This study explores the collaboration between AI and human creativity in the Good New project. AI enhanced efficiency and ideation, while human design expertise ensured originality and storytelling depth. The project highlights the power of AI as a tool to augment, not replace, artistic vision.
Date: April, 2024
#Branding #Content #Visual Identity #Logotype #CaseStudy
The intersection of artificial intelligence and design is redefining creative workflows, offering new possibilities while raising fundamental questions about authorship, originality, and artistic intent. Good New, a project in collaboration with SRH Berlin University and D2030, explores how AI-generated content can complement human creativity to produce innovative, visually compelling media. This case study examines the collaboration between AI tools and a designer’s intuition, highlighting the strengths and limitations of both.
While AI tools have become powerful assistants in the design process, they lack the depth of human intuition, emotional intelligence, and cultural awareness. In this project, AI was not used as an autonomous creator but as a collaborative partner—a tool to enhance ideation, streamline production, and expand creative boundaries. The challenge was to find a balance where AI-generated visuals aligned with artistic and branding principles while maintaining a strong human touch.
The project began by leveraging AI-powered tools such as Adobe Firefly, MidJourney, and Stable Diffusion to generate visual concepts. These tools analyzed vast datasets of images and artistic styles, providing compositions, textures, and lighting effects that served as an initial inspiration board. AI accelerated the brainstorming phase by quickly generating multiple variations of ideas, some of which would have taken much longer to explore manually.
Despite AI’s ability to generate aesthetically striking visuals, raw AI outputs often lacked precision in terms of branding, composition, and storytelling. Each AI-generated image underwent human intervention to refine details, adjust elements, and ensure coherence with the brand’s identity. Key refinements included:
Color Adjustments → Ensuring consistency with brand colors.
Composition Tweaks → Adjusting layouts to improve balance and hierarchy.
Human Emotion & Storytelling → Adding elements that reflect narrative depth rather than purely algorithmic output.
The most successful designs emerged through an iterative workflow, where AI-generated suggestions were continuously evaluated and reworked. This involved multiple rounds of experimentation:
AI generated the initial creative direction.
I filtered and refined the best outputs.
AI was re-engaged to explore further variations based on human-selected styles.
This dynamic exchange between AI and human creativity resulted in visually stunning yet strategically aligned content.
AI models are trained on existing datasets, meaning they tend to reproduce common patterns and styles. This can lead to:
Overused Aesthetic Trends (e.g., generic futuristic looks).
Cultural and Gender Bias in visual representations.
To counteract this, human oversight was critical. AI-generated results were diversified manually, incorporating new perspectives that AI alone would not generate.
One of the risks of AI-generated content is the production of visuals that feel impersonal or artificial. While AI is excellent at replicating existing styles, it often struggles to create truly unique aesthetics.
Solution: I focused on layering handcrafted elements over AI-generated content to infuse a distinctive identity into the final design.
Working with SRH Berlin University & D2030 meant bridging gaps between AI engineers, designers, and branding experts. Effective collaboration required:
Translating technical AI capabilities into artistic goals.
Ensuring the creative team could easily integrate AI-generated content into existing workflows.
Maintaining a balance between AI efficiency and human artistic intuition.
AI excels at generating fast iterations, but it still requires a human to make strategic and creative decisions.
Designers must play the role of curators, selecting, refining, and directing AI outputs to maintain a brand’s visual integrity.
The future of design is hybrid, where AI acts as a tool that enhances, rather than replaces, human creativity.
This project reinforced that AI is best utilized as an extension of human creativity, rather than a substitute for it. While AI speeds up production and enhances ideation, human intuition remains irreplaceable in crafting compelling, emotionally resonant designs.
The integration of AI in creative processes is not about diminishing the designer’s role but elevating it—allowing designers to focus on strategy, storytelling, and originality while AI handles repetitive and time-consuming tasks.
As AI technology continues to evolve, the key will be finding ways to integrate it thoughtfully, ensuring that digital creativity remains not just automated, but authentic, meaningful, and human-driven.
Elgammal, A. (2021). Can AI Be Truly Creative? The Role of Machine Learning in Art and Design. MIT Technology Review.
Gans, J. S., Goldfarb, A., & Agrawal, A. (2019). Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Harvard Business Press.
Manovich, L. (2019). AI Aesthetics. Strelka Press.
McCormack, J., Gifford, T., & Hutchings, P. (2020). Autonomous Creativity: AI in the Creative Industries. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.
