This Is the Future of Designers in the AI Era

1. Introduction: Surviving the AI Era as a Designer: As a designer, I don't really love AI. Specifically, I don't like that feeling that I'm missing out, that I'm falling behind every single day, that if I don't learn about some new AI platform, I'm going to be out of a job in no time flat. And I think most designers are worried, some more than others. News comes out every single day, right, how ChatGPT can create beautiful designs, how Claude can do this and that, Nano Banana and so on, how this platform integrates with Pigma or Canva, how Photoshop is now adding AI here and there. It's overwhelming, right? Hey, there. I'm Chris Chris Barin. I've been teaching design since 2013, and I specialize in web and app design. I'm an entrepreneur, and I think I have a clear perspective on what's next for us as designers. This is why I'm making this course to share my insight and help you get on the right track. And by the end of this course, you should have a very clear game plan for what you need to do as a designer in this AI era to not only survive but excel, you can make the most out of it, how you can navigate this incredibly confusing time and come out much better than you came in. AI in design is like a doctor giving you bad news about your health. You have to change. You got to take action. There's no way around it. You need to act. If you don't go to the doctor, that doesn't mean you're not sick, right? So simply ignoring the problem, ignoring AI won't make you immune to its effects. Don't ignore it. But here's where this course is going to help you. I think I have a better approach because I've paid my rent by freelancing, right? I've been in the trenches. I've worked for clients, but I've also run several businesses. I have a lot of entrepreneur friends and I've hired designers, left and right, dozens of them. Now, by being on both sides, I gained a lot of knowledge, and that gave me a clear idea about what's next for us as designers. In short, you don't have to pay hundreds of dollars per month and learn every single one of these AI tools. You don't have to learn how to code or jump into other niches. No, instead, you got to be really clear about what you're supposed to do as a designer. I'm going to break everything down into simple concepts. I'm going to give you plenty of examples, and by the end of this course, you are no longer going to fear AI. You won't be anxious about being left behind. You're going to have a game plan on how to become financially successful while also building skills that are going to be future proof, skills that are not going away. Basically, I'm going to teach you how to not get replaced by AI. So let's get started. 2. How AI Is Reshaping Design Work: Welcome back. How is AI actually changing the design world? So say you're the designer working in an agency or maybe on a freelancing platform, right? Or maybe you land clients on your own. You acquire clients through your website, maybe, right? Now, how does AI impact you? Now, let me show you a clear example. So I'm using ChatGPT here, but there are tons of options out there. I'm going to say create a YouTube thumbnail based on an abstract purple and blue gradient with text that says AI is not replacing me. Aspec ratio 16 by nine. Oh, and add a thick white stroke around me. Now, I'm going to paste this message and I'm going to run it. I'm going to speed up the process just a bit. And there you go. This is a more than decent YouTube thumbnail. Now, let me add the following. Improve my skin quality and then add a menacing robot somewhere in the background with an X across his face like he's being denied access. Now, again, I'm going to speed this up, though it's fascinating to watch how the model thinks, how it works to various scenarios, and how it arrives at a solution. In any case, here's the result, and it's good. It's solid. Some might even say that it's great, but more than that, here's what employers see. People that actually hire designers. They can see incredible speed, instant turnaround, no waiting whatsoever. The second thing, they see good quality. It may not be world class, but for the vast majority of people and businesses, this is more than acceptable. And the third thing that companies see no complaining. Designers are moody people, right? And clients are typically unsure. They might want to see more options. And they sometimes after 510 other options, they say, You know what? Chris, the initial one was best. Let's go back to that one. And of course, when that happens, a lot of emotions are involved. The client feels bad for making the designer redo the work a bunch of times. But, of course, the designer is frustrated because his input isn't valued, right? Overall, it's a net negative. Everyone is unhappy. But here, through this process, it's effortless. It's seamless. Out of these three points, even if you remove one of them, you still have a solution here that you can't ignore. It's so good. It's too powerful. And I would even argue that if you remove two of these three, it might still be a better experience than what we have right now. So this is how design work is changing. And this is just one random example from one platform. And I assure you there are countless other ones for animation, for the video work, for UGC content, for the commercials. Whatever you can think of, it's out there. And the thing is, there's no fighting it. That ship has sailed, okay? So here are a few other things I made in just a few minutes. Here's this lovely mascot in multiple situations, right? It's cute, it's high quality. It's exactly what I want. Here's my own website, again, made in just a few hours, and I don't know how to code. And this is perfectly functional. It works. Everything is perfect. Now, this is the switch from regular phones with no Internet to phones with four G. You cannot fight it. You may love your old phone, but you can't fight technology. Now, here's the thing. Most business owners won't do this on their own, and those who are going to be inclined to dabble and do it on their own, those were not your clients anyway. Now, let me say that again. The person who prefers to use these platforms himself to create stuff would have never hired you as a designer. And if he did, he would have offered you something like 50 bucks, and he would have been a pain to work with. So the vast majority of the market, the people who want design work done, that's still out there. But now you have better tools. Instead of using a regular screwdriver, you're now using an electric one. It's still the same person doing the same job but with better tools. And that brings up the question which tools are best for you as a designer? Let's find out in the next video. 3. Choosing AI Tools Without the Overwhelm: Come back. Which tools should you use a designer? What's the best stuff that's out there, right? Now, I won't keep you waiting. There is no set list. That's it. Here's a list that's going to be useless by the time I publish this video. Now, why is it useless, and why can't I just recommend what I personally use? Because things change nonstop. Now, here's the best way to look at it. I was thinking about getting cloud code, right? A platform that lets you build software without knowing how to code made by a company called Anthrope. Now, here are just a few stats about this company crazy numbers. Okay? Or on the flip side, there's another platform called Codex made by Open AI, the creators of ChatGPT. And here are a few stats about them. Again, absolutely crazy numbers, right? Now, in my mind, I wanted the best tool available, right? I wanted the best bang for my buck. I wanted to use the best tool so I could get the best results. It makes sense, right? So I started looking at reviews and videos, comparing their features and whatnot. Their pricing was quite similar, but beyond that, I had a hard time getting a clear answer. On and on it went, right, all of my research. And some people were saying that Codex was absolutely horrible. Others said the exact same thing about cloud code, and I felt hopeless, right? I was angry and I was confused because I couldn't understand why there were so many contradictory reviews, totally five stars or one stars, nothing in between. So how can a platform be called the absolute best? You scroll down a bit, and then it's called the absolute worst? Plus that with some Chinese companies offering the same platforms at a fraction of a cost, but it said the same results. And the cost was something like 10% of the established companies, right? So I had way too many choices, and this is going on right now as I'm speaking. And your head starts spinning. But hey, you know, I thought maybe that was just my experience, right? Maybe I get easily confused. So let's see what Marques Brownlee, a famous TecuTubar who goes by MKBHD, what he has to say about it, because I trust him, I follow him. So let's say what the TekuTubr says about what's up. It's getting genuinely difficult to keep track of all the names of AI products being unveiled. In the last hour, Google has unveiled Google Pick, which is not Google Photos, plus updates to Google Flow, Nano Banana, and Vo all Media generation Google anti gravity, Gemini Spark, Gemini Omni, and Gemini 3.5 flash. And here's the thing. If that's not clear enough, I want you to read the following thing. Let's read it together, right? Yo, it's in Gemini. Just created in AI Studio. Oh, that's on your personal Google Win account. For Wordspace, you need Gemini Business. No, not Gemini Advanced. That's AI Pro now. Unless you need AI Ultra. Oh, agents, you do that in Spark, actually. No, not Gemini API managed agents. That's different. For coding, use jewels. Unless you mean the genetic IDE. That's anti gravity. No, that's the old antigravity. Download the new one. Actually, Gemini CLI is being deprecated, so you got to use anti gravity CLI. No, the flash model is smarter than the P model unless you need P. If it's video, use flow. No, flow uses video. No, Nano Banana is images. Actually, that's in Gemini now. Unless you're in search mode, then it's AI mode. No, research is notebook L M. Anyways, it's all very simple. So this is what tech people have to say. Now the question is, is this intentional? Are companies trying to mess with us for some nefarious reason? No, they're actually working double time to deliver as fast as humanly possible. The competition between tech companies is so fierce that they're tripping over each other to launch things. And the things they launch, sometimes they flop. And after a while, they may get fixed or they may get sidetracked by a different product from the same company. This is the game right now. Youth confusion is warranted. It's perfectly fine to feel overwhelmed because the game that we're playing right now pushes you towards that conclusion. So where does that leave us? And in the end, what did I choose between Claude and Codex? In short, I got both. I wanted to try them so I could create content around them, and I'm going to share my experience in the next video. But for you, my suggestion is simple. Choose whatever fits your budget. Literally any of the top five platforms is going to work very, very well. The difference between them might be something like 10%. I would even argue it's 5% negligible. It's not the platform's capability that's going to hold you back. It's the way you use it. And every platform is different. So you have to learn how to use it. So that's what you need to get an edge. So let me say that again. You choose any of the top platforms by random, by chance, whatever you like. Put in the hours, learn the ins and outs of that platform, block out all the noise about the other features that are being launched on other platforms, and stick to yours. That's going to give you hands down the best results. And let me explain why that's the case in the next video. 4. Why There's No Single "Best" AI Tool: Welcome back. You want the best results. You're looking into various tools to pick the best one, and most of them are quite expensive. So you want the best bang for your buck. So how can you be sure that you've selected the best platform? Let's say Google is at the top of you a list. So Nano Banana two or Gemini, as your image generation platform. So you use it for the few weeks, but then you're tempted by, say, Adobe Firefly. And that's because you keep seeing things about it. YouTube videos, reviews, reeditPost and so on, X and so on. So the question is, do you stick with the Google subscription or do you switch boats? And in short, my approach is stick with it. Stick with the current subscription. And here's the best way to understand why. Imagine you're buying a new car and that you love speed, right? That's your main criteria. You want a fast car, right? Well, in that situation, things are quite simple. You look at the price and the zero to 60, right? Now to simplify it, just focus on horsepower, okay? So for 20 K, let's say you can get 200 horsepower. For 30 K, you can get 500 horsepower, so a much faster car. Now, if you can afford it, nice and simple, fantastic job well done. So with that mindset, you might approach these AI platforms the same way. Do you choose mid journey or GPT image two? Do you go for Nano Banana or stable diffusion? You may see transparent prices, though, in some cases, that's really not clear, but you're not going to see the zero to 60 or the actual horsepower. And that's because there is no fixed horsepower that's guaranteed to you. This is the key thing that you need to understand about these AI platforms. When you buy a car with 300 horsepower, that's exactly what it has. If you want better fuel efficiency, you can lower the power, right? That's intentional, though. That's an eco mode. You click on that, and you're going to see the car is going to run much slower. But again, that's under the R control. You can see that you're ecomde and you're doing it for the specific purpose to save fuel, okay? Great. Well, with these AI platforms, they can put you in eco mode or sports mode without telling you. So I'm going to say that again. You have a subscription with company X. You put in a prompt, an instruction. You might get a ten out of ten result right now, but an hour later, you might get a five out of ten. And why is that? Because they put you in echo mode so they can save fuel resources. And the thing is, you won't know it. This is why so many people swear that company X platform X toLX is horrible while others are praising. Some are in sports mode, some are in eco mode. Now, the company is constantly adjusting your horsepower, and you have no idea. When you fire off a prompt, you may get 100 horsepower or 1,000 horsepower. In most cases, you're