Top AI Graphic Design Tools of 2023
As any digital designer knows, marketing relies heavily on graphic design, which can often require a significant investment of time and talent resources. Recently, a range of artificial intelligence (AI) tools have entered the digital marketing industry on a wider lever. Fortunately, as these tools have become more advanced, they are also more user-friendly. Businesses are adopting AI tools to streamline processes and achieve their design goals faster and more efficiently. AI is also gaining the ability to perform creative tasks and design work, making life easier for designers. In this article we will share some of the AI graphic design options, so you can experiment and find the one that works for you.
What Makes an AI Tool Great for Designers?
To this end, there are several AI graphic design software platforms available that can help you create professional-looking projects in minutes. As a designer, these AI tools can now be part of your everyday toolkit, and can help to streamline the design process for any company. Here’s what you have to keep in mind when choosing an AI tool to use.
User-Friendly and Simple AI Tool Interface
What if you’re a designer or content creator with no background in design? Or what if you’ve been designing for years but aren’t familiar with using AI tools? Both types of designers need AI tools that are intuitive and user-friendly. There are several tools listed in this article that offer simple navigation and are easy to use from the start.
Inspiration and Search for Ideas
If the task at hand is not merely to implement some visual concept, but to invent it, then daily search for inspiration, layouts, ideas and concepts may make any creative job a mundane one. But not anymore! Not sure how to visualize a concept or where to search for inspirational ideas? Ask AI. The variety of tools for text description of future designs is amazing: Chat GPT, Bing from Microsoft, different prompts for each separate tool from Midlibrary for Midjourney to Lexica for Stable Diffusion will make the creative search a pleasant walk instead of a tedious quest.
Optimized for Many Platforms, on Desktop or Mobile
Content creators produce visual content between two to five times a week for all types of media: email newsletters, online ads, social media and more. A truly efficient AI graphic design tool will help you create and edit artwork across any of these platforms, and for mobile devices seamlessly. Some tools even allow editing your designs with a simple tap, making it easy to repurpose content and share it on multiple platforms with correct aspect ratio.
Creative and Original Design Output
Every designer wants to produce original graphics to represent their brand; in fact, most graphic artists usually need to design graphics from scratch, to boost customer engagement and attract interest. The best AI tools are those that can help with creative ideation and original designs, allowing you to focus on conceptualization. This means that when a designer inputs the prompts that describe the brand or concept for the AI, the output is in line with what was described, and is original and visually interesting.
We’ve gathered the top tools below, and given a summary of what they offer and their subscription prices. It’s time to check them out and decide which tools would work best for you:
Stable Diffusion: A Free and Efficient AI Tool
Stable Diffusion is a text-to-image model using deep learning launched in 2022. Initially not an online service, it got its online version over time, but previously you had to install it locally on the computer. It will not come as a surprise that it has most of the possibilities. It can function on the majority of consumer hardware outfitted with a modest GPU and at least 8 GB VRAM, and its code and model weights have also been made freely available.
The issue here is that it is difficult to come by if you prefer to install the version. You will need a lot of additional work to install the latest app onto your device with the help of Github using Terminal. But qualitatively this is a game changer from earlier publicly available proprietary text-to-image models like DALL-E and Midjourney, only available via cloud services.
While Stable Diffusion does not yet have a user-friendly interface like some AI picture generators, it is free for personal and commercial use on both PC and Mac and has a fairly permissive license, only prohibiting a number of drawing scenarios and use cases. When it comes to inspiration, you can get prompts from Lexica to get a better picture as a final result. The service has been so popular that the internet is full of different models and prompts to adjust to the most efficient work with the tool. You can get the beginner’s guide to Stable Diffusion’s models as well as numerous examples for all the use cases you can imagine.
Midjourney: An Outstanding Image Generator
Midjourney is getting a lot of notice, as this is one of the most creative AI art generators to hit the scene. Midjourney is as they call themselves “an independent research lab” that offers a range of amazing design capabilities that can be generated by user prompts, that all begin with “/imagine:” From there, the tool creates designs that are only limited by your own creativity in writing a description.
Midjourney creates illustrations, photos, graphics and templates. This platform is used through the Discord app, so it may not be as beginner-friendly to begin as other AI art platforms. Users must have a Discord profile and connect to the Midjourney server. If you’re already familiar with Discord, this tool is easy to start using. When you run out of ideas, Midlibrary prompter will be there to help you out.
Midjourney offers users a free trial of 25 images. After that, the basic subscription plan is 10 USD per month, or 8 USD per month if paid annually, and allows for 3.3 hours of use. For artists who need to generate images rapidly and will use the platform for more than 3 hours, there are pro and commercial subscriptions available, at 30 USD and 60 USD a month.
DALL-E: AI for Creating Realistic Images
DALL-E 2 is an AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language. Its name is a combination of the surrealist Spanish artist Salvador Dalí and the name of the animated robot character WALL-E from the Pixar film series. DALL-E makes use of a GPT-3 variant that has been altered to produce pictures, and was unveiled by OpenAI in a blog post in January 2021. In April 2022, OpenAI introduced DALL-E 2, a replacement that “can combine concepts, attributes, and styles” to produce more realistic graphics at greater resolutions.
