The Easiest Design Tool is also the Most POWERFUL. (thanks to AI)

This, this right here is a perfect representation of why AI democratization is so awesome. Playground design. This is an AI based designer that is incredibly easy to use. I mean, not just among AI tools, but in general among design tools as a whole. This is probably the easiest way to do advanced things I've seen. Let me show you how it works. Let's say I want to make a poster. I select the poster option and I have all of these templates in front of me. Let's say I really like bubble letters that say good vibes. I select that template, right? And at the bottom it simply just says, what do you want to change? Change the text to say Mat Vid Pro. And now I simply press the create button and via a simple text message, as if I was just messaging a designer to fix something for me in real life. It changes it perfectly. It keeps the same exact style and background and the color of the letters. It's really, really consistent. And of course it fully customized to actually spell Matte Vid Pro, which is pretty incredible. A super simple interface. You simply text it like a person. How incredible is that? You see, to create something like this in Photoshop, it would take quite a lot of advanced experience, even more than me. And I'm kind of like a tech guy. I wouldn't know how to make that from scratch in photoshop or a 3D program, but AI can do it really fast. But even if you use regular typical AI tools such as Ideogram AI, for example, even though I really think this is probably one of the most user friendly AI image generation platforms, you still have to learn some level, some degree of prompting. If you were to give this interface to someone who's never used AI before and ask them to recreate this, well, odds are they're not going to be able to prompt the AI in a way that the AI is going to generate what they expect. You see, this did a pretty decent job. But if I want to make any alterations, like making this text pink, for example, typing in make this text pink isn't going to cut it because we're starting a new prompt up at the top here. And even if I remix this and I put that text in, it's not going to understand you because it's not set up to be a text message style iteration system that requires extra technology under the hood just to make it more democratized and compatible for those who are not used to using AI technologies, prompt interfaces or image generation interfaces as a whole. So that's the basic rundown on why I love this. I'm going to explore it today because honestly, I think this is the best thing that playground AI has put out since they first released with their for the time, innovative image generation tool. In comparison to everything else, this is the most easy, the most user friendly and one of the most powerful AI based design tools I've used. 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I've already been using AI to help come up with video ideas and script things out, but it's no surprise to me to see the statistics that high. The report also has proven strategies for using AI to create more personalized and engaging content. I gotta say though, my favorite revelation from this is how 63% of marketers believe that AI implementation at a larger scale could lead to unprecedented growth like we've never seen. It does have me thinking about some areas in which I could use AI to automate and improve the way I actually create content. So what's your take? Are you a creator? Are you using AI? If so, and if not, what's holding you back? Feel free to leave a comment. And if you want to dive deeper into these insights, you can Download the full HubSpot AI trend report for completely free down in the description below. Huge thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring today's video. Now back to your regularly scheduled content. Welcome back folks. Sponsors are the reason I can pursue this channel full time, so thank you so much for sticking around for them. Quick context on Playground AI. This is the old style of design that they have. Obviously this is a lot more complicated. We've got a bunch of switches, dials and knobs to play with. And for Professional users. While these are quite nice, these are fun to mess around with and to learn. And like I said at the time, this kind of interface when Playground first came out was pretty innovative. And don't get me wrong, guys, I still think that interfaces such as this one, where you have all these little knobs and buttons to change things subtly, can absolutely be very crucial for certain situations. But this, this right here gets me way more excited because it's dead simple and it's actually doing quite a lot under the hood that you just don't see. It's twisting those dials, it's adjusting those knobs for you to make things happen. All just based off of natural language prompts. Let me show you how versatile this thing is. Let's start off with a logo. All these logos, all these base designs are pretty good. And we can start with any of them. Let's take this one of the bear, for example. Keeping the sun in the back. Change the bear to a jellyfish. Completely different concept, but will it be able to maintain the style? Will it be able to keep the sun. I don't know exactly how things are working in the background or how they've managed to develop a workflow that actually gets this done, but there it is. We've got that sun in the background in the same style. We've got this jellyfish. I really, really enj how it's able to adhere to such a high quality and adhere to such specific requests all through simple text. I mean, clearly it's using some sort of a large language model. I don't know if it's something they've developed themselves, but I'm impressed. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I haven't seen anything else that can really do this. Let's try this one. Obviously, a very stylized panther kind of reminds you of maybe a sports team. Keep the same exact style, but make this for. And let's come up with our own team. And we're not going to make it easy. We're going to make the centipedes. So I expect the same art style, a logo of a centipede in this same style. And I want the same exact text style saying centipedes instead. And that's a lot to infer from just this basic text prompt. I'm talking to it like chat GPT and there you go. It's able to actually create that. And the text coherence, by the way, is pretty darn good. Same style, same colors, same sort of a logo, but it's a Centipede. I mean, it's crazy. You can't do this with Dall E3 and Chat GPT. It has way, way more of a difficult time. And you know what? I'll show you that. Let's grab this logo, bring it into ChatGPT and say, Change this to represent the centipedes. Will Chat GPT first of all be smart enough to generate with Dall E3? The answer is yes. And it does somewhat of a decent job, right? Definitely. Centipedes, kind of a similar style, but not directly similar. Certainly not as good as the playground design. Centipedes is also spelled wrong though. And we've got some weird glitchy letters up here and something strange going down here. I think that's supposed to be like an underline, but again, that wasn't even in the original design. And the color palette, while similar, is definitely off. And guys, that was just a logo. We have T shirts, we have social media posts. The social media posts are interesting because this is a lot more text on the screen at once. So this is more difficult for the model to produce. I like some of these more YouTube thumbnail esque ones. These are pretty funny. Oh, and by the way, yes, you can see that they do have pro plans as well. So some templates such as this one are pro only. Can't use them for free, unfortunately. And then their plans start at 15 bucks a month. They also have annual, but I wouldn't use that. Here's the thing with AI technology right now, this is cutting edge. This is mind blowing stuff. I mean, you can just talk to it and it reproduces designs in such a great inferred specific. And while I might get that monthly $15 a month plan just to mess with this thing, I wouldn't get the annual plan that knocks it down to 12 bucks a month. Because AI technology moves so fast that you never know when something even better might be right around the corner. So as cool as playground design is, I would not spring for that annual plan. I would stick to monthly. If you want to try this thing out for actual professional design use, for example, which I think it absolutely is capable of. See, let's take this, this one. I like the base design of this thumbnail, right? This is obviously a YouTube thumbnail, but that lady is super creepy. Please turn her into a picture of a lemon. And by the way, you can take it one step at a time. You can prompt it to change everything at once. Or I could say just change the lemon for now and I'll worry about the rest later. And you can continuously prompt it over time and then finally adjust it to the thing that you want. And you can see it does a pretty great job. Like, it does change some of the aspects. It's not perfect. It changes the text a little. Might change these little logo things in the corners, but it does a decent job. Now I'll delete this text. We have our lemon. Change the text to read how to Become a Lemon and press create. And you can get pretty wild with these. You can get pretty creative with them. It will listen to pretty much anything you ask it to do, within reason. It's not going to do nudity or super violent stuff, anything like that. But there you go. We have a pretty decent YouTube thumbnail of how to become a lemon in the. We've got the photo of a lemon there. I mean, contrast this with Ideogram AI Again, Ideogram AI here is probably my favorite image generator platform out right now. But it's still not this easy to use. It's still more difficult to recreate something like this, for example. I know this example is pretty silly, but it's not easy for these AIs to reproduce in this same way. Like, first of all, I have to have the understanding that the aspect ratio for a YouTube thumbnail should be 16 by 9. And that's pretty reasonable. I think that most people who want to create YouTube videos will know that their thumbnails need to be in that aspect ratio. But then if I say make me a YouTube thumbnail for how to become a lemon, this is how someone who is inexperienced with AI might prompt this thing. These results are pretty great, but they aren't necessarily adhering to any specific style that we might want to go for. It's sort of just throwing things at the wall because the user isn't experienced enough with image generators. And again, ideogram is probably the best for this circumstance. Most people trying to use AI tools to create a YouTube thumbnail, for example, are probably going to be using Chat GPT, which only is going to give us much, much worse results in comparison to something where I can not only pick a starting point that I like, but adjust it to exactly what I'm looking for. I understand when I'm making this video here, when I'm trying to explain this, a lot of you guys are already in the AI circle. You' already in the AI space. But I know quite a lot of people who aren't into AI at all. And I can tell you that out of every tool I've used for AI Graphic design, or even just graphic design in general. This gets me excited because I know people who are new to AI can use it. This is technology that will be spread around because of how easy it is to use. Anyways, let's dive deep and actually really create something cool. Let's use something. Ooh, I like that. I mean, it is an election year. What if it were a lemon running for president? I know. I keep using the lemons. It's. It is the channel logo after all. Got to keep Mr. Lemon alive and well. Oh, I like that. Okay, this is cool. But he kinda looks like a clown. Make him really cool. And there you go. It actually is able to fix him up and make him look cooler while keeping that same exact original design. It's. It's pretty impressive. I mean, under the hood, this is really some sort of a model that can understand the text in a very natural way and then apply those changes along with keeping the style. So it's like maybe an LLM prompter with really good style transfer. I don't know what they're doing to make this possible under the hood, but it's good and it works. Oh, and it looks like I've run out of free generations for now. In that case, folks, welcome to my second account. Oh, yeah, I did forget to mention that it does have a general art generator as well. And this goes a little bit beyond graphic design. Right. This is more useful for general style transfer, I would say. Ooh, I really like this 3D ghost, actually. But, you know, maybe I don't want him to be a ghost. I want him to be a pumpkin. Make him a pumpkin instead. What I'm interested in is if it's going to adhere