The #1 Secret Weapon of Top Marketers

This Week

• Long Read: The #1 Secret Weapon of Top Marketers

• AI Tools: The best AI design tools available today

• Career: 4 AI Tips From a Design Expert

• Around the Web: Canva’s Latest AI Release, AI’s Impact on Designers

• Deep Dive: Master Midjourney in Minutes

• Invest: The Rise of AI Investors

• Amusing: AI Honesty 

• News

• Folks to Follow

The #1 Secret Weapon of Top Marketers

Harnessing Today’s AI-Powered Design Tools 

If you've ever found yourself tangled in layers upon layers of Photoshop files, wondering why your graphics look more like a toddler's scribble than a sleek ad, I’m here to commiserate.

I’m a marketer, not a designer, but when you’re working for a startup or on a one-person team, everyone expects you to be. The HR team wants help with their employee engagement posters; the product team expects you to edit a folder of screenshots; you need graphics for five different social media channels - the list goes on.

Read on at Medium with my friend’s link.

6 AI Tools to Streamline Your Design

Now that you know the potential of AI for design and understand some of its limitations, it’s time to dive in and get to work. I’ve vetted the six best (and most affordable) AI-powered design tools on the market today.

1. Canva

What it does: Canva has a wide range of templates, an easy drag-and-drop user interface, and all the functions you need for essential design work.

Favorite feature: You can create a brand kit to access fonts, logos, and colors easily.

Pricing: The free version is surprisingly robust, but if you want premium graphics and tools, you’ll need the pro plan for $9.95/month.

Pros: User-friendly, extensive template library.

Cons: Not as many functions as professional-grade design platforms like Adobe.

G2 rating: 4.7

2. Midjourney

What it does: Midjourney is a generative AI tool that creates images from text descriptions.

Favorite feature: With the right prompt, you can get high-quality and beautiful images.

Pricing: Free with limited features, or the premium plan starts at $20/month.

Pros: It creates the highest quality images.

Cons: The user interface takes some getting used to, and the learning curve is pretty steep.

G2 rating: 4.4

3. Visme

What it does: Visme provides AI-powered tools for presentations, infographics, videos, and other visual content.

Favorite feature: It’s data visualization capabilities.

Pricing: Free for a limited number of templates or $14/month for the premium plan.

Pros: It has the best templates for data and infographics.

Cons: Not as many templates as Canva.

G2 rating: 4.4

4. Fotor

What it does: Fotor is a photo editing and graphic design platform with functionality that ranges from an AI face generator to image enhancement.

Favorite feature: I love the "one-tap enhance" feature for quick photo improvements.

Pricing: You can sign up for the free version, or their Pro plan starts at $8.99/month.

Pros: Affordable, user-friendly and quick editing options.

Cons: Less robust compared to more specialized tools like Photoshop.

G2 rating: 4.2

5. Clarifai

What It Does: Clarifai specializes in AI-driven image and video recognition. It can automatically identify and tag different elements in your visual content, making it easy to organize and locate the exact image or video you need.

Favorite Feature: You can train custom models if your needs are super niche.

Pricing: They have a free tier, but you’ll need the $30/month pro plan for more images.

Pros: Accurate tagging, great API for custom solutions, and a robust dashboard.

Cons: The learning curve might be steep if you go the custom model route.

G2 Rating: 4.3

6. Decktopus

What It Does: Decktopus is an AI-driven tool that streamlines the creation of presentation decks. It takes your content and turns it into a sleek, professional-looking presentation.

Favorite Feature: The 'Auto-Design' function. Just plug in your content, and Decktopus automatically arranges it into a visually pleasing layout, picking fonts, colors, and images.

Pricing: Decktopus offers a free basic plan, but to unlock all the bells and whistles, you're looking at around $10/month.

Pros: Speedy deck creation, tons of templates.

Cons: Limited customizability, not as feature-rich as tools like Powerpoint.

G2 Rating: 4.6

4 Career Tips From a Design Expert

Tibi David has a host of great articles about AI and design. Here’s his advice on getting started:

1. Experiment: Before getting too deep, experiment with AI tools like ChatGPT. Use them in real projects to determine what they can and can't do.

2. Get feedback: Use AI to get feedback on your ideas. Human opinion is essential, but AI can give a new perspective, especially regarding data-based ideas.

3. Use AI for Brainstorming: Use AI as a brainstorming partner. It can give you new ideas, suggest different ways to build things, and even help you make better choices.

4. Stay up-to-date: The world of AI is changing quickly. Check your tools often for updates, new features, and new ways to use them.

You can read the full article on Tibi’s blog here.

Canva’s New AI Features

Canva announced a long list of AI features last week. Here are the quick hits:

Magic Switch: Allows users to instantly transform an existing design into another format, such as converting a blog into an email or social media post, without needing to change the layout or update the copy text manually.

Magic Media: A new text-to-video capability powered by Runway AI, which can generate short videos from text-based prompts or existing images uploaded to Canva’s asset library.

Magic Grab: A new photo editing feature that can select and automatically separate any subject in an image to edit, reposition, or resize.

Watch the video here.

Master Midjourney in Minutes

Midjourney is one of the best AI-generated text-to-image generation platforms out there, but I’m not going to lie — this platform is challenging, especially for the uninitiated.

Good news, though! If you're feeling a bit lost in the Midjourney wilderness, there are a ton of great tutorials to get you started on YouTube. I like the one from Spoon Graphics. It gives you the basics without getting bogged down in a ton of detail.

Watch the tutorial from Spoon Graphics here.

The Rise of AI Investors

According to Contrary Research, generative AI investment is just like the early 2000s Internet gold rush. Goldman Sachs projects that private investments in AI will increase from $92 billion in 2022 to over $158 billion in 2025, a 72% increase over three years.

Skeptics argue that the AI funding frenzy might be a bubble, with capital thrown at companies that lack earnings, founders with little expertise, and companies that don’t have a product.

Read the full article at Contrary Research.

AI Will Change Graphic Design Forever

An ARK Invest study suggests that a human graphic designer would take more than 5.25 hours to recreate images at a cost of ~$150 based compared to AI-generated images, which cost ~$0.01––more than 99.99% lower than human labor.

Read the full article at ARK Invest.

The Truth Hurts

Careful what you ask ChatGPT; it might sting a little.

News

• Jasper, a generative AI tool heavily dependent on OpenAI’s GPT, has cut its valuation internally by 20%.

• Runway, the company providing cutting-edge generative AI video, announced a partnership with Canva to bring its product into Canva’s video creation suite.

• Adobe releases new AI features.

Folks to Follow

Tibi David for AI design tips
AI Marketing Hub who tweets about AI design tools
Aneta Kmiecik for UX and design advice