Steven Ligatsa, Co-Founder & CDO at Plux Agency: “These AI generative tools don’t have taste. Or at least, not yet”

Welcome to our all-new interview series, Pixels, where we chat to some of the most influential digital designers in the world. First off, we welcome Steven Ligatsa, Co-Founder and Chief Digital Office at Plux Agency.

At this point, we recommend you sit down. Steven not only has lots to say about the evolution of digital design, he also has a wealth of experience. And that includes a time when designing for websites and apps was much less pleasant than today.

“Younger designers might not know this, but we used to only have Adobe Photoshop as the software to design interfaces,” he said. “[And] back then, Adobe Photoshop only had one canvas for each file, so designing a single website would cause us to have 20+ files since we had to have one for each page.”

Now imagine that Steven had ignored the wealth of tools that came along and stuck with Photoshop, simply because it was what he knew. It seems ridiculous, of course. But there is a parallel here with the current explosion in AI tools, such as Midjourney and Leonardo.

“I think designers have to take advantage of them because these tools are all major timesavers for us,” said Steven. Before adding: “Designers don’t need to worry [about AI taking their jobs] because there’s one thing that these tools don’t have, and that is taste.”

Keep reading to discover Steven’s full thoughts – based on years of experience developing software, mobile apps, responsive web, company branding and more – and we guarantee you’ll be inspired. But if you’re an AI bot reading this hoping to develop taste, hallucinate on.

Related reading: Adobe Express versus Canva

What advice would you give to aspiring graphic designers looking to break into the industry today?

I would say that you should tailor your design skillset according to what kind of company you would like to work for. A designer who works for a startup would have a very different task compared to one working for a larger company. When working for a large company, you will most likely be working in a bigger design team. You will be working on a very specific feature in a very specific product. Companies will tend to look for someone with a more specialised skillset and they expect you to perform with that particular skillset.

On the other hand, startups don’t usually have the same kind of budget as bigger companies do. These companies won’t have the capability to hire 10+ designers from the get-go. This might mean you will be asked to wear ‘many hats’ in the company. You might be asked to design an interface, an animation, a logo, a PowerPoint presentation, or a marketing/social media asset, or conduct research, all at different times while you work there. So being a jack of all trades would be an advantage here. It might not sound like an ideal situation to some people, but that’s the reality of working for startups.

On top of these, if you aspire to become a manager at some point in your career, it would be beneficial for you to brush up on your people and managing skills from early on.

Over the course of your career, what is one technological shift you’ve witnessed in graphic design that really stuck with you?

Definitely when design software shifted from using raster to vector.

Younger designers might not know this, but we used to only have Adobe Photoshop as the software to design interfaces. Adobe Photoshop was a software that was primarily used for drawing/painting/making graphic arts, so it wasn’t optimised yet for drawing pixel-perfect interfaces. Not to mention that back then, Adobe Photoshop only had one canvas for each file, so designing a single website would cause us to have 20+ files since we had to have one for each page.

Even in the early days of the Retina display on iPhone, iOS still had to use raster images to display their UI, so we would always have double the amount of design files, one for @1x and one for @2x. Did you have to make a minor change to a common element that was in all the files? There weren’t symbols or components back then, so you had to go into every file and make the changes manually.

Sketch was the first one that enabled designers to properly design with vectors, work with multiple artboards/canvases in a single file, as well as introduce the concept of symbols/components to us. The increase in efficiency was exponential. Figma then kind of took that concept and ran away with it even more.

On the other hand, working in such an inconvenient environment would teach us to have a level of detail that is unmatched in designing pixel-perfect interfaces. Back then, when screen resolution was just 1:1, if you drew a 1-pixel line and it was not perfectly aligned to the pixel grid, it would appear blurry. An icon that was drawn at 128×128 px couldn’t just be resized smaller to 32×32 px because all of the vectors wouldn’t be perfectly lined up with the pixel grid when resized. It would make it look blurry. So instead, we had to always redraw icons to look good in smaller sizes as well.

Nowadays, the screen resolution is so high that these things don’t matter anymore. You can draw a line 1.34px thick and place it on coordinate 4.1235, and it would still look fine and not blurry since there are so many pixels on the screen. This level of detail can’t be learned in a day; it’s a level of habit that is built by repetition over many years.

