What is The Future Of Co-Creation? Together with Brandpad, we ask three studios about working with AI

Welcome back to The Future Of, a series presented in collaboration with digital brand guidelines platform Brandpad. Over the course of six articles, we’re speaking to the brightest designers, studios and agencies about the future of graphic design, unspooling the ideas that will shape tomorrow. In our closing chapter, we’re looking into the crystal ball to understand how, in the age of AI, designers will navigate the complexities and the ethics of working with this radical, yet nonetheless, controversial tool. As AI evolves and becomes intricately intertwined with the designer’s process and output, how will we, someday in the future, distinguish between the handmade and the generated? What questions will designers be asking increasingly as they continue to explore uncharted territories? And how will the growing relationship between AI and design impact the expectations and demands of clients? We asked Two Times Elliott, Bravo and Codea Studio to weigh in. For a while now, studios and designers have been weaving AI into their creative processes, especially in laying out the groundwork for projects with greater efficiency, clarity and effect. While generative tools have been helping with ideation and art direction to flesh out a visual approach and present it to clients for a fuller understanding of a concept, some studios have begun using AI tools in their final output for commercial projects. Take, for example, Codea Studio’s identity for research agency Outside Observations, or their art direction for United Cities and Local Governments’ (UCLG) manifesto, Pact for the Future. For Outside Observations, the team crafted a generative tool that can create infinite representations of the ‘double eye’ logo of the brand, while for Pact for the Future, they generated individual imagery before manipulating it through traditional techniques and then remixing it together. The idea, with both, was to always “avoid the uncanny valley – that unsettling feeling when something feels off in AI-generated images – by seeking a naturalness that feels human,” Founder, Art Director & Creative Director Jose Rosales tells us. The team didn’t want to mirror the oft-unrealistic futurism synonymous with generated images, but instead, look for an aesthetic that was a complete departure from that. “Initially, it was a resource to find visual metaphors that would poetically align with what we wanted to convey. When using Midjourney, our approach wasn’t to showcase the most advanced aspects of AI, quite the opposite. Instead, we wanted images with an organic wear that felt more like archival material than something produced by an algorithm,” adds Rosales. To achieve this, after generating the images, the team printed and scanned everything multiple times. “This process breaks down the precision of AI, softening the hyper-real definition and bringing in imperfections. We played with the materiality of the images – wearing them down, subtly distorting them – so that they appeared as though they had lived through time.”