I'm the sole marketer and creative at a small B2B outfit, reporting directly to the owner. I handle pretty much every customer-facing piece of collateral we produce. We've used AI for brainstorming, copywriting, summarising, even analysis - genuinely helpful in those areas.
But here's where I hit a wall: management is dead keen on using AI to design printed materials - flyers, brochures, that sort of thing. As the only person in the room who actually understands layout and brand, I've tried to go along with it. I've built custom GPTs, fed them our brand guidelines, reference materials, examples of past work. And yet I keep getting results that feel half-baked at best.
The issues are the same every time:
- No bleeds, no margins, terrible resolution - not print-ready
- Flattened images instead of editable layouts
- AI recreates supplied logos rather than using the vector files
- Fonts, colours, spacing get mangled even when I provide explicit brand standards
- Hierarchy and flow are just... weird. No clear focal point. You know the feeling.
- Nothing matches our existing collateral system
- The iteration cycle often takes longer than just building the piece in InDesign
Management sees it as a tool that should save time, but the output is never production-ready. I'm left wondering whether I'm approaching this wrong or if the tools simply aren't there yet for finished print work.
So I'm curious - has anyone actually found a workflow where AI genuinely helps with visual design for print? Not just inspiration or moodboards, but real, editable, print-ready collateral? Or is this still a case of the hype outpacing the reality?
Because right now it feels like trying to use a hammer for surgery - powerful tool, wrong job.