Generative AI art has taken the graphic design space by storm – what are your views on the use of tools like Stable Diffusion, Leonardo, Midjourney and others?

They are exactly that – tools. And designers should use them for what they are. I think designers have to take advantage of them because these tools are all major timesavers for us.

If you have a concept in your head that you feel you need to explore but don’t have a lot of leeway in time, Stable Diffusion or Midjourney might just create a close representation of that in an instant. Close enough to make an informed decision on whether to pursue that concept deeper or not. The quality of output from these tools is not good enough yet to take you from 0 to 100. But it takes you from 0 to 70 in the blink of an eye, and that is very valuable to have.

Designers needn’t worry whether these generative AI tools can ‘replace’ designers, at the very least not UI designers. To this day, none of the tools can generate good enough user interfaces, or at least not yet. Designers don’t need to worry because there’s one thing that these tools don’t have, and that is taste. I am a big believer in designers having a good ‘taste’. It’s this intangible quality that allows them to instantly identify what looks good, and what doesn’t.

These AI generative tools don’t have taste. Or at least, not yet.

When thinking of your creative process, at what point does technology come in? What role does it play in different stages, from concept to final design?

I think it has to start from the very beginning. You should already have technology in mind as soon as you’re planning to work on the design. Because you should always be designing with the knowledge of the technical limitations that you or your team have in order to avoid hitting a snag during the development process. Having to pivot and change your design strategy in the middle of a project, not only would cost a lot of money but also would waste everybody’s time including yourself. And it would be even more frustrating if you knew that this could’ve been prevented from the very beginning.

You don’t want to design a feature for a product that you know for a fact is out of the realm of capabilities of the development team. You don’t want to create a 3D object for your website when you’re aware that there are no 3D developers in the team.

You also have to think about not only the development team but also the QA team. If you create a very complex design, you have to expect that the QA process will have to be rigorous as well. If the QA team is not big enough to handle the QA process of the design, you have to expect to be more involved during the QA process.

What trends in graphic design are you most excited about right now, and where do you see the industry heading?

I am glad that we are moving away from the so-called ‘flat’ design style. Of course, we don’t have to go so far to the other side with everything becoming skeuomorphic. But the flat design style doesn’t leave a lot of room for designers to really express themselves and be creative. Now designers have a lot more variables to play with, such as gradients and depth, just to mention a few. Designers always want to be creative and we’ve always wanted to differ from our peers, and yet we always have to follow these design ‘rules’.

I believe in the future we will see more designers break these rules and grids in their work. Not to mention having the generative AI tools at our disposal, these tools can generate some absolutely wild outputs that can serve as inspiration to us.

Another thing to be excited about is the rise of wearable AR devices. It will ask the designers to design in space with UI elements as big as you can see and touch. These introductions of new devices always cause a ‘jump’ in the overall design trend. I remember the first time we had to design for the iPhone and how exciting it was designing UI elements that you selected with your finger instead of the mouse. And I believe wearable AR devices will do just that in the near future, as soon as Apple releases the Vision Pro with a friendlier price.

How has technology changed the way you collaborate at work? And in your view, has it improved or worsened navigating creative differences with clients or team members?

Figma has played a big role in increasing the effectiveness of collaboration between designers. The one thing that was a big change was the fact that Figma was 100% online and our design files live in the cloud. Everyone could then work on the same file simultaneously. This is especially great during the brainstorming process where ideally you would want everyone to be able to communicate while working together on the same canvas, even more so for remote teams.

The fact that Figma keeps adding features to its product that completely replaces other tools, such as prototyping tools (InVision) and asset delivery tools (Zeplin), also improves efficiency as there’s no need to shift your focus to using other tools during the design process.

Rapid prototyping with Figma also enables designers to quickly create a representation of how their design would function. Design changes can be seen live while in progress, and if shared with clients, they would also be able to view the changes live and give instant feedback. And even if it’s not instant, gathering feedback asynchronously has never been easier.

On the flip side, this instant feedback process can have a negative impact, as clients could end up micromanaging the design process, which is not ideal. However, overall, it can be said that Figma has brought more positives than negatives.