going to get somewhere near the middle. Now, you may be furious. You want what you paid for, but Nobody promised you 1,000 horsepower or a certain zero to 60 or ten out of ten result or an eight out of ten whatever. Nobody promised you anything. The truth is, you step on the gas, the message gets sent to the company, and based on 1 million factors, you get a result better or worse. For example, some people say that at 9:00 A.M. There's massive traffic, and the platforms get dumber. And why is that? Because more people are using them? And because these companies don't have unlimited resources, they throttle usage and they limit consumption. And that's simply because they don't have enough processing power or electricity to meet everyone's demands at once. They can't admit it. They can't say, Hey, you know, we don't have enough resources for all of you guys. If they would do that, their stock price would fall off a cliff. They would lose their investors, market share and basically paying users, so everyone would flock to their competitors. But here's the thing, everyone is having the same issues. All of these companies are in a massive race to get more resources. This is why they're building data centers and power plants. This is why they're buying so many GPUs from Nvidia. It's a gold rush. People are getting incredibly wealthy. Now, these companies can't be transparent because that would collapse their business. So when people say GPT 5.5 is incredible and others in the same they say GPT 5.5 is slow and dumb, they're both right. I've experienced it. I've been using Claude and Codex at the same time and parallel to computers, and I can tell you they're both fantastic and terrible. The situation changes day in day out. For me, it's clear as day that at certain periods, sometimes maybe it's just a few hours, sometimes maybe it's a few days, something happens and my juice, my power gets limited. And I'm not being singled out by the way. No, this happens to loads of people all at once. Now, I've accepted it for one simple reason. Even though I'm not sure whether I'm getting 200 or 500 horsepower, I'm still getting 20 times as much as walking without those tools, okay? So with these tools, I'm far more productive. Even though they don't always perform as expected, I'm still better off with them. So this experience where results constantly fluctuate this is still miles better not having access to these tools at all. So in conclusion, there is no single best tool, and most if not all companies adjust the power that you are getting on the spot on the fly. That's why I encourage you to choose one and stick with it. If your budget allows it, try a few other ones for at least a week, give them all the same tasks, though you can't really compare them head to head because you constantly get something else. But in the end, you're going to see which one you prefer. It's a matter of taste. But honestly, there's no tool that's head and shoulders above all the rest. The competition is so intense that even when something fantastic comes out from company one, the next day, company two already has something prepared. Maybe not the next day, but maybe in a couple of weeks at the most. And if that's the case, you're constantly chasing something new. IPhone 17, iPhone 18, iPhone 19, it constantly gets changed every single day. So you can't expect to purchase something one time and be good with it. And with that, I really hope that you understand that you got to relax about chasing the absolute best to all. My car analogy isn't 100% technically correct, but I think it gets the point across. You press the gas pedal and you're not sure what you're going to get. That's how these companies operate. So with that being said, don't chase the best anyone at random from the top ten, top five, and you're going to be golden. Let's continue. 5. Feelings, Not Features: The Core Mindset Shift: I back. You got to change your mindset to become an excellent designer in this AI era. You have to switch from executing to thinking. So instead of focusing on design techniques on how to actually design, say, a banner ad, no, you got to focus more on the best approach that's going to produce great results for the company. So let me give you an example. Say that I hire you and I say, Hey, listen, I'm selling this oatmeal pudding product, and I want you to run some Facebook ads. Make me some banners. You're going to say, Okay, cool, Chris, I'm going to start working, and I'm going to start thinking about what colors I should use, what product imagery, what tie face, whether the brand already has a well established identity. But here's the thing. That's the foundation. That's the basics. That's how a $5 fiber designer approaches a project. A freelancer who doesn't care about the company, the product or the results might create something like this. And at this basic level, it's all about features of the product, 300 grams, 12 grams of fiber, ten bucks per jar, free delivery, limited production, homemade, and so on. But these are all fine and well, but they are the features and people don't buy features. People don't want to buy 12 grams of fiber. They want to buy something that helps them with digestion, something that tastes great, but also helps them lose weight. This is where a great designer comes in and thinks about all the angles. He comes up with three or four of them along the lines of no time to cook. Try this. Some already abs. Try this. Stomach issues. Okay, try this. Feeling bloated. Okay, try this. Now, what's the difference? These are all based on feelings and feelings are actually what move a product. They address a problem that the customer may have digestive issues, extra weight, no time to cook. And then they offer a solution. This is the real value that you as a designer, have to provide because here's the deal. You might create that first banner, and it might be lovely to look at. The client may approve it. If you post it on social media, it may get likes. It may get good feedback on behalf of Dribble, but will it produce results for that Facebook ad campaign? Because that's the only thing that matters, results. So with the help of AI, you can shift your focus away from what program you got to use with tools and techniques inside it. Then you switch from that and you focus on the bigger picture, how to make that design more effective. Whether it's a banner ad, a newsletter, a packaging design or anything else, you think about the bigger picture. How do you do that? How do you make that switch? You hyper focus on results. You create whatever you're going to create, and then you're going to constantly talk to the client about their results. You do that extra work for free to test out different approaches. You chase results like it's your own business, like it's your own money that's being invested into those ads, into that product line or whatever it is. So you deliver that website design or whatever, and you see it implemented. Then you talk to the client as much as possible. You get analytics, you propose changes, small ones that don't break the bank, making the ad to card button wider, removing extra fields from the checkout, adding a ribbon to the best seller, small stuff that really takes no time to implement. Clients are constantly pressured by costs. So don't propose things that are going to take up a lot of resources, but do explore how different approaches are going to work. Maybe the no time to cut path beats all the other ones, but you're never going to know unless you test. You may have certain instincts, but analytics are the key. They'll tell you the truth. So never be overly confident about your proposals. Now, to be fair, some clients won't be open to this kind of work. Keep going until you find a few who encourage. The amount you get paid is actually irrelevant. More on that later. But this is how you adapt to this AI era. You no longer spend 10 minutes thinking and 5 hours executing. No, you flip it, you brainstorm, you research, you go back and forth between concepts. You come up with fantastic copy. You try to approach the product from multiple angles, and then you quickly flesh out all of these concepts through AI. Coming up with design concepts from multiple angles for multiple personas isn't easy. It's far more comfortable to play with type faces, colored skins and layouts. But you got to step out of that box that sandbox, even though it's quite uncomfortable. Clients pay you, at least they should pay you for the results you generate, not because you know how to use Photoshop Figma with Illustrator or whatever else. So change that mindset. Don't spend 5 hours executing, spend 5 hours researching. Make that jump. 6. The Agency Paradox: Welcome back. I'm going to propose something that will dramatically increase your chances of success in the coming years. To make my point, I'm going to give you two examples, and I want you to think about them first. Okay, let's get going. So the first one is a performance marketing agency, S M M A. This is where you run a business, selling, say, whatever, dog toys or whatever, and you want to run payads on Facebook, TikTok, Google, and whatever. So instead of hiring someone internally, an employee, the business outsources that to that agency, a performance agency. That makes sense because the agency has lots of experience, lots of clients. They've been doing this for years and years, and the cost is sometimes comparable to a high performing employee. Let's just say something at random 2-5 k per month. Then we're going to come back to the price in just a moment. Now, here's the situation. There are tons of agencies out there that will run ads for you. The offers are more or less the same. They audit the business. They build a game plan based on your budget. They create the ads, they set them up on every platform. They run tests, they keep the winners, kill the losers, rinse and repeat, okay? And when you start watching their own ads or client testimonial you're going to be shocked. You're going to see examples where they spend ten K, and they generate 300 k in sales. They spend 50 K, and they generate half $1 million in sales. Outlandish results. Five X, ten X, 30 X. I've never actually seen them name the clients, like, Hey, listen, we run ads for brandX or brand Y. No. They always show screenshots of some obscure screen recordings. But the essential information is always blacked out. Now, I want you to think about this. How can a performance marketing agency, five X or TenX your investment, day in, day out month after month and only get paid a few thousand dollars? How does that work? When you put in, say, 20 k per month in ads, and they generate 200 k in sales, that doesn't mean you're left with a profit of $180,000. That's not profit, of course. It really depends on the business. Some have a net profit margin of five to 7%. Most are around 20%. Some may hit 35 to 50% if it's a digital service. In rare cases, you do get over 50%, but those are few and far in between. But even so, how can a marketing agency that produces millions of dollars of revenue per month across all of its clients in the portfolio, how can this agency be happy with only a few thousand dollar per client? See, it really doesn't matter if it's two K or five K or ten K. It's not enough compared to the results they generate. I would take that deal any day of the week, give them whatever. Four k as the fee, the managing fee, then invest ten K into ads, and then you get back, let's not even say 100 k, okay? Let's say just 50 k, okay? That's still incredible. I would take that in any day of the week for my businesses. So the thing is, what's missing here? Why isn't every single business using these agencies and then axing their revenue? The even better question, if you have the knowledge to run ads in a way that produces five X, ten X, 30 X, your investment, why settle for the few thousand dollar a month? Why not start your own docty business and generate 200 k per month for yourself? Think about that, watch the next video, and then I'm going to explain everything. 7. Think Like an Entrepreneur: Welcome back. I may be preaching to the choir, but I've got to say something. Clients are sometimes a major pain, who guess it, right? Some people are hard to work with. It's not that the design task is hard, designing banner, website, product packaging, whatever. It's the interaction with the client, the lack of a firm response of a clear response, the unnecessary meetings, the delays, upon delays, the variations just for the sake of it, and the complete disregard of your own opinion, of your professional opinion as a designer. And here's the other side. Say you design a beautiful, high converting website that typically prints money for your past clients. So you apply valuable techniques and practices that usually deliver a high conversion rate, low churn, low bounce rate, high average order value, you name it, a great design, right, that actually performs. So you come in fully prepared. You deliver based on past experience, and then the entrepreneur sets the shipping price to 40 bucks. He's selling t shirts or dog toys or hair supplements, not furniture, what appliances, or what flat screen TVs. You're shocked. 40 bucks for delivery. Who would pay that? Why is it that high? Who's going to make a purchase if the delivery is that expensive? And you ask the client, and he says he wants to make a bit of extra profit. Okay. But what then? You delivered something that's supposed to work very well. But obviously, the results are being sabotaged by the actual owner by the entrepreneur. And here's the thing, you're powerless. It's not your business. You have no position of power. You were hired to do a job. You did it. Now get out. But let me give you this. What if the Entrepreneur gets upset at the poor results? Because, hey, you said you had fantastic results with your previous clients, Chris. Are you a scammer? Did you lie? Why did you lie to me, Chris? Why did you promise me that this is gonna perform much better? I'm going to leave a bad review because I paid you for the great website, and the result is the same as before, maybe worse. What then? Tell me what do you do? You try to explain that it's a high shipping cost. He says that it's excuses. Okay, so let's take a step back. The absurd shipping charge is just one example, but I promise you, I've seen countless other situations where the owner is basically sabotaging the business. 