🛸 How AI influences our creative process
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🛸 How AI influences our creative process
A newsletter about design and creativity, and how they contribute to a better world.
Welcome to Edition #37 of HUMAN
In summary of today:
How we are using AI as a part of our creative process
Type Anatomy, a series by Wonderland
Our picks from around the web, focusing on how AI and creativity interact
Our thoughts on the new We ❤️ NYC logo
“In our humble opinion” we try to answer any questions you may have regarding design, creativity, branding, and digital experiences.
How do you use AI in your creative process?
At WONDERLAND, we have often felt overwhelmed by the onslaught of new AI tools and news being released daily — and we can imagine that many of you reading this may feel the same. A simple scroll through LinkedIn these days is more like a full-fledged inundation of AI news, products (200 new tools were released just last week!), and opinion pieces. At this moment, our feeds are full of comparisons between Google Bard and Chat GPT, stories of how companies and freelancers are using AI in their work, and, most recently the open letter that Elon Musk and other AI experts have signed calling for a halt to large language model research.
The pressure to keep up with this industry can be daunting. To tackle this challenge, our team at WONDERLAND conducted a workshop last month to gather everyone's input on how we should be using AI in our work as a creative agency. We come from diverse backgrounds and have a range of opinions on how involved AI should be in our work — so it was important for us to collate our opinions and decide democratically on how we should move forward.
Here's what we've come up with so far:
We will continue to help each other stay up-to-date with AI news and tools through Slack, and maintain our conversations there, allowing ourselves to evolve our opinions and use of AI as new tools and products are released.
We recognize that Chat GPT can be useful for non-creative text, such as contracts or surveys, where formal and generic language is necessary. However, we don't rely on AI for creative writing and AI certainly doesn’t take the place of creative copywriters or content strategists.
We identified where and when AI tools could be useful for our teams. For example, Chat GPT can be a useful initial research tool for the strategy team, while Midjourney or Dall-E can assist our 3D designers and illustrators with mockups and concepting. We also encourage our design team to experiment with these tools (as seen in this article) but we always cite when a work is AI-generated. And finally, AI-generated artwork doesn’t land in front of our clients in place of human-designed work.
We use AI to detect and solve bugs in our code. AI is a great tool for fixing and helping you on these smaller tasks that otherwise take a developer longer to do + it’s more time efficient to do it through AI.
By taking a collaborative and measured approach to the use of AI in our work, we aim to stay informed, innovative, and true to our creative vision — allowing ourselves to adjust our perspectives and uses of these tools as we learn more. What do you think about this approach? Let us know at hello@wonderlandams.com.
Do you have a design or creativity-related question that you would like to have answered? Mail them to us at hello@wonderlandams.com and we’ll take it from there.
“Type Anatomy” is a short serie by Teddy Reynaud where he takes you through the fundamentals of type design.
Type Anatomy EP.1
Ask people about typefaces and you will get opinions. Which typefaces are good, bad, funny, done by evil or published by Swiss saints? But when you look into the reasoning behind the arguments, it appears to be a complex issue in which black-and-white opinions are not helpful. This Wonderland series is a short explanation that can help to understand type, to give an idea of what the good and bad can be discussed, and also a way to share our subjective and unscientific approach to type design, here at Wonderland. Your opinions will undoubtedly vary.
Did you know, in typography, the base of a letter respects a structure and a mechanic? Like architecture or the human body, the structure of a letter is divided into different parts, and each of these parts, balanced and assembled in a certain order forms the architecture of one letter or another, and ensures the reading of a word.
Erik van Blokland says: «type design has to deal with many restrictions and limitations which are not aesthetic in nature. It’s the designer’s job to make sure that these limitations are adequately dealt with. Some of them will be easier to solve than others.»
It is impossible to teach a deep understanding of type mechanics and structure over a series of articles, but it is possible to share the basics of the discipline and introduce quick tools.
For instance, the capital alphabet: can be divided into five general groups. Vertical stems, diagonal stems, vertical and diagonal stems combined, curved stems and curved and vertical stems combined. The lowercase has a slightly different structure with the letters appearing in different positions because four letters are made up of branches, which do not appear in the caps.
The different cap and lower-case shapes are merged into a font by using design elements that are common to all of the letters, i.e. consistent stem thickness. Serifs appear on all of the letters except the Os. Characteristics tie the letters together. The lateral optical division of the B, E, H, K, P, R, and X relate. The C,E, F, G ,S, T, and Z may be grouped because they share beaks and vertical serifs of similar design, a trait that further promotes family resemblance. Proportions vary from alphabet to alphabet, but in each font, groups of similarly proportioned letters create a relationship too.
It is important that these relationships, attributes or family characteristics straight, diagonal, and curved stems; shading the transition from thick to thin weighted stems, hairlines, and serifs apply throughout a font and make a consistent and predictable design.
Article by Teddy Reynaud, designer at Wonderland
Additional credits: Erik van Blokland and Doyald Young
This week’s interesting design and creativity finds from around the internet. This week, we are highlighting all of our findings on how AI and creativity interact.
Researchers are testing if AI Chatbots can reach human levels of creativity.
Pepsi’s new logo—what designers like (and don't like) about the refresh.
10 magical Design Resources I wish I had known about earlier in my career.
Whenever a famous logo gets redesigned, you'll find people up in arms about it. Take the ❤️ of I love NY. What do you think about it?.
