I Tried 117 AI Design Tools. These Are The Best

Here are some AI tools for design that will surely boost your productivity.

You might have noticed how AI is changing the way we design and to stay relevant we need to adapt to the new technology.

Here are 10 AI tools for design, that are like having an AI-powered creative companion.

Hello friend!

So brace yourself as we embark on an expedition through the realm of the best AI design tools out there.

I’ve tried over 100 design tools and these are the ones that you should use. 

Nvidia Canvas

First up is Nvidia Canvas.

If you are tired of the frustrating gap between your imaginative landscapes and the reality of paper, well, Nvidia’s innovative new app has your back.

Canvas is your creative companion powered by cutting-edge technology.

This isn’t just another tool.

It’s a portal to a world where brushstrokes metamorphose into lifelike masterpieces.

Imagine your squiggles becoming clouds and blobs transforming into solid rocks.

It’s like wielding a digital wand that turns dreams into reality.

You could easily swap snow for grass and watch your winter landscapes transform into a tropical paradise before your very eyes.

The possibilities are endless.

You can simply draw and paint and have your sketches turned into fine pieces of art instantly.

This is great for generating your own stock images, backgrounds, textures, and whatever you need in your design projects. 

Open Art AI

Next up is Open Art, which is a fantastic tool for manipulating images that you want to use in your design work.

So, let’s say that you have a specific image of a room but you want to regenerate it in a few different styles.

Well with Open Art that is entirely possible.

It’s an AI art generator specifically geared for design situations.

So what I love about it is you can upload your own images, your own work, whatever you want to be playing with.

For example, you can take an image or an open-source image from a library such as Unsplash.

We’re using one of my own photos from Unsplash which is this dunescape that I took in Brazil a few years ago.

I will download this, go back to Open Art, and upload my image.

Now you can optionally add an actual prompt here.

This is great for manipulating images.

You can add, add, and adjust how creative you want it to be, the more creative the more different your output image will be.

And you can go ahead and press on create.

So if you’ve got a stock image that you want to be using, or you’re looking to slightly manipulate a design piece you can use this tool to easily edit via text prompts different details for different areas.

And it’s particularly good at working with photos.

So here you can see that it’s given us a little adaption to what we had before.

It’s kept the tone and nuances.

This is great if you want to create a set of coherent brand images that are going to maintain the same theme and the same feel, but have their relation in between them.

It’s a great opportunity to use that.

Manipulating Facial Expressions

I’ll show you how it works with a photo of a human.

I’ll use this one of this guy that I met deep in Tibet when I was pilgrimaging many years ago.

He was meditating upon a rock with his eyes closed deep in meditation for hours.

Then later that day, we crossed paths at a small spring and he looked at me deep into my eyes and saw myself.

And ever since that day, I’ve never been the same.

So you pop it in, and I will show you what it’s like when you don’t use a prompt.

Let’s go.

It takes a few seconds.

And so now we have a completely different reinterpretation of my kind gentleman.

And what you can do is to have a few options.

You can edit.

If you want to edit it, you can click on Edit and you can erase parts of the image.

Maybe, you want to change his face and you can go ahead and adjust those parts.

So this is simply an effect to paint within the image.

You can add in a new expression for example.

We put in a Sad Man. 

You also have the option to add a negative prompt which is anything that you don’t want to include in the image.

Finally, you go to Generate, and you’ll get yourself a brand new image.

Now we’ve changed the expression on his face.

So this is great if you’re working with some sort of narrative and you want to adjust the facial expressions and the reactions of your characters.

So if you are working on a story, an illustration book, or something to do with emotion, this is a tool for you. 

Generating QR Codes

Another tool they have in Open Art is you can easily create these mesmerizing QR codes.

Because QR codes are probably one of the most hideous design elements that possibly exist.

And now they’ve been transformed with the power of AI and you can simply create your own style of QR code.

So it’s a great way to quickly and easily create organic and beautiful QR codes that fit much better into designs.

I personally have a pet peeve that on many design elements you can see a beautiful piece of graphic design and there’s a QR code that clearly does not sit with the ethics or philosophy, the coherence of a brand.

And now we have the opportunity to do something much more creative.

So you can see there are a lot of wonderful options.

There’s a Transformers-style guy, this little pussycat, or a more abstract pastel-colored dreamscape.

How It Works

We simply have to enter the URL.

It’s as simple as that.

So I can simply put in a URL to my YouTube channel, for example, my YouTube channel.

So I pop in my URL and click on Create.

You can either go with random or pick your own style.

And it’s as simple as that you get your own output.

I really like this Picasso one.

So I do love that you can also generate multiple versions simultaneously so you don’t have to wait for one to finish you can go all the way in.

You can get those rolling down.

And here are some of my beautiful, mesmerizing QR codes. 

In terms of pricing for Open Art, it is only $8 a month or 5000 credits

You get up to eight parallel generations and 20-plus public models.

Plus, you get access to all the AI tools including Sketch Image, Creative Variations, Document Transformer, Custom People Stock Images, and Animatic Brush.

It’s a very good value art generator and one that’s geared specifically toward designers. 

Canva

Next up is Canva in our list of AI tools for design, our dear friend.