20 fields in the checkout form, obscure payment options because they have a lower fee. Request a quote button instead of actual pricing for random reasons, but this is for the product that has no customization options, no options to speak of, so you could just show the direct price. No. So I've lived this. So let's pause again and take another step back. So we have agencies that promise five X, then x 20 X your investment, but they don't start their own businesses, and we have stubborn entrepreneurs who can't get out of their own way. So what's the takeaway for you as a designer? It's actually surprising you're going to become the entrepreneur. Yeah, I said that you're going to become an entrepreneur. You work for different companies until A, you have enough money in the bank to start something, and B, you've learned what makes or breaks a company. So let's start with agencies. Some charge five k per month, land 20 clients and rake in 100 k per month without any risk. Okay, it does make sense, but the smarter ones get something far more valuable data. If you run a performance marketing agency for the few years, you might have whatever. Let's call it 50 clients, 100 clients, whatever. Some sell hair supplements, dog food, TVs, clothes, everything and anything. Now, you get to see which niche performs best. You have complete access to all of their information. You get to see which ads perform best. You gain all that knowledge while spending the clients money. Zero risk on your end, and on top of that, you're actually getting paid for it. So that's why some agencies actually start businesses on the side. They simply copy the top three clients, and they compete with them. They compete against them. You as a designer, should not start a performance marketing agency, but you can get similar information, similar data from your clients. You see what works and what doesn't. You propose different forms to get people signed up to a newsletter. You experiment with different landing page designs. You test out different styles of copy from pleasure focused, say, incredibly delicious to negative. Avoid the embarrassment at the beach if you have a big stomach. Protect your kids, get this alarm for your house. Now, with this knowledge, you can do two things when you can start your own business in whatever niche you want, where two, you can better serve your clients if you want to stick to the designer role. Now, you might say, but, Chris, my previous clients sold handmade furniture and kitchen appliances. How am I supposed to do that on my own? Now, here's the thing. You don't have to create the product from scratch. You create the business, the online part, the website, the ads, the funnel, the newsletter, the Lee generation. And then there are options for the fulfillment. You can outsource that part for the actual product. The easiest one is going to an existing business that's looking for more work. And, of course, you're not supposed to jump into a domain where you know nothing about it, right? Industrial chemicals and corporate cybersecurity, things like that. No, of course not. But if you work closely enough with the business, you're going to see whether it makes sense for you, right? Staying on the designer side, though, say you don't want to start the business. No worries. Totally fine. By having that precious information, that data on what worked and what didn't for similar clients, you're far better equipped to get new clients and over deliver for them. Imagine you have access to a table like this. You see different types of ads, different styles, different texts, and you see how much every one of them generated. W people clicked on the works, everything. With this information, you can easily tell what worked and what didn't. For your website designs, it's the exact same thing. Whether it's in Google Analytics or any other statistic tool, you can try Add to Cart. You can test. By now, you switch to get started, and that one small change can make a big impact. Going from 2% to 2.3% could mean thousands of dollars in profit every single month. That small convergent rate change may do that. This is what I believe to be the future of designers. You might call it transitioning into a product designer. But it really doesn't matter. The label doesn't matter. If you want the essence, it's this. You design stuff, you check out the results. You find the best performers, and you iterate. You do more of that, and you scratch off what didn't work, and you don't try it again. For example, you can tell a business to test a secondary button two ways. The first one with a different color from the primary one, and the second option maybe as a ghost button. See which one works best. Very few platforms share this type of insight. Typically, it's highly protected information, but because you are working for the client, you're going to have access to all of that information if you ask for it. Remember, the main thing is to genuinely try to help the business grow. If you manage to do that, you can build a fantastic case study that's bound to attract even more clients because that's the key. The proof where you can say, Hey, listen, I worked with company X, and I helped them grow from 20 k a month to 50 K per month. Here's the owner's testimonial. That part is absolute gold. So don't treat this data collection phase like you're just trying to extract value. No, you actually have to provide incredible value to the customer so much so that it actually moves the needle. Your designs need to deliver double digit improvements from 50 k a month to 51 k that's just a fluctuation. From 50 k to 80 K, now we're talking. From 50 K to 120, that's fantastic. So in conclusion, you got to stop focusing on design tools, and techniques. AI platforms can help you achieve just about anything, and you spend most of your time on high level work that can seriously grow the business. You think about angles, about personas, you think about grade copy, and so on. Then you dive deep into analytics to understand what work was it the new copy, the new colored scheme, a set of extra icons, the new layout that you tested, the brighter contrast in the do area, the form with fewer fields, and you save that information, and you move forward with it. And one small thing before we end, there are platforms out there that allow you to create fake dashboards, fake dashboards for the Shopify, for the Facebook ads, can put in any random information here, and that's how some agencies lie. So they use these fake numbers. They show you how they can obtain 20 x, whatever. When in actuality, they're just data mining. They want to attract ten, 20 clients, sure, for the monthly payment, but the most important part is getting that precious data, which they can then sell or they can use to start their own businesses in those specific niches. Hi, Dash Mok. I just want to click on open. And it'll load up straight away. And here, obviously, you can see the first thing that you'll actually realize is that it's literally one to one with the Shop F website. The dashboard is literally identical, which is pretty crazy. I'm going to quickly run through it and show you exactly how you actually use it. And yeah, everything on this screen that you see you can actually change and you can't edit. The first we're to show you obviously the tot sales, just click on there on the number and this little window pop up. You can change obviously the tot sales here, the sessions, orders, and the conversion rate, and just click Save. That same window, you can actually access through obviously any of these panels, so you just click on the orders and it'll bring the same tab, it's definitely good to with this chart as well, everything here, you can actually edit. So you can play around with this, how it change that in a second. But for now, I'll show you how to do the avatar. That's pretty much everything for this screen, apart from obviously here with Live visitors, you can click on this and it'll bring up this separate window obviously it's not the same one, and you can change everything else on this screen. So obviously your next payout and everything else you can change right in this window here. Same with your to number of orders which you'll show here. You can change that. Actually quickly do that. So it's a 46, change to 46 and I'll just update everything on here. Another little touch I actually like is see all these little tips that you normally get on the Shop five website. You've got gross sales, returning customer fulfilled orders just like you were on the website. You can play around with this as well. You can change the date range. You can change custom date range if you want to and the currency, and I'll update for you. With total sales, you literally just click on this and it'll bring up this window. And as you can see, this is also why you change Starm here. So just for the example, I'm going to put Dash Mock in here. So that's the thing. That's something you have to be aware of. Some people hit the refresh button, so they can say, Hey, listen, this is a live account. This is a live, Shopify account. Look, what's going on. But if you actually look at the URL, it's never actually shown. And that's because very likely it may be a fake platform. Um, again, I'm not saying that all agencies do this, but some of them, 100%, are doing this stuff. Okay, let's get back on track, and let me explain in detail what's what in the next video because I want you to focus on this new mindset. Let's go. 8. Your Step-by-Step Future-Proof Plan: Welcome back. Here's my step by step plan to future tf your career as a designer. Now, first of all, learn to use any AI platform of you have choosing. It can be free Pick, which has rebranded to Magnific ChatGPT from Open AI, which has incredible image generation, or maybe a Google product which comes with a fantastic bundle of other features. The thing is, don't overthink it. That's the main thing. Choose one and play with it nonstop. Use it nonstop. If you don't have a client to use it on, then go on 99 designs, find random briefs and execute without second guessing. The goal is to have a company and a project in mind real or fake, then execute it fast, high quality, and exactly the way you want it. That's the thing. Don't accept what the AI is giving you. Fine Tune it, so it's exactly as you want it. Now, my advice, focus on designing the same thing in vastly different styles. Think of a new phone, right? So it can be advertised as a luxury product or by focusing on its camera and the memories you're going to make with your friends and family or maybe the old school way on focusing on specs like battery life and screen size, stuff like that. That's what you need to do. Reframe something from multiple points of view. And of course, you got to practice and watch tutorials specific to that platform that you've chosen. After the while, with those practice pieces, you got to build a portfolio on the hands. Not your own personal website, nothing custom or too fancy, upload something on the hands. Specialize in one to three niches. Don't go into logo design, product packaging, website design, illustration, animation, and coding all at once. It's going to look confusing. It's tempting to stack skills, but it's far better to be great at one thing than average at three, especially from the point of view of an entrepreneur who wants to hire you. Then aim for six to nine entries and only keep the absolute best ones. So when you upload your work, make it crystal clear that this is for the fictional company, a project that you made for training purposes, okay? That's quite important, so people don't think you're misconstruing the truth but basically lying. Now, with your portfolio all set up, reach out to clients. Reach out however you want in person, via Instagram DMs, Whatsapp, Linden, phone, email, whatever. I got an entire course about freelancing, and you can watch that to go in depth. Offer to work for whatever price they say. Can say it's totally free or you can say, Hey, you know what? Pay me whatever you feel like it's worth at the end of the project. I won't have any discussions about it. I won't haggle. I won't be upset. Pay me whatever you think is right. I'm doing this so I can build a portfolio. Your company seems like a great fit, and I think I can bring real value. My only ask is that you give me a review, good or bad. No worries. And then you let me look at the analytics, so I can see how my designs performed so I can see the impact of my designs. Does that sound fair? So that's your approach. Don't ask for super low sums like 50 bucks or something like that, because that signals a lack of confidence in your abilities. So don't lowball yourself. It's either free or let the client pay you whatever he thinks that the work is worth. Now, some people will be skeptical of both offers free or pay me what you want. There's no such thing as a free lunch, right? But because you are clearly stating in writing that you want a portfolio and reviews, then it does make sense. And if you mentioned that you won't haggle or be disappointed about the payment, again, that's fine to tell them that you are 100% happy to sign any contract that says no payment or payment to be set at the end. Basically get any job in whatever way you can just so you can collect that precious data about what works and what doesn't repeat this until you have at least at least at the bare minimum two case studies. The Kase studies should be crystal clear. You started at point A, and then you brought the company to point D. Companies won't want to share sensitive information like whatever, average value of net profit, but I'm sure you can share something like gross revenue or maybe a specific percentage, like 20% more bookings, whatever it may be. Now, after you have 235 case studies, you're all set. As long as you've produced double digit returns, you have a message from the founder and their contact information. You're in open waters. You can land a high paying job or win more clients or get more clients with much more ease. So if you step back, if you really think about it, it's not really about Gemini versus GPT. It's not about tokens, LLMs, contacts windows. No, nothing fundamentally changes. You have to deliver value to the company. And the hours you save by no longer manually executing stuff in Photoshop or Figma, you use those hours to think about new approaches. For example, gamification. That's a big thing. It's what Duolingo does. You maintain user engagement with streaks, with animations of all sorts, digital prizes, you name it. So you spend that save time learning the ins and outs of adjacent skills like copyrighting, gamification. Or better ways to test your designs. For example, which platforms offer good pricing for the AB tests, which can get quite costly. So yeah, this is the step by step plan. Fact is, AI does the heavy lifting, but you still got to orchestrate it. You have to guide it towards a specific goal. So to sum it up, you learn one of the top platforms, AI platforms. It really doesn't matter which one and you specialize in it. You build a portfolio with any company. Your portfolio should be fairly consistent, specialize in one or a couple of things. I personally like E commerce, DTC, and lead generation for service based businesses. It really doesn't matter at the end of the day. It can be gyms, lawyers, dentists, whatever niche you think you can serve well. Then you work for free or whatever the client is willing to pay you until you get a few K studies. Once you got them, you're golden. You either land a high paying stable job or you keep freelancing and raise your prices with every new client. The only way to learn how to price your work correctly is by working for free. Then you can see what value your designs actually produced. After you see three to five examples where you brought in an extra 40 k, let's say, in revenue per month, assuming a net profit margin of 20%, that's an extra eight K per month. Then the company can surely pay you anywhere from two k to five K, for example. And that's because they've made an extra 96 k profit per year. So surely paying you four K, five K, whatever it may be, that's more than decent. But if you don't have that information, if you don't have that track record, that experience, if you can't say, Hey, you know what? You can call Chris, the owner of company X, we work together, and he can confirm that my designs grew his revenue by 40 K per month. Then there's no reason that the client can't trust you. That's how you go step by step. You level up, and after a while, you're going to be in clear waters. 