Every agency has a hot take on AI right now. Ours is simpler than most: we only kept the tools that actually made our work better, faster, or cheaper without making us cringe at the output. Here's the honest breakdown after twelve months of real client work.
The ones that stayed.
Midjourney is still our go-to for ideation and mood boarding. The quality ceiling is genuinely high when you learn to engineer prompts properly. We use it to explore visual directions before any pixels hit a real canvas. It's saved us countless hours of stock photography hunting.
ComfyUI is where we do the heavy lifting for product renders. The learning curve is steep but the control is unmatched. When a client needs photorealistic product shots across six colourways, we can produce them in hours rather than booking a studio for a week.
Claude handles our copy review and brief drafting. Not for writing from scratch — we still believe in human voice — but for pressure-testing structure, catching logic gaps, and generating variations quickly.
“AI didn't replace our designers. It made them capable of producing work that used to require a team three times the size.
The ones we dropped.
- Adobe Firefly (inconsistent quality, too many artefacts on product shots)
- DALL-E 3 standalone (Midjourney consistently beats it for aesthetic work)
- Runway Gen-2 (promising but the video quality isn't client-ready yet — checking back in six months)
- Several "AI design" SaaS tools that were just wrappers with inflated pricing
The honest take on AI in creative work.
AI is a production multiplier, not a creative replacement. The studios that are winning right now are the ones that figured out how to blend machine speed with human taste. The ones losing are either ignoring it entirely or letting it degrade their output quality in the chase for margins.
We land somewhere in the middle: AI handles the repetitive, the explorative, and the iterative. Humans handle the judgment calls that matter. That's the workflow we're building toward, and so far, clients can't tell the difference — except in turnaround time and price.