DALL-E 2 became available as an API by OpenAI in November 2022, enabling programmers to use the model into their own applications absolutely free of charge. The tool was implemented by Microsoft in their Designer app and the Image Creator feature found in Bing and Microsoft Edge. The cost per picture for the API varies depending on the resolution of the image. Companies collaborating with OpenAI’s corporate team can take advantage of volume reductions.
Jasper.ai: A Tool for Unlimited High-Quality Content Creation
Jasper.ai is an artificial intelligence tool that generates original images and photos based on user input. Jasper.ai creates high-quality 2K images that can be used commercially without any watermarks or restrictions, which is essential if you plan to use AI designs commercially.
Users also can generate unlimited designs. Jasper.ai’s main points are its speed and ease of use. The platform also offers a robust AI writing tool, well-liked by many content creators. As an artist or marketer, you can use the writing tool to create written content to complement your designs.
asper.ai offers a generous trial version. The 5-day free trial lets users generate up to 200 images for free, and you can even retain commercial copyrights to the generated images. The paid version starts at 24 USD a month per user, with custom plans available for enterprise-level users.
Adobe Firefly: Write Prompts and Get Texts and Graphics
Adobe Firefly’s main function is to let you express what’s on your mind and then use that information to produce and improve writings and graphics. You may improve pictures and adapt the compositions or styles of one picture to another by using Adobe Firefly.
The service can apply styles and textures to letters and objects in addition to improving photos based on text descriptions. Keep in mind that images produced using Adobe Firefly will include meta information stating that it was generated with AI. At the moment it is available in beta, so you can test out the features. You can select from a list of samples provided by the application to get ideas for your own content creation. Soon, Adobe’s suite of programs including Photoshop, Illustrator, AEM, Express, and others will embrace Adobe Firefly’s functionality, which is great news for all the users who love AI features incorporated in the already known software.
Designs.ai: A Tool for Creating Marketing Content
Designs.ai is an accessible online design software aimed at helping users of all levels create marketing portfolios in under two minutes. The platform is organized by capability: a logo maker, design maker, speech maker, video maker and copywriter, making it easy to kick off any kind of project you need.
Designs.ai features a smart editor and wizard tool to help brainstorm design ideas for marketing content. There are over 20,000 templates and tons of icons to get you started quickly. It offers assistive tools like a brand identity package, color matcher, font pairer, scalable vector graphics, team collaboration, and unlimited downloads. These make many graphic design tasks quick and easy.
The basic plan starts at 29 USD a month, and is recommended for artists, students and those who just need to make quick, easy artwork and designs. The pro version is 69 USD a month, and allows for more collaboration with team members, as well as a higher number of premium images monthly. For more information on the use rights, check out the do’s and don’t section on the product’s website.
Leonardo.Ai: Generate Gaming Objects
A technology called Leonardo.Ai utilizes AI to produce beautiful gaming assets including objects, environments, helmets, structures, and concept art. With an artist-friendly interface, it enables users to quickly generate ideas, train their own AI models, and produce original production-ready assets.
Reminding us of Leaonardo da Vinci’s talent by its name and logo, Leonardo.Ai has a freemium pricing model and offers to sign up for an exclusive early bird access. You can choose to use an existing model or fully equip your own one. You may create hundreds of variants and deviations from your training data by quickly training your own AI model. You may iterate as much as you want to gain the perfect result of your character and environment.
Deep Art Effects: Turn Your Photos Into Art
Deep Art Effects is a photo editor that uses AI to turn photos into artwork. Users can try prompts like “How would Renoir have painted my photo?” Not only can you specify an art style for the finished results, but you can colorize photos, integrate filters and create backgrounds.
The tool also allows designers to place their photos or artwork on objects, magically creating realistic-looking mockups for products. Deep Art Effects offers a developer portal so you can take advantage of their API to transform images within your apps, and display custom ads in any language.This is a robust AI tool to use if you’re a developer, or want to create unique art from your photos.
BlueWillow: Create Art and Graphics From Prompts
BlueWillow is an AI art tool that takes any prompt from a user and creates art, photos, logos or graphics. BlueWillow aims to be easy and accessible for anyone to use.
Similar to Midjourney, the tool is used through a Discord server, so the interface is the same. BlueWillow also outputs four image options from a prompt. The images can then be upscaled to better define the characteristics. Unlike Midjourney, BlueWillow is free, so this can be an excellent option for those who want to create with an AI art generator, but are on a budget.
Remove.bg: Easily Get Rid of the Background in Photos
Remove.bg is the simplest AI tool in our roundup, offering just one useful function: to remove the background in photos. It does this quickly and with one click. Users upload a photo to the site, click remove, and choose either a transparent background or a white background for your photo. A job that used to take serious editing software and skills now only takes a few seconds with this tool.
Remove.bg offers a free version, for low resolution images, and for 50 free images using the app or the API. The paid version for premium resolution images is 0.20 USD per photo for a subscription, or use the pay as you go plan for 0.90 USD per photo.
