Using AI as a Creative Design Agency
Friday 10 April 2026
Read time 10 minutes
If you work in a creative field, you've probably spent the last year being told that AI is either going to save your career or end it. The truth, as usual, sits somewhere more nuanced in the middle, and it very much depends on how you choose to use it.
We're a design agency. We use AI tools regularly, and we've formed some pretty firm opinions about what works, what doesn't, and where the technology fundamentally can't substitute for genuine creative skill. We'll also be honest: AI is evolving so quickly that some of what we write today may look dated in twelve months. But the underlying principle is that human creative judgement is irreplaceable and we're confident that will remain true.
What We Use AI For
Let's start with the practical good news. There are several areas where AI tools have genuinely improved our day-to-day workflow, whether that be saving time, opening up possibilities, and freeing us to focus on the work that requires real creative thought.
Image Editing
Generative fill, background removal, intelligent retouching tools like Adobe Firefly have transformed what used to be hours-long Photoshop tasks into a matter of minutes. We use these daily and have integrated them firmly into our workflow. This is AI doing what good technology always does: removing friction from repetitive processes so that designers can focus on craft.
Brainstorming & Copywriting
Stuck on a campaign name? Need twenty social caption variations to A/B test? AI is an excellent brainstorming partner; endlessly patient, surprisingly lateral in its thinking, and fast. The golden rule: always refine the output. The first suggestion is rarely the best one, but as a starting point to react to and build from, it's genuinely useful. Areas, we regularly use it for include campaign titles, straplines, social captions, email subject lines, brief summaries, and mood board descriptions.
Image generated by Falcon AI
Lifestyle Image Generation
Getting a product into a lifestyle context used to mean booking a photographer, a stylist, and a location; half a day of production for a handful of hero images. For social content, campaign concepts, and early-stage presentations, AI-generated lifestyle imagery has become a legitimate and increasingly compelling shortcut.
This is something we've developed into a dedicated service of our own. FalconAI is our in-house lifestyle imagery offering, professional visuals in days, not weeks. We combine the speed of AI-generation with expert human refinement, so what clients receive isn't raw machine output. It's considered, art-directed imagery shaped by designers who know what good looks like. The machine handles the heavy lifting; trained eyes handle the judgement calls. The result is product imagery that feels alive, without the logistical weight or cost of a traditional photo shoot. Find out more about FalconAI →
Summarising Client Briefs
A 40-page brand strategy document can be distilled into a sharp, working creative brief in minutes. This is a genuine time-saver, particularly in the early stages of a project when clarity and momentum both matter.
Where AI Struggles in Design
AI might sound like the answer to everything, but it comes with a clear set of limitations, and some of the most common applications we see are actively damaging the brands that use them.
Making a Logo
One of the biggest misuses of AI is in the creation of logos and brand identities. This is work that requires a human touch to deliver the originality, intention, and detail that machine learning software fundamentally struggles to replicate. There’s also the question of copyright: the same prompt can generate remarkably similar outputs for entirely different users, meaning there's no guarantee of true originality. On close inspection, AI-generated marks tend to lack the precision, compositional logic, and considered craft that a skilled designer builds into every element of a mark.
The Refreshh wordmark that has been animated both by a human and solely using AI.
Logo Animations
AI is becoming increasingly capable of producing video content, but logo animation is a context where it consistently falls short. AI struggles to understand the physical behaviour of a logo, how its layers and assets should move in relation to one another and the results are often mundane and lacking in creative intent. Without the precision and spatial understanding that this kind of work demands, AI won't produce a result worth showing a client. After Effects, in skilled hands, remains the right tool for the job.
Icons
Icon design demands a keen eye and rigorous consistency, every icon in a set needs to feel like part of the same family when used together in context. AI struggles to maintain that consistency across stroke width, scale, and overall visual style, largely because it draws from a vast range of existing design work and aesthetics. The result is typically a compilation of influences rather than a coherent system, and that lack of continuity shows.
Icons designed for Frankster's by humans using a grid to maintain consistency.
Illustrations
AI can produce illustrations serviceable enough for some marketing applications, but issues of copyright and visual consistency remain significant. More fundamentally, there is a meaningful difference between illustration created by a human hand and illustration produced by an algorithm. Every stroke made by a skilled illustrator is purposeful, it carries the decision-making, perspective, and idiosyncrasies of a specific person. AI-generated illustration, by contrast, can produce results that feel random and visually unsettling: strokes that don't quite make sense, proportions that are slightly off, a superficial quality that audience’s sense even when they can't articulate it. That human imperfection is, paradoxically, what makes illustration genuinely valuable.
Controversy Over the Recent Olympics Ad
One of the more telling creative moments in recent memory came from the Olympics themselves. An institution built on celebrating the absolute pinnacle of human achievement, years of dedication, sacrifice, and physical artistry, released an AI-generated animation that attracted significant criticism for its visible flaws: inconsistent motion, uncanny imagery, and a finish that felt unresolved. There's a level of irony that wasn't lost on audiences. When your entire brand is built around honouring human talent and effort, the medium you choose to communicate that sends its own message.
The BBC's stop-motion Olympic ad landed in an entirely different way. Stop-motion is a craft that demands patience, precision, and genuine creative investment, qualities that mirror the Olympic spirit far more closely than a generated animation ever could. The Winter Olympics also carries its own rich history of graphic design and visual identity, and the BBC's approach felt deeply respectful of that heritage. It was warmly received precisely because it felt considered, crafted, and human. The contrast between the two pieces of work is a useful reminder: audiences are more perceptive than we sometimes give them credit for.
The Winter Olympic's Milano Cortina 2026 AI TV Spot watch between 2:20:04 to 2:21:15
BBC'S "Trails will blaze" Stop Motion Ad
Keeping the Craft Alive
Design has always co-evolved with technology. Computers transformed the industry. The web transformed it again. AI will too. But in each case, the designers who thrived were those who used new technology as a tool in service of their craft, not as a replacement for it.
The key distinction with AI is this: every previous technology gave designers more control over their output. AI, used carelessly, does the opposite. It introduces unpredictability, imports other people's aesthetic decisions, and can produce results that are statistically average rather than genuinely excellent. We've seen a version of this before with brands that lean entirely on generic stock imagery and stock illustration, it's precisely that kind of creative shorthand that makes considered, human-led design stands out and become more sought after by businesses that understand its value.
It's also worth saying clearly: we don't believe AI will make designers redundant. These tools still require human intervention to prompt, direct, and shape the outcomes. Used well, AI is something designers should absolutely incorporate into their process, when it's relevant to the context and aligned with the results you're trying to achieve. At the end of the day, it's a tool. And like any tool, its value lies entirely in the hands holding it.
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