9. Why Clients Still Need You: Come back. It's so easy to get discouraged by the speed of things. When you see how fast AI can build stuff, solid stuff, you're going to be left in awe. You're going to be amazed. And naturally, you're going to be then discouraged. You might think, Man, I'm going to be out of a job. In a matter of weeks, in a matter of months, everyone can do this on their own. Anyone can design anything. But here's the thing. People still go to restaurants and order omelets, stuff that you can easily make at home. People still buy tailored made suits, even though Zara and H&M exist. People still buy SAS software for all sorts of reasons, even though they could build one on their own. I've seen web design agencies hire freelancers to design and build their own website. Now, why would that be the case? Because they have too many jobs lined up and their developers are far too busy. So sometimes it's much easier to simply pay someone else to do it, even though you can do it yourself. The fact that you're not willing to spend whatever 15 bucks on an omelet that you could make at home does not mean I repeat does not mean there aren't loads of people out there who are more than happy to pay that. Windows XP was released in 2001, 2001, and it's estimated that of a few million users still running it, a few million users. Some businesses still use fax machines. Plenty of people still hand out business cards and fliers. If you spend all day on X, Twitter, or read it, you might think that everybody has $200 subscriptions to every AI platform, and everyone is spinning up 20 agents all at once building product after product. You know what? That's not the real world. That's a small part of it. But here's the thing. So people are resistant to change. Some people like things the way they are, and a lot of people hate AI. They hate the hype, the speed of change, the volatility, the overwhelming number of options. These people don't hate festive turnaround times when you deliver the project in no time at all. They don't hate the higher quality of work or the plenitude of options. They don't hate that. They hate dealing with AI. We don't hate chat bots for no reason. We prefer a human touch, even when that person is slower. I would much rather wait five extra minutes for a real human than get a copy paste answer from a bot. So all of this to say, you're fine. Yes, things are changing super fast. Five or 99 designs and a lot of platforms, freelancing platforms are in decline. Things are evolving. In what direction remains to be seen? But the essence stays the same. Over delivered to your clients, provide a great experience and you're going to be good. You're going to be fine. Don't ignore the change, but don't spend all day scrolling on social media, chasing the latest and greatest models. You got to be somewhere in the middle. Don't use the first iPhone that came out ages ago, that's Stone Age Tech, but don't always buy the latest release either. You're paying a hefty premium. That's usually not worth it. Millions of businesses still need design work done. AI does not replace you. AI helps you help them. 10. Cutting Through the AI FOMO: Welcome back. The fear of missing out FOMO that feeling that comes up every single time you scroll on social media. Imagine this. You've done your research for maybe about a week, and then you've decided you're going to pay 100 bucks per month for an open AI subscription. So you can use ChatGPT for the image generation and maybe Codex for coding, okay? You're just starting out and you're thinking, Okay, ChatGPT is the most well known platform model. So I guess it's a safe bet, okay? But then you start scrolling, and then you see these videos. Let's have a quick look. Hot but the smartest people in college never used Chachi VT. The smartest people in college never use Chachi BBT. Take. But the smartest people in college never use Chachi PT. Hot, but the smartest people in college never use Chachi BT. Hot the smartest people in college aren't using Chachi BT. This y be a hot take, but the smartest people in college aren't using ChachiBT. All of them switched months ago. First off, we got clawed. All of them switchednths ago. So first off, we got clawed, right? All of them literally switched moths ago. So, first off, we got Claude. Everyone already switched months ago? Stu, we've got Claude. They all switched months ago and it's time for us to hurry up and lock in. The first website is clouded. They switched up months ago. So you need to hurry up and lock in. First set, we have Claude, and the Okay, now, that's a compilation, but imagine that you've seen them individually, organically. A few of them every couple of hours or maybe every couple of days. How would you now feel about your purchase? You chose the wrong one. Everybody is using Claude, not open A eye with whatever you choose. Now, you could be potentially upset, of course, right? You've missed the train. It seems like everyone else is using the other platform. You can replace it with whatever else. So everyone else is super happy on the other one, the one that you didn't choose. So you chose wrong. So you will not get those benefits. You will be left behind. That's Fomo. But here's the thing. This is not natural. It's induced. It's engineered. As you clearly signed the compilation, that's actually an undisclosed ad. That's a script. It's engineered Fomo. Your anxiety and doubts are normal. Who wouldn't second guess the choice? And this isn't just Claude doing this thing. Let's call it advertising, even though I don't think this is pure advertising, whatever. The thing is, there's simply too much money on the table for these companies, and regular advertising simply isn't enough. When you have tens of billions of dollars in funding, all options are open. So I just wanted to take the time to show you that one single compilation video, though, to be fair, there are tons of them out there. That it's all fake. It's all engineered. You shouldn't second guess yourself. The future is uncertain. But these companies and their tactics, they're not helping. It's quite the opposite. They would rather have us nervous and anxious, just so we might make another purchase, just so we might switch. It worked for me. I'm subscribed to multiple platforms, but that's the case because I'm an online instructor. But the same applies, you know, I don't want to miss out. So here's the thing. I encourage you to relax and take my earlier advice. Choose one of them. It doesn't matter which one and stick with it. The differences between them are very, very small, I promise you. If you do become a power user, you can expand in one specific way. You can use one platform to build, say, the admin panel. While another one works on the IOS app, they go hand in hand. But instead of waiting for the one to finish, you can work at the same time. But that's a situation where you're actually earning quite a lot of money, and the extra spend is warranted. I am earning from these platforms, so that's why I can honestly say that, Okay, it's good that I'm subscribed to multiple ones. And since I'm on this topic, I can tell you that having both platforms, for example, Cloud and Codex, having one platform review the code that was generated by the that's fantastic. This usually helps quite a lot because the first platform has huge blind spots that the other one quickly uncovers. Of course, I'm talking about coding. That's a separate issue, but I thought I would mention it. As a designer, I mostly spend my time thinking about how I want to portray the information and what style to what audience, what feelings I want to evoke. That's the actual part that I'm doing as a designer. Okay, so let's cut out all the Fomo. Let's recognize that undisclosed ads are making us anxious. So the advice still stands. Flip a coin, choose a platform, and that's that you're going to be golden, no matter what. 11. Quantity over quality? Maybe!: Back. In this AI age, you have to realize that testing is more important than ever, and that's because we can now produce lots of content fast. In the past, when you were hired to design anything, say an eight image gallery for an ecommerce store, you might have had certain ideas, right, but you were limited by execution by time. And everyone basically accepted that a design project had two, three, maybe four rounds of edits at most. And out of all those few rounds, maybe you could produce two or three different versions, so three different styles, different approaches. Nowadays, that's no longer the case. I think smart entrepreneurs will soon recognize that this is the new paradigm. This basically means that your output has to grow dramatically. You have to put out a lot more content. You no longer make two or three versions. You go for ten, 20, maybe even 50. As long as the company has the budget to test those variations because you got to test those variations, the sky is the limit, and that's actually what you should strive for. So here's the situation. Take a business doing 200 K per month with traffic of, say, 300,000 visitors. So that's 10,000 visitors per day. That's a significant number. It means a conversion rate of 1.33%, quite low, assuming an order, an average order of say 50 bucks, okay? Now, here's the situation. If you make slight edits design wise, and you manage to raise the conversion rate from 1.33% to 1.44%, that means 216 K per month. 16 K increase in revenue, $16,000 per month. Per year, that's nearly 200 k. Extra revenue per year. So the question is, is that extra revenue, 200 k per year? Is that worth testing? Now, let's say you go from 1.33% conversion rate to 1.8, which is quite doable. So from 200 k in revenue per month, the new conversion rate brings you to 270, $270,000 per month, an extra 70 K per month. That's nearly $1 million extra per year. Well, $840,000. So the question is, what's the cost? How much time, effort, and resources does it take to try multiple styles for the image gallery, for the checkout process, to add a mascot, to try a different layout, maybe a totally different vibe, more serious, more playful. This is what you're looking for as a designer. Your designs can have a profound impact, and as a result, you can get paid very well. But if the company only has a few hundred users per day, and let's say the revenue is only ten K, maybe 20 K per month, then everything shrinks. The tests aren't as conclusive. With high traffic, you learn fast. After the couple of days, 20, 30,000 people have seen the new design and you already have precious data. With a smaller company, a single test may take weeks rather than a few days, and that's because there's not enough testing volume. Now, on top of that, say you want to get paid whatever, five K, seven K, ten K. Now, that's a problem when you can bring in an extra 70 k per month. But for the smaller company, those numbers may be ridiculous. Now, you might say, Chris, how am I supposed to get hired by a company doing big numbers? First of all, what I said 200 k per month, those are not huge ridiculous numbers. They're decent. But to answer your question, the best way to get to that level is to over deliver with smaller clients. So get those few precious reviews and case studies from smaller clients. Get the founder's email or phone number, so you have potential new clients can verify that you actually did a fantastic job. And that means a fantastic day to day experience. You have to show up on time, be professional, be friendly, give insight when needed, be proactive, come up with suggestions. Then after it's all said and done and you did deliver double digit improvement, you can ask for specific metrics that you can include in your case study. Whatever the client is willing to share, gross revenue, average order, time spent on site, products per order, total number of orders, whatever it may be, any stats will help. And that's because all entrepreneurs are drawn to concrete numbers. And to put your past clients at ease, tell them you won't publicly share those numbers in your portfolio on the hands that you will only disclose those stats in private. But coming back to my point, testing is the key. Our best guess is just that a guess. We pick a style. We make various design decisions about layout, contrast, typography, color schemes, but honestly, we don't know. This is why you launch a landing page in one style while at the same time launching another one in a totally different style. Two being the absolute bare minimum. You run ads and you compare metric. If one has a click through rate of 3.2% and the other 11.7%, then it's clear as day. This is hard data analytics, it's not feelings, it's not taste. This is your job as a designer in the AI era. You leverage AI to produce a lot more designs for testing purposes. And when you do, you don't just slightly change a few things here and there, like swapping one typeface for another one. No, you come at it with a totally different approach. When you clearly find the winner, then you start tweaking it. You make smaller and smaller edits. You jump from 1.33 to 1.8 conversion rate. Then you try to inch the way to 1.92% and so on. At times your changes will have a negative effect. That's bound to happen. But you go back to the better performing version and you keep on testing. This takes months, but this is how you raise revenue from 200 k to 300 k per month. And think about the investment. What does this cost the company? A designer at five K per month for three months, 15 K, AB testing software, 300 bucks per month. Call it one k in total for three months. Add spend, say 20 k per month, 60 in total. All in all, let's call it 75 K, 80 K, whatever. Let's cap it at 80, okay? All of that gets recouped, and then some after the month. Of course, this is a high level take. It's not like the extra 100 k per month is pure profit. You did spend 80 K or 85 k, whatever it may be. It's not like, again, after one single month, it's total profit and whatever. And all the cost has been absorbed? No, of course not. There are development costs, that may be a factor. You may need a project manager for this AB sprint, there are multiple variables, but my point still stands. This is what you're aiming for. Design work that really moves the needle that pushes a company forward. And if you thought three to five K studies for small companies, set you up for success. Think about the doors you can open when you can say that in three months so you have design work and AB testing, you took company X 200-300 k per month. In conclusion, use AI to create more, a lot more. Come at a project from totally different angles and perspectives and create vastly different styles. Test, read that data, rinse and repeat. This is not about your own taste. It's about testing. 