Fronty: Create Codes From Images
Fronty is an AI-powered tool that is extremely useful if you’re a designer who wants to create a website but doesn’t want to code. This platform is unique in that it creates source codes based on a user-uploaded image. Fronty has over two decades of front-end experience and currently uses 11 technology products and services, including HTML5 and Google Analytics. The unique point of Fronty is that with only a design in mind, you can launch a website, without writing any code.
Here’s how it works: Fronty generates an HTML CSS code based on your draft. Simply upload an image of your webpage design. The AI identifies the different elements of the image and then automatically generates your HTML/CSS code. You can also use its online user interface (UI) editor to modify your webpages. Fronty’s claim is that its code is clean, speed-optimized, and accessible. Beyond design, it even offers website hosting, so it can be an all in one platform if web design is your aim.
Fronty has a great free option, offering a Fronty branded subdomain for your own website with 5 pages and some starting space of free hosting. This is an excellent way to try out the tool and see how it works for you. To get your own subdomain, with up to 10 users, unlimited pages and hosting, the cost is 4.52 USD a month; and for advanced users, 9 USD a month for larger teams.
Adobe Sensei: Predict Customer Behaviors
Adobe Sensei is one of the oldest AI tools around in the design world, launched back in 2016. It uses machine learning and deep learning algorithms to enhance the capabilities of Adobe’s tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro. The Sensei technology helps predict customer behaviors and deliver one-to-one customer experiences at scale. For that reason, the platform is popular with marketers that want to integrate customer data into creating designs that will reach their audience.
Adobe Sensei also features intelligent cropping and auto-colorization, making it easier for artists to quickly try out different versions of their designs. It also allows for collaboration between artists by automating repetitive tasks and giving data-driven insights to optimize creative workflows. Pricing is determined by how much your organization uses Adobe, and users have to contact the vendor to determine what a subscription costs.
Movavi: A Video Editing AI Tool
Movavi is a video editing software that offers AI editing capabilities. It’s designed to help new and experienced users create and edit videos. It offers features such as video trimming, splitting, and merging, adding special effects and transitions, and color correction. It’s simple to use, yet offers fairly advanced creative tools.
Movavi is different from other video editors because it offers a user-friendly interface that is ideal for beginners new to video editing. You can easily create a video montage of designs, change the lighting or animate an item in a video. Additionally, it supports a wide range of file formats and allows users to save and export their videos in different formats and resolutions. Movavi offers a free trial and a full version for 54.95 USD.
Let’s Enhance: Improve the Quality of Your Images
Let’s Enhance is an image generator and upscaler that can improve the quality and resolution of your artwork or images. This helps when you want to work with images taken by your phone, but the resolution isn’t high enough for a professional format. Photos can be scaled up to 16x their original size, and sharpened to look like they were taken by a professional camera.
Let’s Enhance offers a free version with 10 free credits a month, and subscriptions ranging from 9-34 USD a month. It offers cloud storage, batch processing and chat support for the paid versions, aimed at helping businesses and teams generate larger quantities of photos quickly.
Kroma: The Tool for Eye-Catching Presentations
Kroma is an AI tool for creating pitches, presenting data and generating ideas. It’s ideal for users who create marketing assets or business decks, like earning reports and strategy proposals—and those who would like to shorten the time spent on these tasks. The software allows users to create expertly-designed presentations quickly. It features slideshow templates, “grab and go content” and over 1 million assets like stock photos and videos.
You can try one presentation template on Kroma free. Beyond that, to use all the capabilities you’ll need a subscription, at 49.99 USD per month.
AutoDraw: AI for Upgrading Your Sketches
AutoDraw is a drawing tool from Google’s creative lab. It uses Machine learning with drawings from artists to help make your own doodles and sketches better. It is handy and accessible, meaning it can be used on your mobile phone or any device.
Your designs can be downloaded as PNG files and shared digitally. You can also draw with AutoDraw’s basic features such as freehand drawing, shapes, text, and color picker, as well as keyboard shortcuts. While it is a more lightweight tool than many of the AI art generators featured here, it’s also free to use. If what you need is a simple tool to upscale your rough sketches, this is a good option.
Summary of AI Design Tools
As we know, Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the way graphic designers create art and design. For every type of media, there is an AI-powered tool to make design work easier and faster. These tools can offer text to image generation, photo editing, graphic design templates, website creation and animation in minutes—and they offer these advanced features to beginning designers. With all the options, AI tools are making creating graphics and marketing assets more efficient for anyone.
The AI field is very actively developing. And though we tried very hard to include all the most important services, it is possible that at the time of reading, some services may no longer be working, and others would have added new, unlisted features. BeLight Software company (including the Amadine Team) are happily using some of those services ourselves and we hope you’d enjoy them as much as we do. Using any of these AI tools described here, designers, hobbyists, artists or students can easily make stunning, high-quality designs, graphics and prototypes. No matter your budget or level of technical skills, with some practice and experimentation you’ll be able to create great looking designs that can be used on any platform.