10 Ways To Use ChatGPT as a Designer

ChatGPT-4 was released by OpenAI in late 2022. Within two months of its launch, it had over 100 million monthly active users, largely due to improvements in its accuracy and functionality over its previous versions.

ChatGPT works using the GPT large language model (LLM), which was trained on massive corpora of data. The breadth of the chatbot’s training enables people to give it conversational prompts in natural language. ChatGPT then outputs a response that can be finely tuned to the user’s intent.

The conversational, near-instant, and limitless nature of ChatGPT’s output means that the use cases for it in the design process are broad and varied. Users can give it a prompt in natural language and receive an output in seconds. If that output isn’t satisfactory, another prompt can be tried, ad infinitum.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how to use ChatGPT-4 to brainstorm new ideas, understand your audience persona, gather design ideas, and get assistance in routine design tasks to help streamline your workflows.

1. Brainstorming and ideation

Brainstorming and ideation are critical to the design process, and ChatGPT can help. Especially when working alone, people can get locked onto a single (sometimes bad!) idea, or suffer from tunnel vision. They may need help looking at ideas in new ways, which is where having a brainstorming partner helps.

ChatGPT can take on this role. For example, you may need help with what design elements to include in a new website design. If you provide details about your product, audience, and other relevant metrics to ChatGPT, it can offer suggestions for design elements that might work well.

You can also learn more about design trends with ChatGPT. If you don’t have time to read a ton of articles about new trends, paste them into ChatGPT and ask for a summary. You can get a quick overview of new trends without spending too much time reading a multitude of similar articles.

Using ChatGPT in this way, you can read the articles that most interest you so that you know you have a baseline understanding of new concepts. And then you can ask ChatGPT to summarize all the niche articles you may not have time for.

Let’s take a look at a few prompt examples to try.

In this example, we’ll ask ChatGPT to suggest color palettes to use for an outdoor brand.

In this prompt, we’ll get ideas for different user-friendly features for a health application.

2. User persona creation

A critical part of design is understanding the audience viewing your content. You aren’t creating designs that just look good. They must also appeal to your target audience and convince them to take action.

ChatGPT can help you appeal to your audience by developing user personas. For instance, take a company selling a subscription fitness app to help customers get in shape. Describe to ChatGPT the details of your new product, and it gives you demographic information for potential customers and the specific problems they face.

Let’s look at a ChatGPT prompt to illustrate this process. One of your target demographics is busy parents with little time to get into shape. Ask ChatGPT about some of their problems to learn more about how to position your app in the market.

Now let’s look at a busy professional who’s out and about much of the day.

Continue using ChatGPT for user research to develop more user personas to understand who you’re designing for.

3. Wireframing and UI de‍sign

Wireframing and UI design are parts of the design process that lay out the initial version of a design. But it isn’t always easy to develop a user flow from scratch.

You can work with ChatGPT to develop a few ideas for your wireframe and integrate them into your UI design process. Pass ChatGPT the specifications of your design—such as screen size, layout, UI components, and other design elements—and from there, ask ChatGPT to offer ideas to integrate into your user interface.

Take, for example, a project management tool. You need to know the different screens that make sense for the app. Have ChatGPT describe the screens to you.

Another example is an e-commerce homepage. Ask ChatGPT to offer insight into a mockup for the design.

Use the output from these prompts to aid your work in design tools like Figma and Adobe XD.

4. User testing and feedback

User testing is the part of the design process where you get feedback from your ideal customers about how well your design meets their needs. This process has several parts: creating test scenarios, creating and asking interview questions, and gathering feedback.

ChatGPT can help with many parts of this process. One area it shines is generating questions for testers.

For example, say you have a new website design going online, and you want to learn what users think.

But there may also be edge cases to consider. Let’s look at test scenarios for people who need to use web accessibility tools.

Going through this process for several situations will help you build a list of usability scenarios and questions for testers to experiment with. At that point, you can gather feedback from testers to learn what does and doesn’t work with your new design.

5. Copywriting and product descriptions

Copywriting and product descriptions are two factors that help sell products. A great design won’t be enough to overcome the problem of these texts not connecting your company’s products to your customers’ needs.

ChatGPT can easily help designers with copywriting and product descriptions. Simply prompt ChatGPT with information about a product, ask it to create a unique description, and then iterate that process until you’re happy with the results.

For instance, take a company with a new sweeping product that’s better than a traditional broom. Here’s how to get ChatGPT to create a short product description—start by asking the chatbot to take on the persona of a product description writer.

The same thing is possible for copywriting. Copywriters sometimes need inspiration when writing engaging copy. Use ChatGPT to get started.

You can use ChatGPT to give you a great first draft to base your final copy on. Keep experimenting with ChatGPT to produce different copywriting and content marketing outputs to get more ideas for your final product.

