The unstoppable ubiquity of AI: Jessica Walsh on rebranding Isodope using Dall-E

The creative usage of AI is more widespread than it was just months ago. In fact, its appearance in creative projects is no longer the unique talking point it once was; museum identities, film posters and artworks have all been created using various AI programmes in 2022 – Richard Turley even created a whole soft drink brand with the tech in his guest edit with It's Nice That. So with AI’s moment in the sun stretching ever-on, what comes next? Using Dall-E, the latest work from &Walsh who's behind the branding of non-profit Isodope throws up these questions and more.

Isodope is an influencer brand raising awareness about nuclear energy as a clean, sustainable climate crisis solution on the likes of TikTok. “As Isodope is such a major proponent of the use of technology to solve problems in daily life, we decided to enlist the creative help of Artificial Intelligence tool Dall-E to bring this branding to life,” Jessica Walsh tells us. Creating a “school in another dimension” was the aesthetic aim behind the work. Isodope suggests a futuristic space of education, playfully plugged into the Gen Z spaces that it lives across through brand photography and icons.

Unlike other AI-driven projects – where stylistic results are guided by the capabilities and look of the program used – Dall-E was utilised as a source of inspiration as much of a design tool. Prompts were inputted into the program, then &Walsh used the outputs as further prompts to generate ideas, or manipulated them using other tools. “At this point with AI, there was still a lot of human work and curation,” Jessica explains, “although we loved the visual directions that it helped inspire. I can imagine though, in the future, AI tools could help to generate full branding visual languages off of a strategy.”

For &Walsh, this is just the beginning of a long road; Jessica says the team will continue to use AI. “It’s only in the infancy stage, but it’s not hard to envision where this will go and how fast it’s coming. I know there is backlash against AI tools in the design world, which is natural, this always happens when a new tool threatens to take a human’s job. However the reality is that it’s already here and we can choose to ignore it and become outdated by it, or we can choose to find creative ways to work with it and push our work further into territories that we couldn’t have before.”

In the case of Isodope, AI has clearly opened up new avenues of creation. “There were definitely many things created that we were like ‘Wow, that’s not exactly what we had in mind with this prompt but that’s cool and takes it to a new place!” Dall-E was used across several areas of the brand, including typography and photography backgrounds. Both areas lend it an attention-grabbing space-age feel – vital for a brand that needs to draw eyes quickly on social media platforms. However, that’s not to overstate the impact of AI on the final assets; Jessica confirms that a high level of art direction on this project was still designed by humans.

Leaving us with her thoughts on AI going forward, Jessica points out: “When computer and design software was invented, there was also fear and backlash. Designers thought it would take away jobs, but really it just eliminated a lot of the tedious work and expensive barriers in design. It also ushered in a new wave of creatives who couldn’t have dreamed in the past to be a designer due to the expensive tools, where they lived, or the intense training and time required to master the craft [...] AI will be the same, further democratising creativity and entrepreneurship. There will always be a place for designers and traditional craft to help shape the AI outputs and push it to realms even further than we could have imagined. However, there will be the option of spending less time on tedious tasks and more time on pushing the creative, the concept or the product.”