How AIGC is Transforming Design: Tools, Practices, and Real-World Cases

Preface

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) technology brings unprecedented innovation to the design industry. By combining AI with creative design, AIGC offers designers broader ideas, efficient tools, and promotes resource sharing and collaborative creation.

Over the past year, our design team has embraced AIGC, moving from learning to successful application, saving time and freeing up creative space for more innovative work.

Common AIGC Tools Overview

Designers mainly use two image‑generation tools: Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.

Midjourney: Suited for non‑customized needs, it is a powerful AI painting tool with high randomness and weaker control.

Stable Diffusion: Ideal for customized requirements; with the ControlNet plugin it can precisely control shape, color, and other details for tailored AI drawings.

AIGC in the Workflow

Traditional visual design processes often incur high costs. AIGC helps overcome these limitations, making project progression more efficient and direct.

AIGC also provides abundant creative ideas, especially when clients lack clear direction, allowing rapid sketch generation and faster alignment.

Because AIGC can produce massive creative concepts and visual elements at low cost, we focus on three areas:

Creative Divergence: Inspiration, reference, diversity exploration.

Character Assets: Personae, personalized avatars, virtual IPs.

Brand Experience: 3D assets, IP models, illustration resources.

AIGC Project Practice Cases

Brand Marketing

In poster design, sourcing copyright‑free images, especially portraits, is time‑consuming. Using AI‑generated images, we can quickly create diverse characters of different ages, actions, and professions.

Examples:

Brand Promotion

AIGC Application Strategies

1. Knowledge Base – We have compiled detailed AI tool tutorials from basic to advanced operations, and continuously document reusable AI keywords for characters, scenes, and elements, forming our proprietary AI knowledge base.

2. Building an AI Asset Library

Using AI tools, we have generated various design assets—including realistic character images, diverse icons, rich backgrounds, and other visual elements—rapidly expanding our material library, which we will continuously update to stay current.

3. Training Custom LoRA Models

For brand promotion and marketing projects, we trained dedicated LoRA models for virtual characters and monthly publications, ensuring AI‑generated content aligns with brand identity and marketing goals. Future plans include training models for brand IPs to build a comprehensive AI model system.

Conclusion and Outlook

With rapid AIGC advancements, we can quickly generate visual concepts and uncover new creative inspiration, yet AI remains an auxiliary tool. Designers must continue to think critically, maintain humanity and brand personality, and ensure solutions meet business and user needs to stay competitive in the design industry.