So you can consider Canva as your friendly escape from Adobe allowing you to easily pick up a powerful design tool without all of the levers, buttons, and modes, of Photoshop.

One of the AI-powered Canva tools is the ability to create templates aligned with your vision.

You can simply choose an image and insert a prompt and it will give you a graphic design layout straight away.

You can imagine it is an AI prompting tool for design.

It’s great in the design process to get a first draft out there because as humans it’s much easier to iterate and edit a design than it is to start from the dreaded scary, blank page.

So use Magic Design to get the ball rolling.

This is particularly good if you need to create something very quickly. 

Let’s Enhance

Next up is Let’s Enhance for when you stumble upon a low-resolution image that holds promise but lacks the high-quality imagery that you need.

So perhaps you found an image on Google, but you can only find a very low resolution of it.

Well, with Let’s Enhance you can easily boost the resolution with AI.

It’s also particularly good if you’re working in other AI generators and you need to enhance the size of your images with Midjourney, there is a limitation to the size of images you get out.

And if you’re working in 4k, or you want to print this out, it’s a huge restriction and a difficult workaround.

But with Let’s Enhance, you can easily take your images from this to this. 

Khroma

Next up is Khroma.

Color as we all know is more than just a hue on a canvas.

It’s the heartbeat of your creation.

The emotion behind the artistry, and that’s where Khroma steps in.

Ready to be your color guru?

So you input the colors that you like and it will start generating multiple coherent color palettes based on your choices. 

Fronty

Next up is Fronty.

Let’s say that you have a design and with a few clicks that design transforms into code.

Yes, an actual real-life website.

It outputs bespoke HTML, CSS, and React code and caters to both the design aficionados and the coders.

So if you’re a designer looking to create your website, or if you’re a coder, looking to breathe life into a design, this is a tool that’s going to speed up your web design process.

10Web AI

I also recommend taking a look at 10Web AI which is an AI website builder that allows you to input prompts, and it will output a first draft of a website.

Not only does it design a website, but it also fills it out with content.

So you tell it what type of website you’re making.

Perhaps it’s a travel website, or perhaps it’s a blog about fishing rods.

It will generate images and text and populates your website in seconds, which is great for getting your first draft off. 

UIzard

Next up in our list of AI tools for design is UIzard which is about UI-zard.

And you might have guessed it has to do with designing UIs.

What I love about this tool is that you can simply sketch out a wireframe of an app or website, and it will translate it into a fully working app.

So this is great for taking your ideas and creating prototypes.

If you’re looking to develop an MVP to pitch to a client.

This speeds up the process and gives you the opportunity to create working prototypes in seconds. 

Designs AI

Next up is Designs AI and it isn’t just another toolbox.

Designs AI has a huge library that helps you design everything from social media graphics to logos

It’s a toolkit that you can leverage to speed up the design process.

So if you want to mark up a professional logo in seconds using AI, this is a great go-to tool for early exploring. 

Adobe Sensei

Next up we have Adobe Sensei.

We all know the pain of searching for the ideal stock image.

I used to work as a designer for a bank in the UK.

A lot of my work actually involved searching endless hours 1000s and 1000s of stock images trying to find the right ones to represent a brand or business or product effectively.

For example, one of the projects I used to work on was creating a website for the Barclays London accelerator and selecting images.

For example, making data count with AI is a hard topic to visualize without going into cliche imagery.

But this is where Adobe Sensei comes in.

And with AI prowess, it scours the depths of the digital universe curating stock photos that align seamlessly with your vision.

Another AI tool is the ability to overlay designs to text.

And this is a very creative way to create new typographic styles.

Essentially, take your font or typework and integrate it effectively with your brand design.

It works exceedingly well.

Just take a look at a few of these examples where you can take the outline of your text and add different textures, different elements, different feels, and different materials. 

ChatGPT

Next up in our list of AI tools for design is the AI tool to rule them all. 

Of course, it is ChatGPT.

But ChatGPT as a design companion?

I hear you say.

Well, there are a number of ways that you can leverage the power of ChatGPT to be your design companion.

Number one is you can instruct it to be a designer.

You can say something like, ‘I want you to act as an experienced graphic designer, incorporating the strengths and talents of Paul Rand and Dieter Rams and the design aesthetic of Steve Jobs, and help me come up with ideas for this design.

For example, I’m trying to design the brand for a clothing company aimed at 28-year-olds who like broccoli.’

And from that you start to get some advice, some ideas and this is an invaluable space to use.

If you are working alone, and you don’t have a design team in person with you.

You can really talk through your thinking process with this design assistant.

And it helps so much to externalize the thinking process to really go through the options and the possibilities of where you can take your design project.

I also have this video on creating an entire brand with AI.

It goes through a more detailed process of creating a full brand using ChatGPT and Midjourney which leads me on to our next tool.

Midjourney

This is of course the beautiful Mjourney, which is an excellent tool for developing logos, vectors, backgrounds, and even web design assets.

And I particularly like generating textures inside of a Midjourney, background textures to use in your designs. 

Final Thoughts

What are your favorite AI tools for design?

Please let me know if there are any I’ve missed in the comments below.

I would love to check out more tools.

Thanks for watching.

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