Over the last few months, we’ve seen an increasing trend towards people using AI for artwork.
What once took hours, skill, and specialist tools can now be done in seconds. The barrier to entry has all but disappeared, and with it, we’re seeing a growing volume of AI-generated artwork being shared, used, and even sent to print.
We understand why people are turning to AI; it’s easy and doesn’t come with the cost of a designer if you don’t have easy access to one, but to be honest, it comes with other costs. Your time, your brand, your customers’ perceptions, and blending in are all places you can pay for taking the ‘easy’ route.
But there’s a fundamental issue being overlooked.
So let’s get into why AI Artwork in print doesn’t work, not just us saying that, but actual reasons that should make you think twice.
When you print something, you need to consider the DPI requirement of images, scalability for the size you’re printing, resolution, bleed, trim and safe zones, and AI artwork, which quite simply can’t provide those things for you.
Most AI-generated images aren’t created with print in mind; even if you tell it to consider print, it can’t.
So, you get a file with low resolution, images that aren’t the recommended 300dpi and artwork without bleed, trim and safe areas
You’re going to end up with artwork that takes longer than it would to just get a designer to start with, you’ll end up needing a designer to fix, and in some cases, recreate the files, so that money you saved by not getting a designer, you haven’t actually saved.
A brand is made up of many elements, from your messaging, your tone of voice, your colour palette, your fonts and much more. Some of those things are easy to fine-tune through AI. It’s worth saying you should never publish anything straight from AI without a human checking it over
You can get AI to write some copy and then fine-tune it yourself, and you can teach it to sound a bit like you, but you can’t edit your AI artwork, so your font, your colours and even your logo, they go out the window.
You might be thinking, but I give AI my logo files and I tell it my font and my colours so surely that’s okay? But it’s not, especially when it comes to print.
Print uses CMYK and AI uses RGB. Colours can shift quite significantly in the conversion, so a core part of your brand is just not being followed.
Colour is just one part of the issue, but even providing your logo, AI can distort that. Your fonts won’t be consistent, letters can be distorted, words can be misspelt, even though you gave it the correct spelling. The list could go on.
This one might not sound like a lot, but it really is. If you spot an error, you can’t just change it, and AI has a habit of changing the entire design to fix 1 edit, so those last-minute corrections become a full recheck every single time.
AI comes in flattened file types; it has no layers, and so there is often no vector support. Print needs you to be able to be able scale artwork to fit on the item you want. The artwork produced is often low quality
As I was preparing to write this article, I decided to go through the process myself of trying to create artwork in AI, and it was a very interesting journey.
I gave AI our logo as a PNG upload, I gave it our brand guidelines, and I asked it to create me a print-ready poster inviting people to attend our garden party on the 1st January 2020.
Here’s what it gave me.
Fonts - it can’t use controlled fonts
Logo – it recreates it, so it will distort
Brand Colours - well, they’re interpreted loosely
Layout Discipline - it doesn’t follow a grid or the brand system.
It even says – the output wasn’t a brand-compliant design.
Well, AI can often make things up, but on this occasion, we’ll give it credit, because it's 50% accurate.
It says to use InDesign, PowerPoint, Canva and Figma. We’ll let you guess why we only give it 50% here, but still, even AI has said it isn’t brand-compliant, and it isn’t the best tool for the job, and we agree.
So, when you need something printed but don’t have access to a designer. Speak to us, because we do, and we can make sure that all your artwork is brand-compliant and print-ready.
Absolutely not. AI has a place and can be transformative when used correctly, and can help you get to the result you want from a designer much quicker.
When you have an image that you want to use, AI can enhance that image – there are tools like the Adobe AI Image Enhancer, which are completely free to use and allow you to remove backgrounds, add elements, retouch, and enhance images.
If you’re the only person in the marketing team, one thing that you can really miss out on is brainstorming. AI can become that other person in the room to help take your ideas to the next level.
The use of Agents to understand your tone of voice, your customers’ pain points, and your goals can then help to work with the ideas you have to make them really connect. Not alone, but by offering refinements and continually working on your ideas to make them better. Whilst an AI idea should never be the final idea, it can remove the blank page.
One of the most valuable ways to use AI is in the briefing stage of a project.
Rather than asking AI to create your final artwork, use it to help organise your thoughts, define your objectives, and build a clearer brief for your designer. The better the brief, the better the outcome.
AI can help you identify key messages, audience pain points, campaign themes, calls to action, and even suggest creative directions. This means you spend less time staring at a blank page and more time moving your project forward.
The difference is that you're using AI as a tool to support the creative process, not replace it.
AI is brilliant at helping generate ideas, speed up workflows, and remove creative roadblocks.
What it isn't brilliant at is creating brand-compliant, print-ready artwork that meets professional production standards.
When your brand reputation is on the line, and your artwork is going to print, getting it right matters. Colours need to be accurate, files need to be prepared correctly, and your branding needs to remain consistent throughout.
That's why the most effective approach isn't AI or designers. It's AI and designers.
Use AI to spark ideas. Use professional designers to bring those ideas to life in a way that's on-brand, print-ready, and designed to get results.
Whether you have a rough idea, an AI-generated concept, or no artwork at all, our design team can help turn it into professional, print-ready marketing materials that represent your brand properly.