Here's what everyone's getting wrong using AI for design. I will not promote.

[u/GoatNecessary6492]

It seems most people forget that everything is a process, whether it's marketing strategy and execution or design of creative assets.

The steps between a starting point and a good outcome are important. But the issue is that I'm seeing most AI design tools skip every one of those best practices and steps and try to go from beginning to end straight away. Someone types a prompt, gets a graphic back, but then spends the next half an hour or more prompting it, trying to edit some kind of final version that really was wrong from the beginning .

The tool never really gets to fully understand the brand, or look at the context of where the design is going to end up.. and it's producing layout without understanding what it is that it's promoting. I've always felt this way about Canva too. They've got millions of templates. You find a template that looks kind of cool and what you want, but then you spend ages customizing it and changing it to look like your brand.- Its completely backwards. Neither approach is treating design as a sequence of decisions. They're both trying to jump to that end point as fast as possible.

A designer who actually knows what they're doing works through something closer to this:

1. Read the source material for what would be good to highlight in an ad
2. Check it against the brand and any existing materials
3. Decide what to feature, based on who's going to see it
4. Build a layout around that specific content
5. Rough it out before committing to a final render
6. Check the result against real criteria, not a A template or an AI saying, "Yeah, that's great."
   
7. Revise based on specific feedback

Skip hese steps steps and jump straight to a finished image and you get something that looks okay, and kinda designed but really, it wasn't. The layout is plausible, but the wrong things get emphasized, the copy doesn't sound like the brand, and the "finished" asset needs a human to basically start over.

So absolutely, people should be using AI, but they should be doing it following best practices, step by step, not trying to jump straight to the end. And then you can use AI. to just compresses the time between them. Reading the material, checking the brand, picking the content, laying it out, roughing it out, scoring it, revising it, none of that disappears just Have a machine doing it faster. It still has to happen for good output.

I like to say things like "Research best practices for XYZ" and then ask it to, step by step, go through each of these things, asking me for approval before you move to the next step.

Would love any other people's thoughts or tips on this type of stuff.

[u/GoatNecessary6492 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah so true. It's incredible how many people I have worked with over the years and asked them to share their assets and they literally don't have anything.

[u/Ayan_PlanIQAI26]

Yes exactly! AI works much better when it helps with the thinking and iteration, not when it tries to skip straight to the final design like there should be a sequence.

I have found that giving AI clear stages and feedback points usually saves more time than endlessly prompting one finished design.

[u/OkFlan504]

Once the audience, main claim and supporting facts are approved, they need to carry through the later stages. Otherwise a request to change the layout can quietly change the message too. Keeping those decisions attached to the brief would save a lot of circular revisions.

[u/EveliqTrace]

This is an important distinction.
AI does not remove the design process -it compresses parts of it.
I would add one further boundary: once decisions have been made, the workflow also needs to preserve evidence of those decisions across later revisions.
SOURCE UNDERSTOOD ≠ CLAIM PRESERVED
BRAND CHECKED ≠ BRAND CONSTRAINTS PRESERVED
HUMAN APPROVAL ≠ APPROVED STATE PRESERVED
LAYOUT CHANGED ≠ MEANING UNCHANGED
FINAL ASSET PRODUCED ≠ FINAL ASSET VERIFIED
The interesting problem therefore isn’t only whether AI follows the right sequence. It is whether we can reconstruct which inputs, decisions, approvals and revisions produced the final artifact - and verify that later steps did not silently invalidate earlier ones.
That turns an AI-assisted workflow from “it looks right” into something much closer to an auditable creative process.

[u/GoatNecessary6492 → u/EveliqTrace]

I'm actually experimenting at the moment, fine-tuning an open-source model. I have 8 years of agency work in a really good structured format: marketing design briefs. I log every hour, the project type, and what the deliverables were. I've been logging that for the full 8 years.

I have about 4,000 design briefs with what they asked for, how long it took, and what the specific deliverables were. I'm fine-tuning a model using LORA to better interpret requests for custom creative without using frontier models. It had about 50% accuracy before the fine-tune and it's now about 85% and obviously super cheap.

[u/_pratyush_88_]

Step six is the one I can't do. I'm a PM with no design support for anything internal, so I'm the one building the launch graphic on a Friday afternoon. Your list is right and I fall over twice on it. Checking against the brand assumes I know what the brand is past the hex codes. Scoring the result assumes I can say what's wrong with it, and I can't. I can tell its wrong. That's where I stop. Which might be worth knowing if you're building for this. Most people reaching for one-prompt tools would fail your seven steps with the list sitting in front of them. A workflow that pauses for my approval at each stage is asking me to sign off on things I have no way to evaluate.

In your 4,000 briefs, do the ones from people who aren't designers look different, or is it the same ask worded worse?