The Ultimate Guide to AI Web Design
A website designer’s job often entails tedious and time-consuming tasks like colour-correcting photos or creating code samples for individual web design elements. Until now, we’ve been unable to perform these types of tasks without human curation. That’s because these tasks require the human ability to make quick decisions.
But, we’re in 2023. Artificial Intelligence (AI) today is way more advanced than it was just three years ago. Can AI finally streamline the most tedious aspects of web design and free up designers’ time so that they can focus on the more creative aspects of their jobs? Yes, and no.
Yes, there are several AI tools currently accessible to the public that can assist web designers in different aspects of their jobs. But, AI-generated results can never be trusted 100%. While many AI models have shown early promise in identifying abstract concepts, they still can’t adopt human perspectives to make human decisions.
Inputs from AI programs always come with the risk of being biased or inaccurate. That’s why it’s hard to say what the implications of AI will be in the website and app design world just yet. However, gaining a baseline understanding of how AI is currently being used in the industry is a must for all website designers.
This article explains how web designers can use some of the most exciting AI tools (that are currently in existence) to streamline their jobs. It discusses some upcoming AI tools that web designers should watch out for.
How is AI is Being Used in Web Design in 2023
Many web designers are currently using AI tools as personal assistants. The following tools can help any web designer with their routine operations:
Automated Design
Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) tools like Adobe’s Project Felix, Gator, Squarespace, and Wix have automated various time-consuming design tasks like:
- Creating colour schemes
- Selecting the right fonts
- Designing basic page layouts.
- Creating 3D composites
These site builders also create sub-templates for commonly used webpages like “About Us,” or “FAQ.” These tools have empowered new-age app and website designers.
These professionals use ADI tools to create and design custom websites for clients at highly affordable rates. Of course, websites designed by ADI tools are yet to match the quality of human-designed websites. But, it is impossible to ignore the impact of ADI on the web and app design industry.
Idea Generation
Need an innovative design idea for a promotional webpage catered towards retail shoppers? Just ask ChatGPT. This AI-powered text-to-text tool has taken the world by storm. It can answer basic questions with surprising accuracy and creativity. We asked ChatGPT to suggest us a few web design ideas for a promotional webpage. Here’s what it had to say:
Generative Designs
ADI tools can improve the quality of web and app designs humans create by analysing and optimising each individual design element. For instance, an ADI tool can assess the colours, typography, and layout of a webpage and come up with suggestions to improve those design elements.For instance, Autodessys’s “Form•Z Pro” is a powerful 3D-design tool that web designers can use for 3D modelling, creating animations, and architectural drafting. In the near future, using AI tools to generate hundreds of designs for specific web design elements and only choosing the best will be the norm.
Generating Copyright-Free Imagery
Why use dull stock photos when you can use stunning, AI-created art to design your websites? Tools like Dalle-2 and Midjourney can generate incredibly sophisticated and 100% original visuals. With some basic human review and refinement, you can easily create all the images you need for a website using these tools.
Generating Real Copy
Tired of using “Lorem Ipsum” placeholder text when creating website templates? Just ask ChatGPT to generate realistic and relevant text. Having non-generic copy allows web designers to adequately align all content blocks on different web pages. Here are some other AI-powered text-generation tools that web designers use to generate high-quality content within seconds:
- Omneky: AI-powered tool that can generate customised advertising creatives and content.
- DeepL: A Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool that can generate SEO-optimised copies for any type of web project.
- Hypotenuse: AI-powered tool that can create high-quality product descriptions, advertising captions, and other types of content within seconds.
Writing Code
ChatGPT is great at producing decent computer code samples, including code samples for individual web design elements. Of course, similar to AI-generated imagery, AI-generated code samples require human curation and refinement. Many web designers are already using ChatGPT to accelerate their design objectives. Here is an example:
How to Use AI Tools to Design a Website
Now, let’s use some of the aforementioned AI tools to create some basic design elements. In this example, we’ll use Midjourney: a popular AI-powered image generator. Midjourney can create high-definition images and graphics from basic text prompts. You can access Midjourney via their official website or their Discord channel.
Just type in your text prompt and Discord bots will generate four versions of your artwork. Keep rendering each image in higher resolution until you’re satisfied with the result. Then download the images and use them as design elements. In this example, we’ll use Midjourney to generate some design elements for an imaginary shoe company:
Step 1: Sketch Designs
We used the following prompt on Midjourney to come up with some basic, compositional sketches of the shoes:
“sketch design of a website landing page for a shoe brand, red and blue colours, – stylise 1000”
Here are some of the designs created by Midjourney:
Step 2: Logo Design
Now, let’s design a logo for the shoe company. We used the following prompt to create some basic logos for the brand
Prompt: “logo design for a shoe company, sophisticated, red and blue colours, modern, – stylise 1000”
Here are the shoe company logos created by Midjourney:
Step 3: Product Designs
company’s website. This was the prompt we used:
Prompt: “A beautiful show design, view from bottom, realistic, red and blue colours, spectacular, – stylise 1000”
Here’s what Midjourney generated:
Step 3: Responsive Design Elements
Now, let’s create some basic design elements for the shoe company’s mobile website. We changed the prompt slightly on Midjourney to create the designs:
Prompt: Mobile Website landing page for a shoe company, realistic, web design, ux/ui, ux, ui, red and blue colours – stylise 1000”
Here are the results:
Not bad for less than ten minutes of work, right? The better we articulated our intentions in the prompts, the more detailed were Midjourney’s outputs. We wanted to create a design for the shoe company’s mobile website. So, we explicitly used keywords like “UX,” “Mobile,” and “UI” in the prompt. As you can see from the image above, the tool understood that we wanted to see a mobile web layout.
Midjourney also allows you to integrate specific visual references into the text prompts. For instance, let’s say you like a web design you randomly found on Pinterest. You can ask Midjourney to create something similar to that image. Here’s how:
- Let’s say you like the following web design template on Pinterest:
- Open this image in a new tab
- Copy the URL link of this image
- Add the link to the prompt for Midjourney
Here’s how the prompt should look like:
“(URL reference of design), Modern Website landing page for a shoe company, stylish, web design, ux/ui, ux, ui, red and blue colours, — stylise 1000”
In this case, the prompt was:
And the output that was generated looked like this:
As you can see, these images match the image we added in the prompt. Using keywords like “stylish” or “sophisticated” makes the AI tool generate even higher-quality visual designs.
Midjourney isn’t perfect. For example, all the text on the images it generates is nonsense. Plus, some images have too many decorative details in the background. So, web designers cannot directly use the tool to create web designs. They’ll need to manually polish the images they generate on a photo editor first. But, the speed and quality of this tool is undeniable.
The Future of AI in Web Design
AI tools are already transforming the way professional website and UX/UI design is performed. In the near future, we’ll have tools that can do more than just generate images or text. We’ll soon have AI-powered web design prototyping tools. These tools will be able to
- Generate multiple website and app design layouts based on simple text prompts.
- Generate wireframe ideas
- Automatically create a website’s information architecture and align all design elements in accordance with that architecture
AI’s role in web design will only keep increasing in importance over the next decade. Will AI one day replace web designers altogether? Maybe. But, until that day comes, web designers must treat AI as a helpful friend and use AI tools to produce better work and gain competitive advantages over other designers.