Toasters are probably not a great example, but concept art is a big deal in most product development / creative industries. Tech, cars, Hollywood, fashion, anime, etc.
The process usually involves finding and hiring an artist and working with them as they create lots and lots of designs until you find one you like, and then more sketches until the design is refined. So you either need to have a significant amount of money to hire artists for an extended project, or the artistic ability to do it yourself.
Using DALL-E instead, you get 4 high quality images in 20 seconds. If you don't like what it comes up with, you adjust your prompt, add more detailed instructions, and keep experimenting. And anyone can do this, regardless of artistic ability, and it's free (at least for now).
But then you've dramatically shifted from having advertising design done for you to buying a highly technical tool that allows you to create illustrations. If you are someone with no design or illustration experience, that isn't going to work out so great for you.
This is what I thought as soon as I saw the blog post, but in reverse: as a tool for graphic artists.
My wife ended to turning her artistic abilities into a greetings cards / wedding stationery because her social anxiety and low self esteem make it extremely difficult for her to work through the process of figuring out what the customer actually wants and how much she should charge for a commission. The way she describes it, many customers think that they can give you a one-sentence request and get back exactly what's inside their head, except that there is nothing inside their head at all, just a very loose idea. Essentially, they want to flip through an infinite set of mock-ups (that they don't pay for) until they finally stab one with their finger and say "THIS!", but they have no idea in advance what "this" is. When they finally come to payment, they only want to pay for the time it took you to produce the final result, which is "just a simple design!"
In fact, the red-flag customers sound like this: "Hello. I'm looking for the simplest thing in the world and it probably won't take an amazing artist like you 15 minutes to make. It'll be used as a logo at our business so it would be great publicity for you!"
Person doesn't value your skill and will try to low-ball you. Ask them to clarify their one-sentence request and they say "Oh, you know, just a simple logo with something nautical on it". Tell them you'll charge for every set of mock-ups as you slowly figure out what they want, and they disappear.
I think that tools like these could be the first step in your journey with a customer. They have to explain to AI what they want, and refine their statement to the point where it produces "mock-ups" something in the right ballpark. Then you can take their top 3 results and talk through them.
I agree that certain design elements draw the user's eye, but paying for someone's doodles seems like a bit much. If you're doing webdesign, can you -really- not find anyone with a Wacom and a steady hand? Heck, get a random girl to draw that squiggle.
It wouldn't cost much to hire some recent illustration or design school grads and have them do nothing but test the Surface all day and give feature and usability suggestions. Asking a busy person like the Penny Arcade artist to offer suggestions right before the ship date, and then use his suggestions in post-ship date fixes is just half assed.
> "A few of these are nice enough, but not "stunning". You really do need to pay a talented human for that, currently."
Perhaps. Or you (or the creative human talent) could use this as a prototyping tool? Quick low cost brainstorming / iterations to a explore ideas before the high cost human talent kicks in.
Most clients __think__ they know what they want, but the reality is it's closer to "we'll know it when we see it." Getting some ideas in front of them - knowing all but one is going to be paid for - as quickly as possible is a blessing.
If you're doing the designs yourself you're doing yourself a great disservice by charging so little.
Often times most people assume they have an endless well of creativity in them but in actually its a feast and famine scenario. Assuming you want to do this full-time you will burn out eventually.
For this app in particular sure. But in general I expect a massive uptick in people playing around with telling image AI's "make a modern looking table and chairs with sharp geometric designs and..." then refining the concept and taking that as an inspiration portfolio to a craftsman. I wouldn't be interested in paying a designer to just come up with ideas that I may not even like, but if I have something I know I like and a designer/craftsman can refine/realize it, that's a compelling proposition.
You’re looking at these images through the lens as a professional illustrator who has concepts of what is acceptable to deliver as a professional illustrator.
The reason it will steal your job is because your client, instead of having the concept and then hiring you to make something concrete will just type in prompts and click storyboard mode in the eventual tool this is democratized into.
