offers a more rigorous test: evaluate one tool against one real task based on problem alignment, risk, output quality, velocity, and experience.
- A tool that produces something in seconds, Sponheim says, may still cost you time in setup, prompting, fact-checking, editing, formatting, and moving between systems. And the reverse can be true — a slower AI workflow may be worthwhile if it produces something you couldn't have achieved otherwise. The point is to evaluate AI against the whole workflow.
- That's the kind of mindset emphasized in AI for UX Design. Building AI skills isn't about collecting tools or automating every task. It's about learning where AI genuinely improves your workflow, how to evaluate its output, and where your own judgment needs to stay in the loop. Join the next cohort, launching September 10.
You Need Time to Stare Into Space
- Heidi Phelps, a content design leader and practicing artist, discusses how compressing every stage of the creative process with AI risks eliminating the thinking time where designers catch edge cases, challenge assumptions, and realize they may be solving the wrong problem altogether.
- The opportunity, then, is to be deliberate about what to accelerate and what to protect. Once a strong direction is clear, AI can help teams move remarkably quickly. But shipping faster also means things can break faster. And the more interesting question, Phelps says, is what are we trying to make possible with all this new speed?
- "So yes: make the process better. Use AI. Remove friction. Move with urgency when urgency is warranted. But if the entire ambition for the future of creative work is that we can do what we already do, only faster, we are aiming far too low."
💜 PORTFOLIO SPOTLIGHT
Kevin Cristancho brings a distinctive creative perspective to UX. His background spans graphic design, social-first content systems, sneaker art, and teaching at Rutgers. That range comes through in work that is expressive while being grounded in thoughtful research and systems thinking. His LEEG Career OS case study shows that balance. After testing revealed that users struggled to understand what they were doing or how their actions connected to career growth, Kevin and his teammate focused the redesign on clarity — simplifying navigation, terminology, and information hierarchy instead of adding more features. Across Kevin’s portfolio, research visibly leads to decisions and testing to iteration, pairing an artist’s point of view with a designer’s discipline.
💡 INTERESTING STUFF...
- What Star Wars Got Right About AI
- The Naked Designer: What Happens When You Can’t Hide Behind Craft
- Dogfooding vs. QA vs. User Research
- Anthropic says it will watermark text generated by its AI models
Like every technology before it, [AI] will reflect the people building it. Experience matters now more than ever. — Chris Shiflett, builder, founder & CEO of Faculty
🧪 FROM THE LAB
Data-Driven Design Starts In a Week
The next cohort of Data-Driven Design launches August 21. Over 6 weeks, you'll learn to use product data to run experiments and justify design decisions, speed up analysis with AI, and develop the judgment to decide what’s worth pursuing. Grab your seat in the cohort.
Join the Designlab Affiliate Program
With the Affiliate Program, you can share Designlab with others and get paid for every enrollment you drive. By referring aspiring and experienced designers to our programs — from UX Academy to the AI Product Design Certification, you'll help someone find the right next step in their career while earning rewards. Getting started takes just a few minutes. Apply here.
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