4 Confessions From a Designer Who Learned AI the Hard Way

Introduction: Two Years, Four Lessons

Two years ago at Present to Succeed, the conversation about AI was just beginning. Now, as Katya Kovalenko puts it, it is everywhere — and so are the mistakes. Rather than showing polished AI success stories, Katya came back with four honest confessions from her own workflow: things she got wrong, things she changed, and what she now does differently.

Confession 1: Good AI Takes Real Work

Katya took on a poster project using AI-generated models — cheaper than a real photo shoot and seemingly straightforward. She quoted for it like a normal project. That was the mistake.

Small client requests kept coming: "Can you make her smile? Slightly younger? More interesting?" Each one sounded simple, each one took far longer than expected. The final ask — all three models in one poster — meant remixing body positions without changing faces or expressions. She spent three times her estimated hours, lost money, and the client went elsewhere.

• The lesson: never underestimate how long AI actually takes. It can look almost there and still cost you an entire project.

• The good news: Midjourney has improved significantly. The ranked profile (which learns your visual preferences from 200 image pairs) and personalised mood boards now give designers a much stronger starting point from the very first prompt.

Confession 2: Stock Is Dead

Katya's solution to the time pressure of sourcing images is now Midjourney's Explore section — millions of community-generated images, free to use on a paid account, searchable, and each one comes with the original prompt attached. Find something you like, copy the prompt, attach the image as a style reference, and within seconds you have four variations that are entirely your own to develop further. For abstract art, textures, landscapes, and illustrations, she says, it is simply better than any stock library.

Confession 3: The Team Slide Problem — Solved

Every designer knows the pain: a client sends a folder of team headshots in wildly different qualities, crops, lighting, and styles — and expects them to coexist on one slide. Katya's old fix was to put them all in black and white, crop to a circle, and hope nobody looked too closely. Her new process:

• Topaz Photo AI — enhances low-quality images and restores lost pixel detail, with specific intelligence around human faces. One click can transform a blurry shot into something sharp enough to use at full slide size.

  
  

• Photoshop generative expand — for awkwardly cropped headshots, select the area you want to extend and let Photoshop fill it in. Three options, choose the best one.

  
  

• Photoshop generative fill — replace mismatched backgrounds with a consistent studio look using a simple text prompt.

  
  

• Not perfect, she admits — but more than good enough, and a fraction of the time it used to take.

Confession 4: I Quit PowerPoint Two Years Ago

The most surprising confession: Katya has not used PowerPoint or Keynote as her primary tool in over two years. She switched entirely to Figma Slides and has not looked back.

What she loves about it:

• Fully online — no more final_final_FINAL_v3 files; everything lives in one link

• Real-time collaboration — clients and designers can work simultaneously, each in their own workspace

• Two modes — Slides mode for quick edits, Design mode for full Figma functionality including layers, blending modes, and precise cropping

• Growing AI integration — colour palette generators, profile image tools, and object animations recently added

The main limitation: exporting to PowerPoint requires manual clean-up, and it is not quite ready for large-event presentations yet — Katya's workaround for this conference was exporting every slide as a PNG and rebuilding in PowerPoint. But she believes Figma Slides is getting there fast.

Final Thoughts: Designers Are Still Here

AI has changed Katya's workflow profoundly — but it has not replaced her. If anything, knowing which tools to use, when to use them, and how to push them further is now the core skill. For anyone who wants the beautiful presentation without the learning curve, her closing line lands perfectly: just hire a designer. They are still here, still needed, and very much open for business.

Join the Conversation

Have you made the switch to Figma Slides — and is there an AI design tool you swear by that nobody talks about enough? Share your thoughts below.