After testing more than thirty AI tools over eighteen months, here’s what survived the cut.
Every week there’s a new AI tool promising to revolutionize design workflows. Most of them are noise. A few are genuinely life-changing. After spending an embarrassing amount of money on subscriptions and an even more embarrassing amount of time testing things, here’s my honest breakdown.
For ideation and moodboarding: I’ve settled into using AI image generators not to produce final work but to communicate visual direction to clients before I’ve done any real design work. It’s the fastest way I’ve ever found to get a client to say “yes, that feeling, exactly that” in the first week of a project rather than the fourth. I used to spend days creating handcrafted moodboards in Figma. Now I spend two hours generating twenty concept directions and spend my energy on the conversation about which one resonates.
For copywriting support: I am a designer, not a writer, but most of my clients expect me to at least provide placeholder copy that’s better than Lorem Ipsum. AI writing assistants have become my secret weapon here. I use them to draft UX copy for buttons, error states, empty states, and onboarding flows. Good UX copy is surprisingly hard and time-consuming. Having a capable drafting partner that I can edit is genuinely useful.
For code: I build in Webflow and Framer primarily, but when clients need custom interactions or unique animations, I used to outsource to developer friends. Now I use AI coding assistants to write the CSS and JavaScript myself, then review it with a developer who charges me a fraction of what it used to cost for a full build. This has expanded my service offerings significantly.
What I’ve ditched: Any tool that generates complete web layouts automatically. Every single one produces something that looks fine at a glance and falls apart under scrutiny. The proportions are off. The hierarchy is confused. The spacing is inconsistent. Using these tools made my work worse, not better, because cleaning up AI-generated layout messes takes longer than designing from scratch.
The pattern I’ve noticed: AI tools work brilliantly at the beginning and end of a design process — ideation and production. They’re terrible in the middle, where judgment, taste, and design thinking actually live. Structure your workflow around that reality and you’ll get tremendous leverage from these tools without sacrificing the quality that makes your work worth paying for.
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