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I've been doing web design long enough to have experienced the swing from illustration to photography, and then back to illustration. I don't really think it ha

I've been doing web design long enough to have experienced the swing from illustration to photography, and then back to illustration. I don't really think it has to do with signaling wealth or status. Here's what I think: Most web designers are not designers. Most people on web design teams, in hierarchies of management, who style themselves "art directors" or who interface with the clients, are not designers. Most directives that come at people building websites come from marketing teams at companies, composed entirely of people who are not designers. Those people get to work in the morning with one goal: To impress their boss at the corporation by collecting tons of screenshots of other websites and marketing campaigns that have recently been popular, collating them and listing the features that these non-designers think, in their non-design opinion, made those things successful. What you end up with is a feedback loop where every marketing department follows every other one, and demands a copy of the latest trend, without any regard for the company's actual brand. Which designers are then obliged to do, even if we know it's stupid. The longest running brands I represent use a mix of illustration and photography, and that mix is specific to the way they choose to present themselves. In fact, understanding that particular mix for each business, creating style guides that delineate when one thing or the other should be used, and not messing with the mix if it's working is crucial to maintaining consistency and building brand recognition over time. TL;DR, most web designers have no design background, and companies hand too much control over online branding to people who are competent coders but should not be responsible for image. Also, the idea that Dall-E2 or any further iteration is going to replace either photography or illustration at the high end is counterintuitive. The high end is going to just go further to show it's not AI-generated.

bspear 5y ago
> high end is going to just go further to show it's not AI-generated. That actually is the argument the author makes. That companies compete to differentiate from what can be easily generated by anyone.
londons_explore 5y ago
> The high end is going to just go further to show it's not AI-generated. But I think it'll actually be pretty hard to make something that is clearly not AI generated. Remember that to be effective, it needs to be clear to a regular person, not just an expert in AI imagery.
- noduerme 5y ago
  People misunderstand what illustrators do. They don't take an idea like "teddy bears playing poker" and make a literal image of teddy bears playing poker. They look at the total context of a marketing campaign, a brand, an audience, sub-currents and winking references in culture from the latest internet memes to 14th century masterpieces they can subtly reference, and then they synthesize images that play on these in a way that telling them to do something that crosses 14th C painting with a meme with a teddy bear would not accomplish. They sit and think about the meaning of what you want, and then they bring the big idea to it; how to draw the point so it resonates with everyday people, tickles intellectuals, and fascinates other artists. Every good illustrator I've ever worked with has done this; has surprised me by cleverness. To illustrate this: A marketing person or even an art director (like me) who replaces their illustrators with DallE-2 is not going to think of all those wonderful esoteric things that illustrators bring to to the table, not even enough to put them into a sentence, let alone to bring them to the degree of quality that close study and a honed lifetime of irony/history/intelligent communication and the skill to use visual language to tell stories that trigger recognition and memory and emotion can bring to the audience. Illustrators don't just "draw picture of donkey". That is actually the most conceited part of the idea that they can be replaced; and it's entirely on the part of marketing people who, again, have no design background. (But do have a permanent financial interest in automating artwork, which is in tension with their overarching job of improving their employer's communications). Most people with no design background don't know the value of good design. When they see it, they think it's something that can be mechanically aped. It's hard to assign a dollar value to the exact glint in someone's eye in a photograph, the exact alignment of their smile, the placement of the reflection in the watch on their wrist; does taking time and spending a lot of money for a human to consider each of those visual decisions microscopically really pay off in hard cash for the brand? If the answer from your marketing people is "not really", then your brand isn't going further than a local retail chain. An AI can never compute those things because the slight shift in a smile will always be perceived subjectively by humans whose entire "software" is built around understanding whether smiles are genuine or not. Or noticing (subconsciously) if reflections are slightly displeasing. And it's not just a matter of having it mathematically accurate, in fact, mathematical accuracy is not what you want in a successful illustration. Maddeningly for the people who want to reduce everything to data, visual "mistakes" are a tool that can be used to register extremely positive emotions when deployed with a full understanding of the human psyche and the local culture, just as much as they register displeasingly when used without that knowledge. So at best a machine can only achieve neutral mediocrity in producing an image. If photorealism or the imitation of any particular style were the key to successful illustration, we could have replaced actual illustrators 50 years ago.
dahart 5y ago
> most web designers have no design background Most people with a design background aren’t particularly good at design, right? And even good designers have styles that go out of fashion and become irrelevant. The requirements for most websites don’t depend on good original design. To your point, web design is mostly curated trends, and not original design at all. This means two things: 1) most web companies don’t actually need people with design backgrounds, and 2) AI based design could plausibly occupy a place of permanent utility from now on, if what people really need is remixes of recent ideas -- which is what human designers have already been doing, by and large. I think you’re absolutely right, high end will work to demonstrate non-automation and new concepts. That’s already been the case in the art and design world, some people already work to eschew generative styles as well as easily reproduced art. Photography has never had the cachet of oil painting or sculpture. Illustration is further down the list, and all types of “computer generated” art further still, regardless of how good they are or how much work they take. Unfortunately, doing wholly original design work is expensive, and it means that the people who can imitate good design for the masses cheaply and quickly enough to keep up with trends will have a business advantage over firms bending over backwards to prove they’re human (and most consumers will remain oblivious).