to the style, because I feel like this is a pretty unique style. And if he's gonna be holding the book, and if so, how is a pumpkin gonna hold a book without any arms? And bam. Honestly, it did a pretty good job. It kept that same cutesy style. I gotta say, the colors and everything in the 3D style as a whole adhered very well. Gave him little pumpkin arms that work, and he's still holding the book. That's like, bam, man. I'm just surprised that we've achieved this level already. This level of ease of use, this level of super advanced customization that's just possible for anyone who makes an account on here. Okay, but this one. This one is even cooler. Instead of a popsicle, can we try a caramel apple? I mean, this is sufficiently advanced enough technology to where it just sort of Starts to feel like magic instead. That's the point that we're hitting with some of these AI tools now. They're becoming more refined. There's a lot going on under the hood that you just don't even know what it's doing. And, oh, yeah, I forgot to mention, they also have a resize feature, so you can change aspect ratio if you need to. Like, let's make this a 16 by 9. Did a decent job extending that. I think it lost the style a tad there. Add text that reads, you wouldn't. You wouldn't do this to your friend. Right? And. Oh, there you go. See, it's still not perfect. It's still not going to do it every single time. In this case, we didn't get any text. Oh, and then it just tried to apply it directly to the creature itself. Interesting. See, we are in art templates. I think the templates do, to some degree matter for this, which makes me think, is it different models for each kind of design? I mean, like I said, I would love to know what technology is going on under the hood to make this all possible. The ebook covers are pretty crazy overall, if anything, from a market perspective, this product is very well targeted to a bunch of small, little demographics. And it's equally as easy to use pretty much across the board. I think a lot of us people who are into AI would probably be wondering, you know, what technology is going on under the hood to do all of this? Because we would love to twist the knobs and change things ourselves. Right? So maybe that would be my. My takeaway is that us advanced users would like to see how things are done. But at the same time, the rate that AI technology is advancing is fast enough, where in a year or two, I don't think it's really going to matter. The AI will be so good at controlling itself to create what you want that you might not have to really worry about it. Right. Keep the style but change it to a walking T Rex. Come up with a quote for that as well. I'm kind of pushing it to see how you can prompt it. I want to know how far they really went with of use. And like I said, I mean, we did see some failed generations today. It's not perfect just yet. Okay. Hey, it did a pretty decent job. Always in the move. Pretty close. Not perfect. Like I said, I think it's getting there. I think it's getting there. Like I said, in a year or two, this technology is gonna be, like, nearly flawless. We made it really far in a very Short amount of time. Can I do something annoying? Just change him to being sad. Oh, my God. It actually did such a great job. Wow, that's crazy. It was able to, like, sometimes it just nails it, right? That's. That's the thing is, like, sometimes you'll get misses, but when the hits hit, they really hit, bro. Oh, my gosh. Wow. Okay. And yeah, of course they have an undo button. You can share things as well. You could always download it or upscale it if you have the pro feature. But yeah, I encourage you guys to go on here again, you can try it for free. You get some limited amount of uses for free. I don't know if it frees up. Apparently they've also got an iOS app that you can just download, so that's pretty cool. I'll have to try that as well. Oh, and one final thing. They do have starting a design from an image of your own. And when you upload an image, it's generating right off the bat. By the way, I clearly uploaded the channel logo and. Okay, so it sort of tries to do a style transfer of your original image. Very interesting. Did a pretty decent job here. It was able to understand everything and replicate it. I think the style's a little bit different, but to be fair, that image I uploaded was originally a Dall E2 generation, so some people might actually prefer this one. So you can do an image upload and then start off from that, but it's not actually going to let you edit your original. It's always going to make a new generation because it probably has to work within the constraints of whatever model it's using. Like I said, under the hood, from an AI technical perspective. I don't know if it's using different models for different types of patterns. I mean, seamless patterns must be its own thing, right? Because these are supposed to be able to tile over time, as you can see. So this has to a different model, right? And oh yeah, here's another really cool feature too. It's like you could use this for actual design work for sure. These all came out pretty great. Oh, and it does have a meme mode, although most of these are fairly cringe. If you make anything genuinely funny, send it to my Discord server. I would love to see it. I really wanted to talk about this today because I do think that just as important as developing the initial AI technology is making it available to people is more important. And I know this has paid plans, but there is limited free use and well, it's just plain easy to use. It's more powerful for new users than pretty much every other design platform out there because of the power of AI technology and that's a big deal. Do you think that's important in your products? Do you want them to be easy to use for new users or do you prefer having all of those knobs and dials at your fingertips to adjust things and where's the balance in between that? It's something that I've been thinking a lot about lately just because of all of different AI products I use on a daily basis. Some of them are really easy, some of them are really user friendly, some of them not so much. Thanks so much for watching today's video and yeah, give this one a shot and let me know what you think. Like I said, I do have a Discord server and I'd love to chat about it and see your creations on it. So thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next one.