For my Graphic Design I class (AD372) I was tasked with designing a sticker that was relevant to our local area (Carbondale, Illinois) and used some amount of AI-generated art.

Spitballing

The prompt is very broad and had lots of potential options, so I began by doodling a few different things to play around with a few different idea.

With a few ideas on paper, I refined a few into rough drafts to see how they looked before bothering with the fickle and often slow process of getting anything useful out of a generative AI.

I'm not much of an artist, so moving beyond basic, text-heavy designs was going to require using the AI, so I began throwing random prompts at it that pertain to local fixtures and landmarks to see what it made. This included salukis (the school mascot), clocktowers (there is a famous one on campus), lakes/forests (we're surrounded by them), and animals (for a local animal shelter I frequently volunteer at). Here is some of what was generated:

A lot of them were sort of close to what I was picturing, however most of them fell short in important ways. The animal ones, though, really caught my eye, and I really liked the idea of making stickers for the animal shelter, so I went in that direction.

Refinement

With a general direction sorted out, I began polishing the results from the AI into something more usable. I began with one of the dog images since it already looked like a sticker I would like.

It was deceptively difficult to make this work properly because, on top of the gibberish text, the background shape was slightly oblong and misshapen. I replaced a lot of the background, but I liked the roughness of the inside borders and kept the original ones where I could to keep it from being too perfect.

Then I iterated on it. The primary color of the animal shelter's existing designs was a pale blue, so I tried incorporating that, as well as a few variation with and without the background.

I decided that I didn't like the spiral inner border, but preferred the black-and-white color scheme. I also thought the variations without a full background around the image and text looked strange, so I opted to keep close to the original. This was the final version:

Gifting It to the Shelter

I created a sticker sheet layout and used school resources to print several pages of stickers. Then, I took them to the shelter, who loved the design and were excited to start placing them on various things they lent out to the community.