bspear 5y ago

> high end is going to just go further to show it's not AI-generated. That actually is the argument the author makes. That companies compete to differentiate from what can be easily generated by anyone.

londons_explore 5y ago

> The high end is going to just go further to show it's not AI-generated. But I think it'll actually be pretty hard to make something that is clearly not AI generated. Remember that to be effective, it needs to be clear to a regular person, not just an expert in AI imagery.

noduerme 5y ago
People misunderstand what illustrators do. They don't take an idea like "teddy bears playing poker" and make a literal image of teddy bears playing poker. They look at the total context of a marketing campaign, a brand, an audience, sub-currents and winking references in culture from the latest internet memes to 14th century masterpieces they can subtly reference, and then they synthesize images that play on these in a way that telling them to do something that crosses 14th C painting with a meme with a teddy bear would not accomplish. They sit and think about the meaning of what you want, and then they bring the big idea to it; how to draw the point so it resonates with everyday people, tickles intellectuals, and fascinates other artists. Every good illustrator I've ever worked with has done this; has surprised me by cleverness. To illustrate this: A marketing person or even an art director (like me) who replaces their illustrators with DallE-2 is not going to think of all those wonderful esoteric things that illustrators bring to to the table, not even enough to put them into a sentence, let alone to bring them to the degree of quality that close study and a honed lifetime of irony/history/intelligent communication and the skill to use visual language to tell stories that trigger recognition and memory and emotion can bring to the audience. Illustrators don't just "draw picture of donkey". That is actually the most conceited part of the idea that they can be replaced; and it's entirely on the part of marketing people who, again, have no design background. (But do have a permanent financial interest in automating artwork, which is in tension with their overarching job of improving their employer's communications). Most people with no design background don't know the value of good design. When they see it, they think it's something that can be mechanically aped. It's hard to assign a dollar value to the exact glint in someone's eye in a photograph, the exact alignment of their smile, the placement of the reflection in the watch on their wrist; does taking time and spending a lot of money for a human to consider each of those visual decisions microscopically really pay off in hard cash for the brand? If the answer from your marketing people is "not really", then your brand isn't going further than a local retail chain. An AI can never compute those things because the slight shift in a smile will always be perceived subjectively by humans whose entire "software" is built around understanding whether smiles are genuine or not. Or noticing (subconsciously) if reflections are slightly displeasing. And it's not just a matter of having it mathematically accurate, in fact, mathematical accuracy is not what you want in a successful illustration. Maddeningly for the people who want to reduce everything to data, visual "mistakes" are a tool that can be used to register extremely positive emotions when deployed with a full understanding of the human psyche and the local culture, just as much as they register displeasingly when used without that knowledge. So at best a machine can only achieve neutral mediocrity in producing an image. If photorealism or the imitation of any particular style were the key to successful illustration, we could have replaced actual illustrators 50 years ago.

dahart 5y ago

> most web designers have no design background Most people with a design background aren’t particularly good at design, right? And even good designers have styles that go out of fashion and become irrelevant. The requirements for most websites don’t depend on good original design. To your point, web design is mostly curated trends, and not original design at all. This means two things: 1) most web companies don’t actually need people with design backgrounds, and 2) AI based design could plausibly occupy a place of permanent utility from now on, if what people really need is remixes of recent ideas -- which is what human designers have already been doing, by and large. I think you’re absolutely right, high end will work to demonstrate non-automation and new concepts. That’s already been the case in the art and design world, some people already work to eschew generative styles as well as easily reproduced art. Photography has never had the cachet of oil painting or sculpture. Illustration is further down the list, and all types of “computer generated” art further still, regardless of how good they are or how much work they take. Unfortunately, doing wholly original design work is expensive, and it means that the people who can imitate good design for the masses cheaply and quickly enough to keep up with trends will have a business advantage over firms bending over backwards to prove they’re human (and most consumers will remain oblivious).