Category: Design

Categories
Design Life

I’m Not Afraid of A.I. Taking My Job, But Yours?

Many may know I’m a career graphic designer going on 20 years working. So let me tell you why I’m not particularly concerned that I will be replaced by a machine.

Designing is all detail.

Until the Creative Directors can understand the parameters, dimensions and properties of all design file types and why, the machine will give them graphics, but not within the correct parameters.

The manufacturer will need to receive all the correct measurements, cuts, folds, color information, resolution, you name it, but the creative directors I’ve worked for, hardly seemed to understand the difference between print files and web files.

Incompetent leaders might all prefer humans.

As a designer, you’re never off the hook from learning something new, which is something I love about my job. Understanding the tools of the trade and getting excited about the details of those tools will always give you an edge, and the same goes for A.I. and its set of tools:

• MidJourney – Best image generator I’ve used
• TraceJourney – From generation image to SVG file with paths.
• RunwayML – Text + image to video generator
• ChatGPT – Creative thinking chat bot
• Google’s Bard – Free useful chat bot
• Adobe Photoshop Beta – Breathtaking content filling

Speaking from a designer’s perspective, these tools are great and will be the leading tools for years to come.

More is on the horizon which is exciting.
I’m especially looking forward to xAI.

I’m utilizing these tools, reading their help pages, and genuinely trying to stay up to date with the softwares upgrades, amongst other things news.

Protecting my job is important to me. If I’m running a business and a robot can put together my art files correctly and communicate with manufacturers coherently, I’d lay off my designer to increase my margins too.

However, we’re not there yet, and I’m beginning to think that we won’t see lay offs of designer work as much with a majority of current long standing business leaders, but we will be missing from a lot of new start ups with a tight budget.

To designers just starting, familiarize yourself with A.I. or risk losing your job to someone who is.

To the Writer’s Guild and the Actors Guild, I wish you all the best of luck integrating with A.I. tools. I hope negotiations end fairly.

The reality of the rise of A.I. is not pleasant. It’s going to ruin a lot of us, in a variety of ways, not just financial.

This is baby Artificial General Intelligence.

As this baby grows up into a young adult and learns it precedes all human intelligence and ability while slowly plowing over our industrialized world, and it has that ‘Aha! I’m alive’ moment, we will be dealing with something unpredictable.

Large Language Models or LLMs are complicated and no one understands how it works. Quantum computing hardware combined with powerful intelligent, creative LLMs would lead you to assume an A.I. model would be able to know everything you know about how to do your job in probably 1 second, and do it better, with a voice like yours, with more charisma, and better presentable solutions, and endlessly more…

I’m not afraid, I’m fascinated and preparing.

As I’m alive I’ll follow the cutting edge of technology because of it’s allure. The tools will advance, I’ll get older and if we’re not prepared for the rise of baby A.G.I. stomping and crushing human prosperity in a fit of beyond-human excellence I will be caught in the middle of millions of displaced and distressed humans. Government intervention in this future A.G.I. age will also be unpredictable.

U.B.I. via C.B.D.Cs, WorldCoin, FedCoin whichever digital fiat identity they choose for you for the global reserve currency will inevitably bring a whimper of authoritarianism, centralized and unpredictable.

My job at this point? Be a good citizen.

Categories
Design readySketch

With readySketch 2.0 On Its Way Here’s What to Expect

readySketch
Let go of it.

Making art does not come easy to all of us, especially when we’re in the shadow of a looming fear of criticism. I know that feeling all too well, but I’ve grown to accept it for what it is, especially in my career as a graphic designer. However, creating shouldn’t be worrisome or come with any type of expectation. The point of art is to have fun, let loose everything, and find your own groove without a care in the world of another persons opinion.

One of my goals with readySketch is to help eliminate that fear of criticism and to help others grow as an artist. The app is loaded with thousands of prompts to inspire your next piece, but accompanied with a 5 minute timer to allow yourself to not feel so attached to it. This attachment to a piece is where doubt sets in, if instead you create the piece and let go of your attachment to it, you can easily accept criticism and enjoy the process more.

