If You Asked a Designer to Make Anything with AI
Toss Design Chapter’s AI Contest invited designers to build anything with AI, resulting in 122 projects over one month. The examples show that designers primarily used AI to improve existing work—making it faster, more persuasive, and higher quality—rather than creating entirely new kinds of work. The article recommends starting with a frustrating, repetitive task or a frequently repeated communication problem. ## Automating Repetitive Work - A color-extraction tool automatically identifies and adjusts colors from images for use in UI. - Color extraction had been an unresolved challenge at Toss because results varied widely by image. - Designers used AI to draft the logic, test it against many sample images, and rapidly refine it. - The resulting system is now used for product-card colors in Toss Shopping. ## Reducing Collaboration Costs with a Personal Bot - A Slack bot was trained on a designer’s knowledge, past discussions, and reference materials. - It creates draft answers to the many design and requirements questions the designer receives each day. - Team members can send the draft as-is or revise it before responding. - The bot learns from those revisions, improving its answers to similar questions over time. - The designer described the result as feeling like becoming “1.5 people,” and other Toss designers began creating their own bots. ## Persuading Through Interactive Prototypes - A designer built a functioning prototype of a stock-trading desktop interface instead of presenting only static screens. - Users could drag panels, rearrange them, and resize windows, with the interface responding accordingly. - Showing the intended interactions directly reduced the risk that design ideas would be misunderstood during development. - The working prototype helped align designers and developers and persuade the product owner. ## Pushing Quality Within Tight Deadlines - AI-generated motion graphics were created for the key visual of Toss Bank’s recruitment website. - Each job category needed its own animation despite a very short schedule. - The designer created the foundational images manually and repeatedly refined Kling prompts to achieve the desired results. - Human-designed starting and ending frames combined with AI-generated motion allowed all category animations to be completed in a single day. ## Four Ways to Start Using AI - **Efficiency:** Hand off one especially annoying repetitive task to AI. - **Replication:** Build a bot to answer questions you repeatedly handle yourself. - **Persuasion:** Turn designs that require verbal explanation into working prototypes. - **Quality:** Use AI to reach a higher level of polish within a limited timeframe. The practical recommendation is to begin with an existing task rather than searching for an entirely new AI application. Choose one area where AI can save time, communicate intent more clearly, or help raise the final quality.
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