How we scaled our design efforts using AI and Canva

Designers, before you all go off running, hear me out.

When I hear 'how to design on Canva/AI,' it takes all my will not to roll my eyes, too. Oh, the many times my wife designed an event poster or social post using Canva or Midjourney without consulting me, our in-house designer, always crushed my soul. Soul-crushing as it may have been, I was probably too busy with something else, and it was easier (and more fun) for her to do it alone.

Tools like this make it so easy. While I agree that creativity goes to templates to die, the ability to make design scalable and accessible is undeniable.

I want to show you how, as a designer, you can leverage these tools not to replace you but to help you minimise inconsistencies when your design system inevitably gets into the hands of a non-designer on your team.

What happens when you don't design for scale

When you're a designer founder or a single designer in a small startup, you will have to figure out how to do the work of many on your own. Even at a medium or large scale, there will always be more marketers, developers, and salespeople than designers. It's only possible to support a company's brand and design efforts by considering how to scale it.

Here's the problem that we faced.

We have a popular blog where we share tips and learnings about OKRs, strategy operations, and how to get your teams to be more results driven. It's called ODT (Outcome Driven Teams). Several people work on and publish articles weekly, but we only have one designer (myself). Every article we publish needs at least a hero image and a few infographics or illustrations to help visualise the point. Because we write and publish so quickly, design becomes a bottleneck for publishing the content.

Content writers will take matters into their own hands, knowing that design resources will be delayed for at least the next day or two, and publish the article with an AI-generated stock image or no images. From a business perspective, this is the right thing to do. You can always go back and fix it (though we hardly ever did), and we get the content out into the world.

But that's how you end up with an inconsistent brand. We could have just let this happen, but we take pride in our brand and want to ensure that our blogs provide a recognisable and enjoyable experience.

Design systems and brand assets only go so far. Logos, a colour palette, and a font get you part way, but we've all seen the nightmares the team can still create with them. Using templates is necessary to ensure your team can create assets in the most fool-proof way.

As you scale your company and design efforts, you often become the "brand police," as we call it, at one of my former companies. It's not flattering, but you'll naturally run into things people have published and want to pull your hair out. You have to remember that your job isn't to fix each thing you see but to set up templates to mitigate this issue in the future the best you can.

Making your design efforts scale

We started by visualising what we want our blog to look like, and made a few requirements to meet for this project:

1. Unique: Articles must have unique images
2. Scalable: Anyone can make images
3. Consistent: Images have to be within the realm of our brand guidelines and colour palettes

We looked at some blogs that we liked and took inspiration from them to help us achieve our goals.

Basecamp is undeniably a recognisable tech brand. Their designs are not really that impressive, but when you see that yellow label, you immediately recognise it. This was a prime example of what we thought was possible with our resources. They use stock images overlaid with a branded type and colour. It's simple but consistent.

As a baseline, this was scaleable and doable with our resources, but we wanted to stand out more and create a more engaging and beautiful blog experience.

We also looked at the Hubspot blog. We loved the type of content they post, and the hero image designs are extremely consistent and well done. Overall, it was a beautiful and cohesive experience.

However, given the details and uniqueness of each image, their images were most likely all done by a designer and not via templates or scalable assets.

Crafting AI prompts that are on brand

While we wanted the uniqueness that the Hubspot look had, we knew the Basecamp approach was probably more achievable and scalable. To find a middle ground, we explored AI as an option for creating unique assets with minimal design efforts.

Identifying a base style prompt

Now, if you've used any of the AI image generators, you know it's not perfect. Most of the time, far from it.

For this project, we used Midjourney because it seemed to be the best image generator for our needs. At first, images had no consistency in styles, colours, etc., so we tried feeding it our own brand assets to see if it could recognise and replicate aspects of them. Trying to replicate our mascot, Tabby, we quickly found out that would not be happening.

But we knew applying a unique, scalable and consistent style to a more recognisable image was possible. We started by recreating a simple image of Chess pieces with the proper aspect ration that we wanted for the blog images.

/imagine chess pieces moving around a board --ar 16:9

Great. A unique image to use for an article about strategy and operations.

Now we know that it's able to produce the proper imagery, but we wanted an simple illustration style and some resemblance of our color palette to be applied to it. Our main brand colors are a forest green #0A5055 and a blush pink #F4CDC9.

After some digging, we realised that Midjourney recognises specific colour prompts. Using colour prompts we found, we tested a few and eventually settled on "hunter green and light pink." We then added a few more characteristics to hone in on the styling.

/imagine illustration of chess pieces moving around a board, 2d, flat design, hunter green, light pink colours --ar 16:9

The colours were starting to look more accurate, although far too bold. The illustration style was also a bit too refined. We use a simple and cartoon-like style. I added a "children's illustration" prompt and that seemed to do the trick.

/imagine childrens illustration of chess pieces moving around a board, 2d, flat design, hunter green, light pink colours --ar 16:9

We were quite happy with this result. We now had a template prompt to replicate the same styling to generate other imagery.

Putting the on-brand prompts to use

We now have a prompt to reuse and create new images with the same styling. Template:

/imagine childrens illustration of (describe image here), 2d, flat design, hunter green, light pink colours --ar 16:9

Using this new template, we've now created dozens of illustrations using the same colours and styles. Anybody on our team is now able to create custom imagery that's fairly on-brand.

Here are the results it produced:

Tip: Sometimes, I emit the "children" part of the prompt based on results. When drawing people, this prompt tends to give the characters child-like features rather than drawing adults in a children's book drawing style.

This may take some time to replicate, but scaling your brand assets using AI is possible.

Using Canva templates to add an extra touch

If you're a designer, you may not be convinced. If you really stare at the details, they're not always perfect. There is tons of refining and iterating to do on the prompts, but compared to how the blog used to look, it's a massive improvement. Whether the details of the illustrations are perfect or not, the general vibe of the brand is better represented.

Going an extra step, you can implement templates in Canva to help tie in the brand just a little bit more. For Midjourney-generated images, we use a premade template with a background pattern to match our brand style even more. A simple template like this can help tie the images together more.

Further, there may be times when a product screenshot or photograph needs to be the hero. A Canva template like this can make it easy to tie it all together, mixing AI images, product screenshots, photos, and emojis.

Even if you decide that AI is not for you, having some Canva templates to start goes a long way. You can even lock assets from moving to make your designs as prescriptive as possible.

Conclusion

This may take some time to replicate, and it's not perfect, but it is possible to scale your brand assets using AI. Doing this will minimise the variability in your brand's assets and save you from hours of brand policing, freeing you up to tackle more meaningful design problems.

With the advancements of AI, this will become easier and easier to replicate and scale. However, I don't think AI will ever replace a designer. Rather, AI and Canva will just become new tools that we will have available to use, just like we have Figma or Michaelangelo had marble and a chisel .

Love it or not, designer, there will be a day someone in your office comes to you with a deck they made in PowerPoint and asks you to make it "look nicer." Scalable solutions are key to making it possible for your team to keep producing and for you not to be a bottleneck for the entire team.

For everybody else here, you're gonna love this. Go share this with your designer.