6. Typography and color scheme recommendations

The typography and color scheme of a design play a big part in a design’s tone and readability. It also conveys a brand's voice—giving customers a consistent user experience throughout their interaction with your company’s content.

ChatGPT offers tailored recommendations for typography and color schemes based on your requirements. You can build design systems tailored to specific audiences, desired moods (relaxing, engaging, urgent), and types of interaction.

To illustrate this feature, let's look at a children’s app that needs to keep children engaged. What color scheme will work best for this product?

You can also use ChatGPT for specific typography that fits your brand. Take a luxury clothing brand, for instance. You may want to provide a more high-end experience, which means you want your font to be more sophisticated and easy to read.

Let’s ask ChatGPT for advice on the right typography.

7. Automated design tasks

Designing something new can be a lot of work, so designers must find tools to help automate tasks. ChatGPT offers many features that can make this easier.

One of the most popular use cases of ChatGPT is helping with coding tasks. Whether you’re a programmer or coding novice seeking guidance, you can ask ChatGPT to help you create design code or troubleshoot code you already have.

For example, take the need to create a slideshow on your website homepage. If you’re having trouble centering the slideshow and making it fullscreen, ask ChatGPT to help you.

ChatGPT is also good at generating synthetic data. If you’re building a design and don’t have the copy for it yet, you may still want to see what it looks like without the regular lorem ipsum text. If you have several pages, you probably don’t want to generate the text for those pages manually.

Request that ChatGPT create this text for you to paste into the design.

8. Graphic design assistance

ChatGPT also has the ability to offer more choices to designers when they struggle with brainstorming. A designer may understand the current graphic design trends and be able to implement them, but they need a hand to determine the best way to integrate them seamlessly into a new design.

ChatGPT can act as a partner in this situation. A designer can give ChatGPT all the details they have about their current design and a few ideas they want to experiment with, and the chatbot can give feedback about the options.

In addition, OpenAI is currently rolling out DALL-E 3, and ChatGPT Plus subscribers will be able to make infographics with a simple text query.

Let’s look at an example of a designer creating a poster for an eco-friendly event. The event is for a showcase of new green energy technology, so the designer wants to incorporate a design of some of those products in the poster. Let’s ask ChatGPT to give some advice to move the design forward.

Now say you like the idea of hand-drawn elements. Let’s explore the idea further.

9. Integration with other design platforms

Use cases for ChatGPT have grown since it was first released. While its algorithms were trained on vast quantities of data, the model didn’t retain information from its training, and it couldn’t access the internet. This meant that its responses were very limited and often contained mistakes—a problem that still exists but is improving.

ChatGPT Plus now offers web surfing capabilities and plugins that offer more features. You can use these to your advantage to browse the web for help.

LinkedIn is a great first place to look. Ask ChatGPT to analyze a page and summarize the content. Doing this saves you the time of reading articles that may not directly relate to your needs.

Let’s look at an example of ChatGPT reading a web page.

ChatGPT also has direct integration with popular design tools. Take Figma, for instance. There are many Figma plugins with ChatGPT integration that let you talk directly to ChatGPT from within the Figma interface.

These tools allow designers to streamline their workflows by preventing the need of jumping back and forth between different browser windows.

10. Refinement and iteration

Refinement and iteration are the final parts of the design process. You won’t have a finished product on your first draft. You’ll continue making changes to match what the audience wants to produce the best results.

You can use ChatGPT to help with this process. Instead of imagining ways to improve a piece of content on your own, ask ChatGPT for feedback.

For example, you may have a product description ready to go but aren’t happy with it. You want to say something more creative and engaging, so ask ChatGPT to iterate on what you already have.

Of course, you don’t need to accept the feedback that ChatGPT offers. You can ask it to improve itself and take feedback. When you do, you’ll get results more tailored to what you actually want.

You can continue going through this process for whatever stage of the design process you’re in. Keep talking with ChatGPT about your design ideas, gather feedback, and keep iterating until you have the perfect design.

Put your design and AI skills to work on Upwork

AI tools like ChatGPT-4 can play a significant role in the modern design space as powerful tools that can enhance creativity and spark new ideas.

If you’re a UX designer looking for your next client, head to Upwork’s UX designer job board. And if you’re a ChatGPT expert who has the ability to help companies with their next design, check out the ChatGPT jobs available.

If you’re a company that needs help with your next design project, head to the Upwork Talent Marketplace to find experienced UX designers. If you’re ready to use ChatGPT in your business, browse the ChatGPT specialists available for hire on Upwork.

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Upwork is an OpenAI partner, giving OpenAI customers and other businesses direct access to trusted expert independent professionals experienced in working with OpenAI technologies.

Upwork does not control, operate, or sponsor the other tools or services discussed in this article, which are only provided as potential options. Each reader and company should take the time to adequately analyze and determine the tools or services that would best fit their specific needs and situation.