12. Making Peace With Constant Change: What we know for sure is going to happen in the next few years. It's a fail question because there's a lot of uncertainty. People worried they're going to lose their jobs, and for us, what's going to happen to us as designers? We can imagine a scenario where clients no longer employ designers. They simply use a prompt and they one shot it, so to speak. Now, the current generation of AI platforms is far from perfect, okay? This generation is still not there yet, but the third generation from now, the third one it's very likely going to be better than any human designer out there. And on top of that, the cycle no longer takes 12 to 18 months. No. In the past, when you wanted a new iPhone, you had to really wait for it, right? But with these AI platforms, the launches are speeding up and the improvements are quite solid. Now, the answer to that question is that will simply evolve. That's what's going to happen. In the past, I designed websites in Photoshop. Then when the DobxD came out, sure, I moved on to there. Then in Figma, because that came out and it was much better and it was free. Then came Framer and Webflow. Now you can vibe code the website by using this latest technology. The only question is, if you stick to designing websites in Photoshop and you refuse to move on isn't that kind of your fault? I mean, sure, then you will be out of a job. But if you stay curious and open to new tools in tech, then I think you're going to be just fine. So this means you're going to have to constantly learn. But guess what? That's what you're doing right here with this course. It tells me that you want to stay relevant and up to date. It tells me that you are very likely going to be fine. Of course, nobody knows exactly what's going to happen, but I'm quite positive online shopping, for example, will still be a thing. I'm positive will still need creative work done, product retouching, photo editing, website design, and a lot more. And while AI platforms will keep getting better and better, you'll still need to guide them to end up with something fairly distinctive. Otherwise I said, people still need designers to steer the horse, to steer the car, the ship, the autopilot, towards a specific destination. And that's because of how AI is built. And AI is non deterministic. Now, what does that mean? It means AI can produce different outputs for the exact same input. Otherwise, said, you can't use the same recipe over and over and expect the same quality. It means every time you hit Enter, you simply copy paste. Every time you hit Enter, you get something else better or worse. It means you need a designer to get you to the right place. AI can help you travel the world all over. But in most cases, you want to go somewhere specific. So again, results will constantly differ. And at the same time, you're going to see that a lot of websites will look exactly the same, and that's not good. Clients don't want that, and people can immediately pick up on that. If you open four tabs and three websites look strikingly similar, that might make you choose the one that looks different. So in a world of infinite choices, we're looking for human touch for the connection, for uniqueness. If we identify a design that's AI slop we'll very likely skip it. But how do you avoid AI slop by using a designer? So while I'm not sure what's exactly going to happen, I do know certain things will stay the same. A person should make all the creative decisions. And that's because us humans, we don't like copy paste stuff. This is why we invest in expensive clothing. This is why we decorate our houses. We want a unique style, our own style. We like a human touch, and we devalue stuff that seems mass produced, that seems cheap. I don't think those things are going to ever change, and that should help you feel more optimistic about the future. 13. Workflow in Action #1: From Brief to Concept: Welcome back. I want to give you a glimpse into my workflows. But there's a strong disclaimer. Everything changes fast. This is why I won't mention pricing or walk through every single step in this workflow. That's not the point. I don't want you to copy this workflow because there's a very good chance it's going to be obsolete in a matter of weeks. For example, we're going to start with Google flow, which was just called a few weeks ago Google WIS now, the rate of change is dramatic. It's absurd. It's hard. It's frustrating to keep up with it. That said, I stand by my advice, pick up platform and stick with it. If you have the time and resources, explore the alternatives, but keep a relaxed, curious attitude. Okay, here's the scenario. Let's say that someone hired me to create materials for an online store. An ecommerce website, right, a simple shop or maybe for selling on Amazon or a similar platform. Great. Now, the business owner provides decent photos. I typically ask for at least two angles because that helps the AI quite a lot. Now here I'm going to use this random vase from Unsplash, just as an example. Normally, I would have the raw files from the client's photographer. I then adjust the photos in Photoshop slash Camera Raw. So I do all of that editing. I don't let the photographer do it because it's much cheaper for the client and I'm in full control. Removing the background, stuff like that, this will typically help the AI not get distracted. And typically, I might touch up the photo, so it's nice, bright. For example, I might sharpen it. I may add some texture here and there, so on. While automatic editing has come quite a long way, I still prefer to do some parts manually because that typically gets me better results. Okay, say that we have done. Good stuff. Now I'll finally open Google Flow and upload the image so Google can process it. Again, large photos from multiple angles are going to give you the best results. But for the purpose of this example, this one, this one single image, it's going to be fine. Now, once that's done, I can write my prompt. This is where you have to know what you want to ask for. I'm going to say this. Place this vase in a luxurious home with a couple in the background. Marble countertop. And that's because I want to transmit a certain vibe. My plan is to sell this vase, not by relying on its beauty, size, or material. No, those are features. People don't buy a vase because it's made out of glass or plastic or whatever else. That may be a factor, but that's not high up. What is high up, they want a beautiful home. They want to give their partner a lovely gift. They want visitors to appreciate the style of their home. That's why I chose that prompt. It's a bit vague, but typically I do put in a few more details. But, yeah, that's the angle. Elevate your home. That would be the copy for that particular ad, whether it's for paid advertising or maybe inside an online store listing. Now, the next thing, I'm going to emphasize the gift aspect, and I'm going to say, woman receiving this vase as a gift from her husband in their luxurious living room. And again, I'm going to wait for it to generate. There are quite a few options here, but typically I go for the 16 by nine aspect ratio, four images in total, with the latest model. Here, that's Nano Banana two. I think that's a free version as well, but I have a paid one. And yes, you could potentially generate videos as well. But for online stores, images of the gold standard. And yeah, you're going to get some solid options. Sometimes the AI does change the product. If that happens, you got to change the prompt by saying, don't change anything about the vase. Keep it as it is. Though sometimes that produces the opposite effect where the product is not well integrated into the background. And basically, you can tell that it's a generated image. That's no good. Now back to Google Flow, I like to come back and edit things if the initial result isn't exactly what I imagined. Of course, I could do that in pollo shop as well, but let's stick to the platform. For example, I can say, add the greeting card on the table, which further implies that this was a gift. This is how you work smarter. Now, when it's all said and done, I can download the image at two k, which is quite decent resolution. And most of the time, I'm going to bring it into a FIGMA project. And that's because I want all the images to have the same aspect ratio, say 12 80 by 700, and I usually add other things like maybe a logo, a call to action, maybe some text, and all of these materials have to use the same brand styling. So that means the store has a certain color code, a certain typeface, and so on. And Google Flow doesn't handle those things all that well. So I would much rather do them myself. FIG M also becomes a source of truth, so I can come back to it at any point and have a bird's eye view. Imagine this company has 100 products across 15 categories. Having them saved in folders on your computer that's PNGs just isn't enough. Yeah, this is one of my workflows. If you look at amazon.com, you're going to see how important this is. A gallery has to pack in loads of information in an easy to process way. Most people don't read long descriptions. They quickly glance at a few images and make up their minds. This is why some designers specialize only in product listings. Before we wrap up, I want to be clear. This isn't a comprehensive look at Google Flow. I'm not in love with it. I don't 100% recommend it. This is just one tool that I've been using recently. Ask me in a week, in a month, maybe a year, I have no idea what I'm going to use, but that's because I'm an online teacher. If I had clients and projects lined up, I would stick to one platform and get the most out of it. In Google Flow, you can really fine tune things if you dive deep into it, but that deserves a course on its own. Still, let me show you one thing. As I said, I like to add product photos from multiple angles, typically three of them, and then add a specific photo of a person. That's my desired avatar, my persona. And that's because I don't always like what Google flow generates for people. If the product is aimed is market. A certain type of person, I would much rather have that image be clear as they for that particular person. For example, I don't know a grandma in her kitchen or the 20-year-old off to college in a messy dorm, wearing a hat and a hoodie that sends out a certain vibe. So in those situations, I like to browse around and find that specific vibe and bring it here. And in some situations, I might also use something quite striking. For example, a woman with black lipstick. This can work very well for the paydads because it makes you stop scrolling, and it makes sense to use reference images to get a specific vibe. If a product is aimed at a particular demographic, it's really worth including a reference image. So the generated people match the target audience, and the customer feels well represented. Another approach is the luxurious room. Now, here's the thing. As I said, this is a bit too vague. If you leave it like that, you might get a New York style penthouse with lots of chrome, marble, and incredible views. Okay. But what if this company targets a suburban area where everyone has a single story house, lovely lawns, and a white picket fence, right? So that would not fit. Both of them can be luxurious, but they're totally opposite people, right? Different targets, different markets. So spending the time to find the right reference image and the right vibe is key. And boy, does that take time? It takes quite a lot of effort. But, yeah, that's a glimpse into my workflow. That's how designers generate a lot of value with the help of AI. They create product photography that makes people purchase, that makes people buy that particular product. This is something that you can do, as well. 14. Workflow in Action #2: Designing for Results: Welcome back. Here's another high level of one of my workflows. To be clear, I'm not being secretive on purpose. I'm glossing over a lot of details simply because things change nonstop. The point of these videos is to give you ideas for what you can achieve with AI. This is not a step by step click here, then click there guide. Okay? Cool. Now, here's the situation. Duolingo is a fantastic model because it's memorable. It's cute and it relies on gamification to get you motivated. Now, what does that mean? We all love growing and leveling up. We like seeing our names climb a lead board, the scoreboard. It gives us immense satisfaction. It gives us a big boost. So this positive feedback loop makes us more inclined to stick to a routine. Now, that may be working out, quitting smoking, painting every single day or some other task. Now, some companies know how powerful these mechanisms are. The trouble is gamification is quite hard to integrate, especially to do it well. Things like, you know, you use the app for five days and you get a digital teddy bear. You get a star. You make the mascot happy, and it starts dancing, right? Or on the flip side, the mascot gets gloomy and sad when you ignore it, when you don't do your exercises. Now, the ethics