To this person it won’t matter if it’s perfect or not because they just did it in 30 minutes themselves rather than having to hire someone and go back and forth over a week.
End of the day you just need an image good enough to get sign off from the client, and the quality level you work to won’t be needed anymore.
I see a lot of designers who are very creative but are creating artwork instead of interaction designs.
The problem is: it sells.
Customer wants a website, designer makes a peace of art, customer thinks it looks amazing, contracts are signed.
The the trouble starts when it is getting build.
Real texts are much longer than designed, the available pictures don't fit as good as the hand picked stock pictures, and the interaction.. well it all looked great on paper.
I believe it's dumb to get contracts this way because the project always delays because the client doesn't get what works.
It's better to sell customers a moodboard and then design interaction as the project moves along.
Care to share a workflow? No doubt I've seen people make shitty assets more quickly, but nothing I'd consider useful for any of my purposes. Besides, the hard part of design is figuring out the best way to solve design problems visually, not making the assets. You can definitely save money on designers if you don't care about having good design.
you could probably get your main systems made so that designers can go on top of them with free assets / stable diffusion then get an artist after you have all that
I'd really love it if someone could make it as as easy to buy design help as it is to buy stock photography.
There is an astronomical difference between the effort required to buy tens of thousands of dollars worth of imagery, and the effort required to buy tens of thousands of dollars worth of someone's time. The former is a matter of a cart and credit card, the latter requires lengthy emails, contracts, legal approvals, timesheets, and all other sorts of mumbo jumbo and for most projects, is enough work that I often just don't bother.
Though those roadblocks are there to protect both parties, I suspect that there's an artificially large delta between cost and risk.
I am working on an MVP. I have a clear idea of what I want for the hero illustration. The idea is 3D style building, inspired by the intro of the Silicon Valley TV show.
My first inclination is to use 99 Designs, but then my second thought is finding someone I like on Dribble and hiring them directly. My third thought is that I should use some generic free illustrations... but then I think to myself how boring and generic those are, and my idea is very specific.
I'd love to hear some advice. Has anybody tried hiring a designer directly from Dribble? How do you go about hiring a good designer to start an incremental business relationship? Have you used 99 Designs with good luck? and lastly, any recommendations for free alternatives?
If you are retouching a favicon pixel-by-pixel I can see that racking up a few hours: £585 = $944, so if a designer is say charging $150 to work on a complex logo that would quickly add up. It's actually much harder to create something good in the space of just a few pixels as opposed to a social media icon which might give you 100 pixels.
By the way I noticed yesterday that Hacker news is going to start a designer's directory because there "are so few good designers". I submit the problem really is that there are so few programmers who can be bothered to learn anything about designers or how they work.
In fact the very notion that designers are some secondary set of dumb hands is quite insulting. The reality is that product design (of any sort) should START with a designer and not an engineer. VCs should give more serious thought that an BFA or MFA is worth far more than a CS or MBA.
If you are a designer, this is absolutely the best thing you can do to sky-rocket your market value over night:
Create a concept design from a popular product and put it on a slick landing page. It shows that you, as a designer, are proactive and think beyond designing standard stuff (like webpages or mobile apps).
Moreover, you are not limited by any client restrictions[1] which hurt your work (and portfolio), you learn 3D modelling if you haven't yet (it's not hard just time consuming), if you are lucky with social news sites you get so much free promo and finally, it's the eye-catcher on any CV.
The process usually involves finding and hiring an artist and working with them as they create lots and lots of designs until you find one you like, and then more sketches until the design is refined. So you either need to have a significant amount of money to hire artists for an extended project, or the artistic ability to do it yourself.
Using DALL-E instead, you get 4 high quality images in 20 seconds. If you don't like what it comes up with, you adjust your prompt, add more detailed instructions, and keep experimenting. And anyone can do this, regardless of artistic ability, and it's free (at least for now).
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