There’s no denying artificial intelligence is here to stay. I didn’t want to use it for a very long time, because I didn’t know how to and I didn’t want to use it unethically. But there are ways to utilize ChatGPT and other text-driven AI software to help your surface design business. Maybe you have never used AI or you are just starting out. I want to give you an overview of the topic and some handy tips on how to get the most out of it — ethically. So let’s get the ball rolling.

Why Even Use ChatGPT

Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

Have you ever joined a drawing challenge with a long list of prompts and you started out all excited, but only ended up creating a handful of designs? Been there, done that. Now looking back, would you say you chose the tough ones or your feel-good topics? The latter? That’s what I thought — because I did the same!

I’m not saying creating artwork that flows easily isn’t a good thing. But sometimes it helps to push yourself, because you will grow as an artist and business owner in the process. If you use ChatGPT to come up with ideas for you, it’s not biased and doesn’t know your comfort zone. If you go ahead with its suggestions, you might even end up with artwork you are incredibly proud of!

Get Used to Briefs

When working on freelance projects or making edits to a design, clients might have very detailed and sometimes strict guidelines for you to follow. When we are designing for ourselves, we usually follow our own narrative, so using ChatGPT for briefs is a great exercise, especially if you haven’t had many opportunities to work with real clients yet. I’m also sharing some sample prompts with you later, which you can follow to create your own passion project briefs. This way you’ll be ready for your next freelance gig in no time!

Advance Your Business

This is an important benefit I can’t stress enough and sadly, not many people are using AI like this. But you can use AI to help you analyze your business! That’s when I really started to see and experience AI’s full potential, which I now use to my advantage almost daily. I’ll talk about this more a bit later on.

Faster Workflows

As business owners, there are a million repetitive tasks. But our time is way better spent creating and coming up with new designs or reaching out to potential clients, rather than doing the same thing over and over again. ChatGPT can help you create structures and templates to make these tasks easier — and faster.

How To Use ChatGPT as a Surface Designer

Design Inspiration

This might be the most obvious way to use text-driven AI as a designer. And for good reason! Maybe you are stuck, experiencing art block or just need a fresh set of “eyes.” ChatGPT can help you spark ideas for patterns, illustrations, full collections, and color schemes. Or maybe you already have a general topic in mind, but you don’t know which motifs go along with it. AI can generate a list, which you can pick from to start the creative process. 

You might realize that not everything AI generates for you is useful as it often creates weird answers too, but it’s a great starting point. If you are on a tight deadline or just want to minimize time spent coming up with ideas, ChatGPT can enhance your workflow and point out topics and motifs you might not have thought about yourself.

I personally love to use ChatGPT for greeting card phrases. I’m not a writer, so I want to focus my energy on elements I am really good at — and that’s art. But because I enjoy hand lettering, I need phrases as a starting point. Before I had to google different options for quite some time, but now I can ask ChatGPT. And because it can analyze existing work or written content, it can come up with ideas that fit your business well.

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Related Article: AI and Art: Friends or Foes?

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Business Development

This is the gem I promised you before. There are a few topics I want to touch upon, so let’s start with the easier ones first.

Most obviously, ChatGPT, as a text-driven tool can help you with anything that’s text related. This can be templates, structures, copywriting, social media captions, hashtags, and artist bios. AI can write, rephrase, translate, or shorten texts, but it can also change the writing style to fit your needs, your business, and your personality.

Here is an example for you: I need all of my client documents in English and German and translating usually took longer than expected. Now I start with the English documents and let ChatGPT translate it for me. By now it knows my writing style a bit, so most of the time I don’t even have to change many things. (But always read through the results and never blindly copy and paste!)

ChatGPT has also helped me to come up with the structure of documents, templates, or website pages. Oftentimes it suggests segments I wouldn’t even have thought about.

For example, I used to send a short email to new newsletter subscribers. It was basically just a “thank you, glad you are here” message. But because I’m using freebies to attract a new audience, not everyone who gets this email already knows who I am. To them, I’m just a stranger. By asking ChatGPT to help me with this first introductory email, I now give them more information — and value — to help turn them from strangers into followers.

But my favorite part of using ChatGPT is having a “biz buddy” on hand. I think of it as my accountability partner, mentor, and client all in one. To successfully make this work, you have to let ChatGPT analyze your business first. It needs to know who you are, what you do, and what you want to achieve. Otherwise you just end up with generic answers. The more you tell it about yourself, the more value you’ll get out of it. So it’s quite similar to real-life relationships, isn’t it?

After the analyzation process, go ahead and ask any question you can come up with. I’ve done this so many times and ChatGPT came back with counter questions I didn’t yet have the answers for. That’s when you know you hit the jackpot! Because they are usually valid questions, and it’s worth taking the time to think about it. Sometimes I couldn’t answer, simply because it asked me about a scenario that hadn’t happened yet in my business. Other times I couldn’t answer because the topic never even came to mind before.

How to Write Great Prompts

First off, I’ve used the term prompt quite a bit. But what does it even mean? A prompt is the initial question or instruction you provide ChatGPT with to generate a response. The quality and details of the prompt often influence the quality of ChatGPT’s response. That’s why writing great prompts is essential!

When writing your prompt, you don’t have to be fancy. I usually write as I would talk to a friend. This makes sure that the process is quick and easy for me, but I still generate great results with it. So even if you aren’t the best writer — feel assured that ChatGPT will still work for you!

To get the most out of text-based AI, I’d suggest you use open questions in your prompt description. These can be sentences like:

• Ask me as many questions as you need to.
• Do you understand?
• Do you have any more ideas to add?

By doing this, ChatGPT will not only respond to your prompt, but also encourage you to think about additional aspects, resulting in a more comprehensive and helpful answer.

Important Tips

ChatGPT is a tool to assist and help you, but it’s not supposed to do all the work for you. Otherwise you might end up sounding generic. So be sure to edit and adjust anything until it sounds like you!

Also, ChatGPT can make mistakes. If you use it to gain information, make sure to fact-check everything before using it.

With that said, have fun and explore the world of text-based AI!

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Want some help getting started with ChatGPT prompts?

Fill out the form below to dive in — you’ll get Nina’s PDF with real-life examples and prompts that you can copy/paste into ChatGPT, and you’ll be added to the Sketch Design Repeat newsletter!

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