behind this part well, those are maybe a bit questionable. But if it's for the good cause, like getting in shape, I think that's great. If it's there to extract more money out of you, it's probably not ideal, but I'm not here to judge that part. Instead, I want to show you how you can integrate that. Here's the scenario. I have an app that helps you to learn photoshop, right? It guides you through every step. It checks your settings, your hot keys. It's basically a supercharged clippy if you're old enough to catch that reference, right? Now, rather than having a plain standard interface that shows you that you're on less than five out of ten and that you're on step seven out of 100, whatever, I can introduce a lovely mascot. So what I did was I used Codex for that. I described what I wanted, and the model helped me to basically finish my thoughts to flesh them out. So that's the great thing about it. You give it some rough ideas and it starts filling in those gaps. Like how many states should the mascot cover, how to animate it and things of that nature? Now, to cut it short, after some back and forth, I got my lovely mascot. And again, this is where your skill as a designer matters. What kind of mascot? What type of clothes? What style? Is it appropriate for the target audience? If this were for an accounting platform used only by accountants, I'm not so sure this style would work. Now, you've got to spend the time to research these things and see what fits best and come up with at least two or three options, at least, then execute them. Here, I'm quite happy with it. So the next step is to animate it. I tried using Codex slash ChatGPT, but the animation wasn't smooth enough. You're going to notice that some of these platforms, they're overly optimistic, right? They're not realistic about their abilities. Now, the platform was quite confident that it could animate the mascot, so I said, Okay, give it a go. But, yeah, it wasn't good enough. It was clunky, it was choppy, not good enough. But then I move to the next step, and that's using magnific, which is the form of platform freepg.com, which is quite popular. Now, this platform, magnific can animate. Now, there are loads of choices and settings and price plans and whatever, I won't get into all of them. The fact is I got this animation as a test run, and I'm quite happy with it. Now, one slight issue, it does have a background, but I talked to Codex about it, and actually, it made a program to remove the background, and it did manage to get a transparent version. And why was that important? Because in my mind, I wanted to overlay the mascot. On top of the existing interface. I didn't want to extend the app, the UI, because it was already quite big. And the more space it takes up, the less room the user has for the actual content for the Photoshop, right? So this is another way where you can add tremendous value. This isn't my specialty. I don't know after effects or animation in general, but I was able to achieve something that's quite decent in maybe an hour or so. Now, the task is far from done. I still have to create all the other states, then decide when and how the mascot is going to show up. I've got to make sure that the program doesn't become too bloated or maybe too slow. It's a process, but I really wanted to showcase this workflow. So while all of these AI platforms can help you quite a lot, there's still quite a lot of heavy lifting that you have to do. But yeah, I hope this workflow has sparked some ideas about what's possible. Go for it and have fun. 15. Get Paid to Learn: The Remote Advantage: Come back. Let me say something that's a bit controversial. I don't believe remote work is ideal in this day and age with AI all over the place. Now, of course, the benefits of not working in an office, they're fantastic, right? Not commuting, not wasting 2 hours every day. Not grabbing expensive lunch, all valid, right? Plus, a good chunk of people are genuinely more productive at home, and I agree. But here's the magic of an office. You talk to people you wouldn't normally talk to, especially in an open office or any setting where you're bound to have lunch with a co worker or just mingle. As I said before, getting data is essential in your position as a designer. If you limit yourself to executing one small part and nothing more, you're doing yourself a massive disservice. The main thing is, ask questions, right? Talk to different departments. How does your design impact the company? What is that department struggling with? Is it something you can help with? Is it something that you can imagine a product, any sort of digital product that you might be able to create? The thing is, I've run bigger teams, and you have no idea what can come out of these conversations, right? Informal conversations, just people talking about random stuff, how people can brainstorm and come up with brand new ways of thinking about a problem. And more often than not, the best ideas come out of terrible ones because you constantly pivot, you adjust. But again, if you're at home with a ticketing system, just churning out work and then browsing social media or whatever, I think you're missing out, and here's why. If you truly want to take advantage of this AI era, you've got to put in the work and try and solve problems, problems that a lot of people have. It doesn't have to be groundbreaking. You take an existing solution, you make it just a bit better, usually through a better UI because you're the designer, and now you have a decent product. So let me say that again. You take an existing solution, so there's already a SAS or something similar out there, and you make it better. Now you have your own product. You don't have to decide to become an entrepreneur from this moment on. You don't have to quit your job and tell the world that you are now a businessman. No, it doesn't work like that. Just launch something, make a better UI for a program that you've used thousands of times, and maybe you're not happy with. Maybe make a wet, for example. And again, this is bound to happen. This idea that you want to launch your own products, this is bound to happen when you work with different companies over the years, when you talk to many entrepreneurs. You see the issues they run into. You see their blind spots, and you recognize patterns. You recognize how this company is three steps behind the company you used to work for. And this is fantastic, valuable insight. And by going into an office, you get so much more out of it in a shorter amount of time. And I truly believe you go to phases in life. First, you focus on learning on acquiring knowledge and experience, and then you switch to a phase where you earn a lot from those skills. And here's the thing. If you adjust your algorithm on Tik Tok, X, red it, whatever, you're bound to see more and more designers move from pure design, photo shap Figma Camb, whatever, to product design, and then obviously running actual companies. And the great news is that your chances you as a designer, they're actually higher than, for example, a developers because you are going to put UI and UX first. Those are going to be your priorities. You make the software look awesome. And in this day and age, I think that's one of the best things that you can do. Then, of course, you're going to move into advertising, which is critical for any app's success, any program, any SAS, whatever it may be. And again, you should know how to make gorgeous ads that convert. If not, of course, I have courses on that as well. And more than that, probably you do have some experience by working for various companies. So that's the thing that past experience, that's invaluable. It really does not matter how much you got paid. What matters is, you got that precious insight. So that's it. The world is basically your oyster. You have tons of options, and with AI, you're supercharged. The only thing that matters is that you start. For example, like I said, create a weather app. Okay? Yes, yours is going to be the million plus one app because, again, the space is inundated with 1 million weather apps. Then make a note taking app, the flashlight, the calculator, it really does not matter. And why should you do it? Because this puts you in the right mindset. These are just random examples, of course. What I want you to do is go through the steps of launching something anything, and you're going to see how a sleek UI, a gorgeous UI plus great ads is probably 80% of the work. And these super basic apps or programs or whatever, they should teach you that you don't need a complicated earth shattering idea to start earning some decent money. You don't need to build the next social media app or the next notion or the next Uber or whatever. Sometimes a weather app is all that it takes, though, to be fair, after you launch 35 Pin apps, you'll probably continue until you're going to find the winner. And that may come fast or it may take you whatever 50 tries. It may be a SAS software as a service, maybe a mobile app for Android dot IOS. It could be something made for tablets, but it all starts with gaining that valuable experience and going into an office and talking to lots of people from different parts of the company. That's fantastic. If you have that option, go for it. One of my students got a job offer. He's from Turkey and he's moving to San Francisco. The money isn't fantastic. The experience is surely going to be something else. The experience is what matters. So, in short, there are opportunities everywhere. Just make sure you go into them with the right mindset, and you're going to see them and make the most out of them. 16. How E-Commerce Design Really Works: Welcome back. As a designer, you're bound to work with online shops, be it stores that are on Shopify, Woo Commerce, or whatever platform. E Commerce is likely going to be one of the biggest clients that you're going to have. Now, let me explain how the entire game works, but I'm going to keep it short and fairly sweet. Now, first, what you need to do is this, create designs like this at scale. This means lots and lots of variations. You're going to have to do this for tens or maybe hundreds of products, though some shops might have one single product, though that's a bit rare. Now, to be able to churn out so many designs, you're going to have to use various AI platforms, but that's not the point of the lesson. Instead, here are the mechanics behind just about every typical online store. So the entrepreneur typically takes a product that usually costs about $10 to make and it can be literally anything that's brought over from China. The goal is to sell it for maybe 80 bucks, preferably 120, okay? Somewhere around ten to one, right? Now, ads are going to be probably 99% of the game, not a CO, not organic traffic or anything like that. So incomes the first metric that you should know, and that CPA cost per action. Otherwise, said, how much does it cost to get one paying customer on meta, Tik Tok, Google, whatever. Now, this can be whatever, five bucks or 50 bucks. Now, what decides the price, the quality of the ads, and, of course, how in demand the product is? Now, shipping, let's say it's another ten bucks and taxes and whatever, let's call it another 20. Now, that means the following. You should be able to do this for every single company that you're going to work for. So the company sells the product, it doesn't matter what type of product for $120, -30 bucks for Facebook, just a random example, minus ten for shipping, -20 for taxes, minus the ten bucks that the company paid towards the Chinese supplier, and overall, let's say that we're left with whatever, 40 bucks, okay? Now, typically, you can expect a net profit of about 20%. So after that sale of 120 bucks, usually you can expect to make about 20:20 5%. It really depends. So the main things that you got to know as a designer about that store we need to know the CPA, again, how much it costs to actually purchase a client, in our case, 30 bucks towards Facebook ads, meta ads, AOV, and then LTV. NCTR is a fantastic metric, as well. That's really helpful for designers. Now, CPA, like I already mentioned, is how much money you need to spend until you get one paying customer. Okay? You spend 100 bucks, you have one sale, that's 100 bucks. You spend 100 bucks and you have four sales, then the CPA is 25 bucks. That makes sense, right? So, the better the ads, typically, the lower that CPA value. And that's what you want to do. You want to be mod five bucks, not 50 bucks. So that simply means that good ads obviously will bring more clients. Now, say that we are selling whatever steam cleaner, okay? So these would be great product photos, and you can slightly adjust them to make good ads. Okay? Now, imagine product photos that would look something like this, right? So that's the difference between high advertising costs versus low ones, high CPA, low CPA. I think it's pretty obvious, right? Now, after you've designed fantastic ads and product photos, you got to focus on AOV, average order value, again, as a designer. So in short, make the person add more things to the card, make the buyer buy more stuff. Now, if this is a steam cleaner, maybe on the website, you can have some extra filters, maybe warranty, maybe some special towel wipes, whatever. So all the costs that I previously mentioned, shipping and whatever, they stay about the same, roughly the same. We'll call it the same. But instead of the client making a purchase of 120 bucks, he spends 150, okay? And that 30 bucks, that's nearly pure profit because as you previously saw, the price of the goods is actually quite low. You get it from China, super cheap, ten bucks this entire thing, and we're selling it for 120. So it's going to be the same thing for everything else around it, okay? So again, at least ten to one, bare minimum eight to one. Okay, so average order, that's quite important. If you can make the user add other products to the card, you are going to be golden. Now, how do you do that as a designer? By doing stuff like this, orders over 125 bucks have free shipping, and you got to put a progress bar or some type of notice. But the product C, it's 120. So again, you're forcing the user, you're enticing the user to buy more. Oh, and you can also add the fact that over 160 bucks, if you spend that, you're going to have a free product. That's going to be a surprise product. And you can even say that it's going to be worth at least 50 bucks, whatever. Again, ten to one so it does make sense. So that's one of the ways you can actually go about it. Now the next thing, LTV, lifetime value or CLV, customer lifetime value. So basically, in sort making the client purchase again and again, because if you