JM’s AI Toolkit Part 1: Essentials for Brand Designers
In the ever-evolving world of technology, we’re like AI archaeologists, digging through the digital landscape to unearth the best new tools as they emerge on the scene. As we venture on this technologically-charged treasure hunt, we’ve garnered a bunch of insights on how to seamlessly adopt and weave these resources into the work we do for our clients and partners. Most have direct benefits in increasing not only the speed at which we solve creative and business problems, but the standard of the work we can achieve in the same amount of time.
With an average of 1 billion AI tools released every week so far in 2023 — ok, actually more like 100 but either way it’s a lot — we’ve done the legwork and found the best of the best so you don’t have to. Sure, we’ve all heard of the big names like Dall-e, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney, but our goal is to spot the underdogs — the ones that could catapult your ideas to dizzying heights.
This article marks the beginning of a series made for the curious Product Strategists and Designers to Developers, Motion Designers, and even Founders in our midst. But today, we’re starting with Brand Designers.
So, let’s dive in! And remember, we’re just a call or message away if you’re craving a chat or hanging out for a helping hand.
Runway ML Gen-1 — A New Kind of Creative Suite
RunwayML, simply put, is just a lot of a fun. It’s a new kind of creative suite — one where AI is a collaborator and anything you can imagine can be created. Gen-1, in particular, is one of their new groundbreaking tools that transforms existing videos into new ones using text prompts and style transfers of existing images. It’s really a wild experiment. With a variety of AI models, including image generation, style transfer, and object detection, designers can quickly experiment with new ideas and create highly unique and creative work.
Vance AI — AI Photo Enhancement and Editing Tools
Vance.ai is an advanced image-editing tool that gives designers a powerful new option when they’re tired trying to find the perfect high-res image on Google. Utilizing AI trained on millions of images from the web, Vance AI goes beyond traditional editing methods. It sharpens images, recovers original details, and yields clear, high-quality results. Additionally, there are also some more creative options like cartoonize, colorize, and convert images into sketches. But our favorites are definitely the enhancer and upscaler — they work a treat.
Let’s Enhance — Image enhancer & upscaler
If you need another option to Vance AI, we also recommend Let’s Enhance. Whether you need to improve the resolution, remove noise, or enhance details in your images, LetsEnhance offers a range of features to help you with your image-enhancing needs.
Kive — Easily organize visual libraries with AI
AI-powered visual content library that curates its offerings to fit the user’s preferences. The library has extensive learning capabilities and is able to categorize images based on traditional image categories (colour, lighting, environment) but can also discern themes and according to Kive, even human emotion. This allows any creative team to instantly categorize, access, and streamline their own digital catalogues and tap into the millions of images that power Kive.
My Mind — Smart AI Visual Bookmarking Tool
This bookmarking/note-taking platform mirrors a stream-of-consciousness workflow, allowing users to save notes, content, and ideas without over-categorization or over-documentation. Using AI algorithms, MyMind.com can analyze images, articles, and websites, automatically tagging them for easy searching and retrieval later on. It’s also all private, so nobody will see what’s on your mind.
Seamless Studio — AI-generated original high-quality mockups
Seamless Studio, a premium AI mockup generator (currently in beta), is every designer’s dream sidekick. Created by Josephmark, the platform is designed for designers, marketers, and anyone sick of seeing the same mockups over and over again. This ingenious tool harnesses the power of AI to craft custom tailor-made, visually stunning mockups from a single prompt. Just type in what you want, upload your artwork, and hey presto — you have a totally unique and ownable brand mockup.
https://www.seamless-studio.com/
Unprompt — Get Stable Diffusion prompts for any image, subject or style
UnPrompt is a tool that allows users to reverse-search prompt text and parameters for almost anything for image generation. If you are struggling to come up with a prompt, or the ones you have aren’t generating the desired results, UnPrompt can help. Simply upload an image or try your prompt, and the tool will provide thousands of images with full-generation parameters.
Namelix — Generate brandable business names using artificial intelligence
We know all too well how challenging naming a brand or product can be, but we’ve found some AI tools like Namelix that can act as your brainstorming buddy. By generating hundreds of unique and creative names based on your preferences and keywords. With Namelix, you can choose from a variety of naming styles, such as classic or modern, and filter results by industry, character count, and more, helping you find the perfect name that fits your brand. But don’t get us wrong, of course, there’s a tonne of duds in there, but we find it helpful for sparking new ideas quickly.
Calligrapher — Generate dynamic handwritten calligraphy
Looking for a set of unique handwritten fonts that actually look real? Check out Calligrapher.ai. Using AI, this font tool allows you to adjust your calligraphy based on legibility, stroke width and style, and then it animates it in a way that looks hand-drawn. Have a play! The options seem endless.
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