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Using Adobe Firefly to make in-house product design unboring
by generating a design system mascot, empty state illustrations, chatbot avatars and more…
I’ll be honest from the start — there are no direct use cases for in-house product designers to use Adobe Firefly (currently in Beta).
We simply don’t use images in our work that often. Our primary tools are typography, components, patterns, icons, flowcharts.
Still, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t benefit from an image generating AI. Firefly can help us to make our work more fun and entertaining by adding some unique and often curiously looking images to mockups and communications.
From boring to unboring
In a nutshell Firefly is an advanced interactive search engine for stock images, where instead of actually searching, you generate images out of the prompt text. User types some combination of words, chooses visualisation settings and clicks generate. Iterating both the prompt and settings until a satisfactory result. Quite fun tool to play around.
In B2B in-house product design images are usually provided by marketing and brand teams, if these are ever required. Alternatively, we quickly dive into free stock libraries to find some portraits for user personas, as those are mostly for internal use only. Our work does sound boring though.
This is where Firefly can help us — make B2B in-house product designer’s work unboring!
- Generate some fun images for chat and user avatars, as well as various empty and error state illustrations, all to be used in mockups.
- Enrich your presentations with unique characters or create a mascot for your in-house design system.
All these small details, that make our work more fun, but we neither have time nor skills (or both in my case) to create.
Let’s start with constraints
Firefly is in Beta, hence there are several noticeable limitations.
It doesn’t really generate anything real to look real. Like for example, if you want to generate a cat, its anatomy may turn out really weird — 3 tails or strange poses…