spent 30 bucks to get that client on your site and he purchased something, if he can buy again, then you can consider that CPA to actually be 15 bucks. So two purchases, 30 bucks, one purchase, two purchases, 15 bucks. And the math obviously improves a lot. If he buys the third time, that's a $10 CPA. Now, typically, you can do that by enticing him to subscribe to a newsletter, where you place that, how you show that form, and what style you show that form, what type of copy you put in. That's all on you as a designer. My advice, you can add that form in the thank you page. So after the order was placed, you can say something like stay up to date with the status of your order and get 15% off on your next order by subscribing. And then it's only a button, not a field because he already put his email in the step befoe when he placed the order. So that makes a whole lot of sense. It's fast, painless, and you give him two great reasons to subscribe. So this is all what E Commerce is all about. Let me briefly speak about CTR. Click to weight. Basically, if you have two ads and this has 3% and this one has 2%, that means more people are clicking on this specific ad. So what you do is you try and break it down and see why this ad is more appealing. It's that simple. Now, this is a very rough, high level overview. But I've sold over $900,000 per year through my own store. So I've actually lived it, and this is all through my experience. You don't need to become a marketing expert to realize these things, these metrics, make better ads to lower the advertising cost, the CPA. Then inside the website, make sure that the product photos are gorgeous and they explain all the benefits. The customer has to understand the value of the product without having to read a single line from the description that's typically underneath. During the checkout process, add some type of progress bar that basically tells the user, Hey, add a few more products to get a free surprise, to get free shipping and so on. It can be recommended products, or customers also love this or that or buy two devices and get $40 off. So one for 120 or two for 200. And finally, try to increase repeat to adults by getting the user to subscribe, then emailing him fantastic newsletters, not just the product on a simple background, but create a story, a visual story that anyone can look at for 2 seconds and understand what's what. Have a look here. I don't speak German, but I totally understand what's happening here. This is your job as a designer, and with AI, you can bang out more volume, five X, TenX, you have current volume. The issue is not the execution part. The main challenge is knowing how to frame it. Let's talk about that in more detail. 17. Framing: Your Most Valuable Skill: Welcome back. Let's continue our discussion about your role as a designer in this AI era. So let's say that we're looking to sell this steam cleaner, okay? You already saw all the photos, and it's clear as day that this is a good presentation. But I want to explain why because maybe for some people, it's not obvious. Well, let's think about it. The first photo shows us a bundle. Look at how many things we are getting for that price. Lots and lots of accessories. Even the box is included in the photo to make it seem like we're getting quite a lot, a lot of volume, a lot of toys. Now, obviously, do we need all of those accessories? Honestly, I have no idea. I don't know what half of these things are. But that's the thing. Your initial impression is that you're getting a lot. You're getting a bundle. You're getting a deal of fantastic value for the amount of money that you're going to spend. Now, why would you need a steam cleaner, okay? To clean bacteria, germs, viruses? See this device goes all the way to 135 Celsius, and that kills everything. You can clearly see that from the graphic. It burns them alive, all the viruses and whatever. Hence the fire and all the embers. Notice how the product looks like it has fire inside it to further emphasize that point. It's really, really hot. Honestly, I don't know if all steam cleanups go to that 0.1 35 Celsius. But that doesn't matter. Here, it looks interesting. It looks like it's something to brag about, right? Now, why would you want to kill germs? Ah, here you go for your family, for your children, for your animal that you love with all of your heart, your cat, your dog, whatever. And obviously, your dog is basically a part of your family. And, of course, you want to kill germs for your spouse. Basically, you loved ones. Plus, look at how nice this room is. Who wouldn't want such a home and such a beautiful family? Plus, this also tells us that the charging is super fast. It's ready to spray in 3 minutes or something like that. So why is that important? So you can spend more time with your loved ones, super smart. And here's what you can do with it. You can clean the stove. Fast and easy. Look at how she's smiling, effortless. But don't worry. This device is actually safe to use around your family. Look at your two young kids and you have precious dog. You want to keep them safe, right? You want to keep them safe. Of course. So there's some type of safety feature built in. No idea what that is. But again, the message is loud and clear. I don't speak German, by the way, but I think it's quite obvious. Now, I could go on and on, but I think you're getting the point. Making these graphics, technically, that's not difficult. It's not about knowing the right tools and techniques in photoshop, figma, or Canva. No, that's totally all irrelevant. And besides the point, the entrepreneur behind this product doesn't care at all about what you use to create these graphics. Okay? No, what matters is your approach as a designer, how you frame things, and how you take all of these details into consideration. So every slide brings something new, further entices that sale, makes the sale possible. Now, these details decide your conversion rate out of 100 visitors that land on this page, typically paying customers, how many decide to actually make a purchase? Again, that's the CPA. You put money to bring people in, and the more people that buy, the better it is for the business. Now, a good conversion rate ranges anywhere from 1% to 5%. So yeah, one out of every 100 people. Now, the question is, if you have a bad presentation, obviously, you're going to be on the lower end. This means you need to bring in more people to actually make decent sales. So you got to spend more in ads, and that means, again, it's bad for the business. Higher CPA is always bad for the business. So if your CPA becomes whatever 50 bucks and the product is sold at 120, you have deepened the red. That's a huge loss for the company. So, in short, this is how ecommerce stores operate. If you understand why this framing is so important and how it helps sales, then you've all said, you're good to go. It's not Nano Banana versus GPT versus mid journey versus whatever. It's not Photoshop versus Canva. It's about helping the business grow through fantastic designs that are cleverly designed, smartly made. So that's the thing. Be thoughtful. Don't rush to execute. Think about the approach, frame it in the right way. And when you have good ideas, go and execute them with the help of AI so you can produce more more perspectives, again, reframing as this, reframing as that. So you can output more, and you can test more, and that's how you can actually help the business. Again, work smarter, be clever. 18. Reading Ad Data Like a Pro: Welcome back. If you get a chance to work with a great customer, a client, or you find yourself in a position where you can chat with a performance marketing agency, ask them for a quick look at their dashboard. It can be Facebook ads, meta ads, TikTok ads, Google ads. It really doesn't matter. Have a look at any dashboard that shows analytics. What I want you to do is to try and learn a few key things. Now, I'm going to explain what's what in this video. This is going to be a fairly quick overview, but it's the most important part. Now, he's one of my dashboards for one of my past companies. Now, this can make you the head spin as a designer, but it's actually all about comparing numbers. That's it. You compare numbers between two different ads. Two or 20 or 200 ads, it's the same thing. You're simply comparing them. Now, this is in my local currency, but the actual value really doesn't matter all that much. I would say this is probably about $150,000, if I were to guess just by looking at it. But yeah, the fact is, there's a lot of information here. So it's a solid budget, so there's a lot of data. That's also clear this day from the results column. So you can see quite a lot of sales have happened here. Now, that's the first thing that you got to look at. So what's bringing the results? So you click on that campaign, and then you have a look at all the ads that are running inside that campaign. Again, you don't have to be an expert, simply take it step by step. Now, you can sort by all of these columns. For example, based on the spend, what budget was consumed to get these results, right? So that's how I usually look at things. I look in terms of spend, the highest spend at the top. Then you simply have a look at, say, the top ads, the top three ads, top five ads, and see what do they all have in common. So first of all, the very basic question, are they photos or videos, do they focus on this or do they focus on that? Is it based on price? Is it based on a certain sentiment? Is it based on the product? Is it a person inside the actual frame and so on? So that's the first thing. You got to understand why the best ads are actually performing. What do they have in common? Then you have a key metric in meta ads, for example, that's ROAS, return on ads spend. Three ROAS means you've put in $1 and you've generated three in sales. It's like a multiplier. Now, some companies are profitable at two ROAS while other ones need eight, simply because they don't have enough margin. Now, ROAS does not translate across niches and countries and stores and whatnot. It's one thing to advertise fashion products where you have a certain margin. It's another one where you sell kitchen appliances when you have a totally different margin. So this is not a universal number. If someone says, Hey, I got ROAS four, is that good or is that bad? You have no idea. It depends on the business. So you should never go ahead and say, Hey, listen, Chris, I got company X or ROAS five to my designs. I can do the same for you. It doesn't translate to different companies to different niches. Okay? If it's the same niche, yeah, probably. But again, it has to be the same countries, and it's a lot of factors in short. Now, next, there are lots and lots of entry points here. For example, one of my go to metrics, which you should always have a look at, CTR, the clickthrough rate. So how many people stopped scrolling and clicked on this ad? So, this one here had 3.01% with a CPA of 65. Let's call it $65, though that's not the case. You actually have to divide by 4.5. Let's call it dollars just because it's easier. Now, this is much higher than the first one that got about half that. So that's 1.57. And the second one had an even lower click to the rate, 1.43%. Then why did this not outperform them? Why did this campaign receive a smaller budget? Remember, these are all sorted by how much budget I allocated to them. I decided that, of course. Now, because the overall ROAS is lower, where the first two are over 3%, well over three, actually. Plus the CPA, the cost per action is quite higher, especially versus the first one. That's only 45. This is 65 huge increase. So this is how you start putting things into context. This is obviously just a glimpse into it, but I hope it helps. So let's continue. So to sum it up, you don't look at one single metric, for example, a ROAS or one single metric, click through rate. Because here's the thing. A lot of people may be clicking on the ad, so you have a CTR of say, whatever, 5%, 10%, whatever, something ridiculous. And you might say, Wow, this is a fantastic ad because a lot of people are clicking on it. True. But does it also have a great ROAS? Does it also have a low CPA? Because if it doesn't really does not matter. Does that make sense? So you don't judge an ad by one single metric. You could potentially just look at the ROAS, but again, imagine you're only spending ten bucks. So a very high ROAS would not be relevant, or you get one single sale. Again, a high ROAS would not be relevant. So you got to take a few of them in context and then decide, Hey, this is actually a good ad. So again, let's continue. Let's say that you know that the average order is 140, okay? Then the difference between a 45 CPA and a 65 CPA, that becomes hugely relevant. It's super important. So by simply knowing these two numbers, AOV, the average order value, and then CPA cost per action, meaning what it costs you to get a paying customer, you can see what's what. Now, again, your goal as a designer is to find the best ads out of this account and then recreate them in one way or another. Day in, day out, you have to do it constantly. And that's because some ads work wonders for the week, maybe two, but then they degrade. This is a well known established rule. They degrade. Now, they start out with a very low CPA, something very good, say, 25, but then it goes up to 35 and then maybe it goes up to 50. Now, in some occasions, it may recover and it may go down to 30, for example, but you never know. So that's what the marketing department is doing all day long. The thing is, they need ammo, ammunition. They need volume, and you provide that ammo. You can provide better and better ads. Now, keep in mind, my store had multiple products. So here we may be comparing an ad for lemonade. Versus an ad for the oatmeal cookies. So you got to be you got to pay attention. This is obviously important. When you're looking for the best ad, of course, you should compare apples to apples. But even when you compare different categories, you should still know what type of format performs best. Again, video versus a photo, a carousel versus a simple standard photo, a person in the photo versus the product in the photo. Lots of text versus no text. So once you find that format, for example, let's say comparison, us versus the competition, and it's a split screen. Once you know that, you can begin to refine it. You can try out different colors, different layouts, different styles. So you have the idea, comparison, a head to head comparison, and then you churn out variations. Then you have a look at the CTR, the ROAS, and the budget, of course. Like I said, the budget is only important because you