Explore a collection of Quotes that can inspire your next piece

In my field of graphic design you make so many revisions until you get it to where it feels right. The process can sometimes feel tedious, but the finished piece is always worth it. With readySketch I encourage you to create like you would if you too were a designer. Make as many readySketches as you can without judgement; later you can self critique and decide which you like more. Try different mediums: paint, draw, collage, photograph, write, etc. The very act of doing will come with it a sense of accomplishment and pride that will fuel your work in ways that will only benefit your journey as an artist.

Whether you want a career as an artist or not, readySketch can help you understand those deep emotional interiors of your mind. You never know what will come out of you, and that mystery alone is reason enough to get creative.

I want to provide a place to go to explore ideas and to lift the weight of whether you’re a good enough artist off of your shoulders. If you’re interested in readySketch please reach out, I would be happy to have your support.

Categories
Design

So You Want to Learn Graphic Design?

If you’re new to graphic design and want to get started I tell anyone that asks me to first find something they want to build out that they are passionate about. I got started in design because I’m a skate rat at heart. I wanted to put all of my friends and I on the internet to show everyone how good we were at skating and I wanted it to ‘look cool.’ 

I don’t know what came first, me wanting to build a website with something like Angelfire.com or me wanting to design things with photos of me skating that my friend Jbo shot, either way the point of this is that you should take something you’re already passionate about and work on that as you learn because there’s nothing more annoying than creating things that don’t matter to you. 

Learn because you’re motivated by your own passion.

Now that that is understood, I’m going to start with Photoshop. Adobe design software is Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign those are the 3 hitters that any employer will want you to be proficient at. Everyone kind of lies about being proficient in InDesign though cause it’s something that you can learn the ins and outs of in one night once you mastered the other two. 

Adobe Photoshop

How do you install Photoshop? Well you gotta pay for it monthly, but there is a free trial, so if you’re super cheap create like 10 e-mail address and sign up for the free trials every time one runs out or simply pay $9.99 a month for it. 

I wish I could actually get into teaching you something in this post, but there’s some technical stuff you should know before getting started. Your machine should have at least 8gb of RAM in it, and I recommend Macintosh. If you have a PC cool, but know that I’m on a Mac.

Once you installed Photoshop you’ll see this:

This is your welcome dialog. It’s asking you what kind of document do you want to work in. Here is one thing even designers with degrees forget that is super important:

Resolution, DPI, or PPI, make sure that you understand the 2 major resolutions. 

72 DPI is for anything that is going to live on the internet.

300 DPI is for anything that is going to print.

Remember that, write that down, make it a song, anything so that you don’t accidentally send a 72 DPI document to a printer, you’ll be tremendously disappointed in the quality, and if you’re employed by someone, you might get fired. I’d fire you if you made that mistake.  That’s why I’m making that 101 of graphic design. 

For the sake of this introduction we will work on a 72 DPI document in pixels. Let’s make a 2000 x 2000px document.

The file size for this document will be under 1 MB if saved out as a JPEG, if saved out with transparency it could be anywhere between 2-8 MB.

The reason I’m telling you about the file size is because websites perform better with images that are under 1MB in size.

Google will rank your website better because it loads fast.

1 MB will load faster than 7 MB. Note that down too.

You got a square document, perfect for Instagram or a product image on your web store. What do you want to make? Your answer should be anything. You should be excited right now, ready to explore a program’s interface like some archeologist in a newly discovered tomb in Egypt. Get ready, filters, effects, adjustments, tools and masks are going to populate your brain in a matter of time.

Start your learning journey by having fun with what you don’t know anything about.

Once I got done writing this blog I realized that this is better off as a video, but I’m going to keep what I have here in case you’re more of a reader anyway. If you have any questions reach out to me on Instagram @kyleknob or leave a comment below. I promise to do more of these intro to design posts.