AI is a tool.
Own it.

When the first generative AI tools began to emerge, our graphic design team didn’t wait to see how things would play out. We started experimenting immediately. That early involvement gave us early insights and experience in a space that was changing every week. It says something about how we work — we want to be at the front of what’s next, not catching up to it.

One thing was clear from the start, and it still holds today. AI doesn’t replace what we do — it helps us. It doesn’t decide the visual direction, know the brand, or understand the story behind a campaign. Only we do.

The AI output looked very different back then. Images felt far from realism, often with a cyberpunk vibe, over-polished, with contrast and sharpness that looked just a little off. We got hyped anyway. So hyped that three years ago we were proud to launch a fully AI-generated visual for our back-to-school campaign. Looking back — the visual is not great.

But that campaign gave us an important realisation: AI is fast, but designers are faster. So we adjusted, and we evolved.

Today our typical AI creations look nothing like those early experiments. We create surreal key visuals for launch campaigns and new products — and one of them turned up, animated, on the screens of Vilnius airport. We produce visuals with a level of detail that makes us doubt what is real anymore.

We dive in. We own it. We ship it. This is the creative freedom we thrive on: everything here is driven by our own input and shaped by our attitude as restless achievers. And that freedom is now built into the workflow itself — with AI embedded in it. Here is how we got there, in three lessons.

Once we learned to control the tools, the potential became obvious. And it raised a question: why spend time on production when you could spend it on creativity?

Historically, the creative process has been bogged down by the friction of execution. We’ve all been there — hours or days of tedious production work just to find out whether a concept even works. AI bridges that gap. It absorbs the heavy lifting so we can reallocate our energy where it belongs: strategy, wild exploration and high-level art direction. Our main resources shouldn’t go into production. They should go into creativity.

AI isn’t a shortcut. It’s a way to enhance our creative possibilities. AI isn’t a threat to designers — the standard workflow is.

Quick to fail, quick to create. Creating content is easy — a prompt is enough. Standing out is harder. So we shifted from prompting and getting an image, to directing and getting a controllable system. No prompt lottery allowed — we own the vision and the ideas.

To achieve visual consistency, we control the visual language and think visually rather than in abstractions. Light, outfit, position — we manage every variable of the system, and through it, we control the brand.

By generating photography instead of shooting or buying it, we started building visual consistency across our brands. It gave us full control and ownership of the mood we want our visual identities to carry.

Saily is the clearest example. When we started working on the brand, almost all visuals were stock. So we created the “Saily lady” — a consistent character we can place in any context. Same person, different setting, always positive vibes. Our workflow is a combination of training, feeding, generating, and refining that allow us to stay in control of what we’re building.

None of this means that designer skills no longer matter. Composition, photography, light — they will always exist. Today it all comes down to simply having good taste.

We’ve heard people say “oh, AI did it” too many times. Yes, AI did it if your prompt was “I need a picture of a cat” and you used that picture, whatever it was. But when you are in control, you’re the one who did it. You own the vision — AI only helps you execute it.

AI acts as a flexible tool in an open, non-linear creative process. You have plenty of different ways to achieve the same result with Photoshop or Illustrator. The same goes for AI: prompt with one model, polish it in another tool, generate an image, prompt again, upscale a part of the image, go back to the first model to finish. With infinite ways to build a unique workflow, you set the direction. In design there is no single right answer — only your direction.

Don’t forget your craft just because of a new shiny tool — turn it into a core design skill. There’s no magic button in the process.

We don’t know how AI will behave next, how it will evolve or change. Are we ever going back to handmade stuff? Possibly — trends repeat themselves, like with vinyl, CDs, and cassettes. But we still have our ideas, and we own them. And everything we make with AI as a tool is ours.

The creatives who will thrive in this era aren’t the ones using AI the most. It’s the ones building and owning workflows around AI. Own your AI tools, own your creative workflow — and create what’s next.