Taming the beast: demystifying AI image generation with Visual Electric’s Co-founder Colin Dunn

For quite some time now, the conversation about AI has revolved around it being a threat to craft – it’s seen as an easy way out, a menace for photographers and illustrators, or a tool that undermines creative authorship. But for Colin Dunn, CEO & Co-founder of image generator Visual Electric, that perception misses the big picture. Visual Electric is the playground where his team challenges that idea, and uses AI to empower creatives. Built with designers in mind, Visual Electric offers an intuitive approach to AI image generation – one that isn’t about churning out generic been-there-seen-that visuals, but crafting bespoke, brand-specific imagery. It’s a tool that sits within the creative workflow, rather than overriding it. As Dunn says, agencies, brands and designers have already been using Visual Electric to great effect, not just to generate images but to define a visual language – creating styles that can be refined, iterated upon, and handed over as part of a larger identity system. “Our job is to understand what our customers want and what the technology can do, and to bridge that gap,” Dunn tells us. Following up on our first conversation, here, Dunn demystifies working with AI – going over everything from ideal workflows, prompt generation, and their most used features. For him, the idea with Visual Electric is to showcase that AI doesn’t sweep away the craft required in design. Instead, it’s just another instrument in the creative process.