need enough information. If you get one single sale with a CPA of ten and a ROAS of 20 Okay, that's incredible, but no business is happy with one single sale. Maybe you just got lucky. You need ten sales per day, 50 per day, 200 per day, depending on the business. That's how you actually see if the stats are worthwhile, if the stats can be trustworthy. So you always judge and after it's received enough volume, enough volume, AK, enough budget. If you only spend, again, ten bucks on it, the data won't be representative. It won't be conclusive. It's not enough. But here's the thing. There's no set number. For example, if you spend 500 bucks, then you'll definitely know. It really depends on the company and how much budget they can allocate, because the more ads you have, obviously, it's going to dilute. If you have 500 bucks, but 50 ads, that's only ten bucks per ad. Again, that's not ideal. Now, in the best possible conditions, you would spend millions of dollars on tens of thousands of ads to find out what's the absolute best one. But here's the thing. Consumer trends obviously change. Consumer behavior changes. So even if you were to find out that the perfect ad for dog food in 2027 is this, that doesn't mean that ad is going to work well in 2028, or that ad will work for the beverage company. Okay? It really depends on the context. So that's the thing. You don't have to understand everything that's inside this dashboard here. You have to have a look at the overall return on ad spend ROAS, which you can think of as ROI, if that's more familiar, return on investment. You have a look at the budget and make sure it's decent enough, so the results can be trusted. You look at the CTR, click the rate and see if it's performing better than the other ones. And basically, that's that because here's the thing. Let's take any random column here, say CPC, cost per click. What's better yet? Let's go for cost per landing page view. The first one is more expensive, 2.78. So that's how much it costs us to bring a user to the website, okay? But the third one is far cheaper, 2.28. So you would naturally think that this ad might be better. It might be, but look at the volume. The more expensive one brought over 3,200 purchases, whereas this one brought only 1,400. So that's the thing. Even though it's more expensive and by quite a lot, say, 20%, it brought in so much more revenue, and most companies would be very happy with that. So this is the type of fine detail you can learn by being proactive, by getting involved, by talking to people. This is why it's a great idea to network, but to go to the office and speak with other departments. This is how you level up as a designer. If you were to spend two, 3 hours with me, going over example after example, you wouldn't be an expert, but you would know about 80% of what style of ad works best for this company, and on the flip side, what doesn't Again, the table looks scary, but it's all about comparing numbers between them and then seeing the actual ad. And if this is just too much for you, just focus on the CPA, on the ROAS, and on the CTR, and that's that you're going to be golden. Now, one last thing about the budget because I want to be clear. If you ask two people who they're voting for and they say candidate X, they both say the same thing. That would mean 100% of people are going to vote for that person. Now, is that statistic relevant? Obviously not. We know we shouldn't trust such a statistic because it's not valid. Only two people is not enough volume. You need a lot more to get an accurate reading. It's the same thing with a budget, nothing more to it. Now, the ideal situation is when you see somewhat the same numbers, but one of the ads has a higher CTR. So that means that people are clicking on that ad, and there's room to grow. There's something there that's attractive. So again, my best advice is you go talk to people and have a glimpse into various dashboards. You got to know that this is proprietary sensitive data. I've made my exit from this company, and it's data, so that's totally fine, but be aware that you shouldn't be so straightforward and nonchalant about it. This is precious precious info. But if you're an employee or something of that nature, a freelancer that's been contracted, if you ask nicely, you may get access to it so you can provide the company with better ads. I know you probably want more information, more of a breakdown, but this is not the right quote for but still, if you have any questions, use the comment section, and I'm going to do my best to explain. And yeah, hopefully you now get a better sense of what you need to do to create better ads in this AI era. Use statistics. Use these tables. 19. Don't Sleep on Adobe: Welcome back. Love them or hate them. Adobe has helped countless designers over the years. Their programs are absolutely incredible. Photoshop Illustrated after the fact, you name it. The thing is, some people think Adobe has fallen off and that all of these AI platforms are vastly superior. For example, Mid journey came in like a hurricane and everyone rushed to it. Mid journey is still active, and it can create some incredible imagery. If you're looking to get your creative juices flowing, just browse around their gallery or try it out. As you can see, this this is quite impressive, visually stunning. And you can create everything you see here through careful prompting. You write out some instructions and you get it. Fantastic stuff. But here's the thing. Is this commercially safe? Can you use these designs for the big client? Do you have the usage rights? In short, it's unclear. Initially, Mid Journey was simply taking everything it could find from the web, melting it together, and throwing back stitched up versions of it. So it would take people's work, stitch it together, and give it to you. Now, in other words, you would ask for a picture of a cat, and you might see a scribbled signature in the corner, a clear message that the image was actually being taken from someone's portfolio, and, of course, edited, more or less. Now, some say that was trade up stealing but yeah, in any case, if you're serious about working as a designer, you should take usage rights very seriously. You can't steal someone's work and then call it your own and even worse, sell it for the premium, sell it for any type of money, actually. You can't take an existing style, tweak a very small part of it, and then call it yours. So that's why serious designers never actually adopted Mid journey. They never used it. But back to Adobe. Adobe says that, you know, clear as they that their AI generation is commercially safe. Adobe Firefly gives you content that you can trust, content that you can use in a commercial setting, meaning with paying clients. First of all, the AI integrated into Photoshop is fantastic. I covered that in my Photoshop courses, but in short, you drag out the box, you type in a prompt, you type in the instruction, and you're going to get what you want. It's quite good. Now, you can upload the reference image and you can change someone's shirt, for example, in a hyper realistic way. And that's Adobe's power. They may not have releases every few weeks, but they do deliver. They're not as fast, but they do deliver. And more than anything, it's commercially safe, and you can trust that what you're producing is on the up and up. You have no legal issues with it. On top of that, Adobe now clearly states that it won't use your own projects to train its AI models, which was something a lot of people were worried about because you can get Chinese platforms that offer you, you know, fantastic results, but they may be taking the data and using it in not so positive ways. Let's call it that. So overall, even though all of these other platforms seem to be innovating at a rapid pace, I would still bid good money on Adobe. I still trust Adobe for the long run. I still use Photoshop. I still use Camera Raw, plus all of the other programs, maybe not as much as before, but there's still a very big part of my workflow. The only thing I'm not too happy about is their pricing change. You used to get photoshop and Light Room bundled together in the photography plan for about 12 bucks per month, depending on your country. Now, that promotion was live for lots and lots of years, but fairly recently, they've decided to raise the prices quite dramatically. So in my country with VAT with taxes, it's about 26 euro, nearly 30 bucks. And that's for the photoshop alone. The photography plan, which everyone should get is about 24 euro per month. Again, way too expensive. That's quite a lot. So that would be my only gripe with Adobe. Hopefully, they'll come back to more reasonable prices. But other than that, I'm still an Adobe fan, and I suggest you do the same. You still look for their releases because they deliver 20. Outro: Your Next Steps: Welcome back. So what's next? Well, first of all, I hope you understand that you got to stay calm and you got to continue learning. Your learning journey is the most important thing. As long as you stay curious and you stay open to testing new tools and techniques, you're going to be fine. My best advice is to cate your feed so you get advice from trustworthy people. You saw how undisclosed ads can really ramp up the Fomo the fear of missing out. If you get your news at random from unknown sources, you may end up with a lot of anxiety and not a lot of actionable information. So that's why I encourage you to find decent creators, honest creators that you can trust, that they can disclose when they have a financial incentive, that they can disclose when this is an ad, okay? Find three of these influences, five, ten of these creators, a better term. And see who you can trust, find ones that give you the right amount of information because some YouTube words create content purely for the numbers. For example, say, Google Flow, it just came out. And after the day, they already have a ten minute video on it. But basically, that's just the official presentation, nothing more about it. And that ten minute mark is quite important for them because that dictates how many ads they can insert. So when you see a video that has 10 minutes and 2 seconds, that's why. Now, here's the thing. That's not what you need simple presentations, basically slop, videos that simply take up your time and that's that. You actually need creators who are in the trenches who totally test these products, who do head to head tests. This is why you can't really take advice from someone who's only used, say, just Cloud. Okay? So if they've been using Cloud code and nothing else, it's very difficult to trust their judgment. Their perspective is going to be limited. Even if they're 100% honest, their perspective is too limited. But when you watch creators that do head to head comparisons, you know same tasks, different platform, you know, Codex versus Cloud, then, yes, that may be something that you should look into. So that's how you cut through the noise. You find these creators who specifically cover what you're interested in. I can't give you my list because it all depends. Are you on TikTok, X or thread read it or Instagram. Do you watch videos or read newsletters? Are you into image generation or video generation? Are you doing product photography for e commerce or characters for mobile app games? But after the few weeks of looking for trustworthy creators, you should find a bunch. You're going to be golden. Now, more than anything, recognize that AI is just an electric screwdriver. You can build fantastic things at a faster rate, or you can stick it into a socket and electric it yourself, right? Focus on helping clients achieve their goals, and you're going to be good. And with that, this is Chris Barin signing out for the moment. Thank you so much, and I hope to see you in another course of mine. 21. Class Project: The Feelings-Not-Features Brief: Welcome back. I want to give you something to actually do because watching me talk only gets you so far. Now, the whole point of this course is to shift from executing to thinking. So let's put that into practice with a small project. It won't take long, and it's the exact thing I'd ask a designer if I was hiring. Here's the project. You're going to take one product and build what I call feelings, not features brief. Don't worry. I'm going to walk you through it step by step. So the first thing, step one, pick a product. It can be real or made up. It really doesn't matter. If you have stuck, here are a few you can use a protein powder, a smart water bottle, a budgeting app, or a robot vacuum. Pick whatever you find interesting. The second step, list five features of that product, the boring stuff. For the protein powder, it might be 25 grams of protein. No added sugar, ten bucks per serving. Vegan mixes instantly. Now, that's the easy part. This is what the $5 designer stops at, and you don't want that. Now, the third step, and this is where the real work happens, turn those features into four angles based on feelings. Remember the oatmeal example, no time to cook. Try this, feeling bloated. Try this. So here, you're not selling 25 grams of protein. You're selling the gym goer who's scared they're wasting their workouts. You're selling the busy parent who skips breakfast. So find the emotion behind the feature. Come up with four different angles for four different types of people. Then the next step four, pick your favorite angle and actually create a banner or a thumbnail for it. Use any AI platform. It really doesn't matter. ChatGPT, Nano Banana, Firefly, magnific, whatever. Now, don't obsess over making it perfect. The design is almost the easy part, right? What matters is you communicate the feeling and not the feature. That's what I want. And then step five, write down two or three small tests you would propose to the client to see if the angle actually works. Maybe a wider button, maybe testing the no time to cook angle against the summer ready body. Remember, you want to chase results, not likes. Post it all in the project section below. You have four angles, the banner that you created, and then you have test ideas. So again, the four angles, the actual design, and then which would change to that specific design, how you would create variations. I'm going to read everything, and I would love to see your thought process. This is great practice, and you can actually add it to your portfolio. Please don't skip it. Thinking through angles, I know it's a bit clunky. It's a bit uncomfortable. You would much rather play with colors and fonts and layouts and whatnot. But that discomfort is exactly the muscle that we are building together. So go do it and only then come back to the final video. Thank you.