Embracing AI As A Designer

This week on Stacking Growth's final episode of 2025, we've got lead designer Chris Fordon called to action. Chris shares with us his journey as AI tools have been springing up all over the place, detailing how he works to harness their features without compromising his artistic integrity. He shares what's been working for him and where he sees the industry going. After this episode, we'll be taking a couple weeks off of the holidays, but we'll be back in 2026 with new and exciting ways to share B2B marketing insights with you all.

If you ever want to see specific things from us, please feel free to drop a comment or get in touch. Thank you for spending this year with us. We hope you have a very happy holiday season, and we'll see you all in 2026. Welcome to Stacking Growth, called to action, a show for the trailblazers, change makers and paradigm shifters.

Each week, a different marketing hero who is called to make a change in their field will join us to walk through each step of their journey. They'll cover the highs, the lows, and what's coming next. Together, we'll help you find the changes needed for your own business to win. I'm Steph Crenola here with Evan Hughes, and today we're so excited to welcome Refine Labs' lead designer, Chris Ford.

Chris has been a force behind Refine Labs investment in our own brand identity, as well as that of countless customers. And Chris, we are so excited for you to be here. Thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks.

I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm ready to get into the juicy stuff, but before we do that, I want to talk to you a little bit about your path into the creative world. Where did your design mind come from?

Was marketing always the end goal or is this a place you kind of accidentally found yourself thriving in? I'll keep it short, but I actually started with design as a middle schooler. So I used to be on this 3D social platform called IMBU, and I used to make products on their sale products using tools like Photoshop, designing different clothes and my avatars, coding on my homepage, making it look cool. And so I was very captivated by that.

And I went to high school, took some design classes, went to college, studied at University of Michigan, and I got my BFA and art and design and performance there. And I started working as a junior graphic designer at a health care company downtown in Detroit when I graduated. So from there, it kind of threw me into the design portion, but also how we were going to market this to health care patients. Fast forward to now, where I'm at Refine Labs after many career roles and switches.

Here, I'm still designing, but I'm also strategizing with performance driven marketing. So it's not just making ads, it's not just making designs. You want to help the brands in the right thing go right way and reach the right people, but they also have to be effective. So it's like, I'm in the best of both worlds, like a bridge between those two, and it just falls into place here and I love what I do.

I love that. It's interesting stuff. And Chris, talking to the creative folks at Refine Labs, it's the first time that I've heard consistency where creative is at the core of what they wanted to do and grown into versus other conversations we've had with some other demand marketers, performance marketers, it is whiplash to somehow we're in this role and we blame it. So it's so fun to just hear the truly the passion is in your background and what you were doing early on and finding ways to evolve that and more of that into something that has turned into a career for you.

So it's an interesting perspective to reflect on. Yeah, I would say I'm one with the arts, like a digital renaissance man. So if I'm not designing ads, I'm making music, I'm creating content. It's, I guess it was like divine alignment to be here.

But I also had like a dabble in marketing too. So I sell apparel outside of work. I used to run like niche blocks for like Google AdSense motivation methods back then as a teenager. So it's very analytical sometimes also very, you know, that brain right brain too.

So it's a little plug for you. No, go check out Chris on any social. I won't give away exactly the details. Crowd please are here at Refine Labs and it's awesome stuff.

So you truly do do it all. I mean, it's a jack-of-all trade that sounds like and you have so much expertise and challenging yourself to it sounds like do more push yourself out of your comfort zone and speaking of comfort, I feel like there's always that moment where comfort and curiosity kind of collide. And so when did you realize you couldn't keep doing things the same way, especially as like AI was starting to come into picture in this creative space. Like was it frustration driven?

Was it curiosity? Kind of talk of the listeners through like, what was that moment where you just realized you had to embrace this AI in a creative world in space? I would say it was definitely curiosity. But also I kind of saw the writing on the wall, especially with like image generation and JNI.

We use tools like Photoshop and they have very complex algorithmic features like content-aware feel, right? This was going on way before the surge of AI tools. They could look at your image and they could feel in different spots of the design based on what they were seeing already before AI. So it was only a matter of time before I could talk to a program and say, hey, create an image of a cat, you know?

So I started using mid-journey like in 2022, my favorite image generation program. And I was using in its beta program just to create like different personal pictures for me. So I started seeing AI as a an opportunity, a collaborative tool versus as a threat. And it helps you realize that yes, AI can move fast, but it can't think strategically, right?

It can give me like 100 directions in seconds, but it can't tell me which one would like emotionally connect with somebody. And that's when I decided to like lean in, like not compete with it, but to collaborate with it. So I think one of the ways I use it here is to test things faster to ideate to visualize concepts and spend less time on like that repetitive mundane work. So we can spend like more time like refining the story of it all.

It's so fascinating to hear the way you talk about it, because it is so analytical and process-driven. And like I know how creative you are. And so I don't know, I think that that left brain, right brain that you were saying earlier really is just like Chris brain. And I think we all should be striving for Chris brain.

So I want to hear a little bit more detail, these things that help you, I date or help you improve your processes. What are some specific tools and these can be programs or these can be like processes that you've developed or people that you've lent on? What are specific things that have been helping you out? Yeah, mid-journey for one for image generation.

I kind of see it as a stock resource. So different brands and agencies and corporations, we use stock resources like photos and pre-made graphics just to speed up our process. Because we don't have time to sit here and schedule a six to eight hour photo shoot for one picture for an ad. When you have 40 different ads to do for different clients, you know, we're pressed for time sometimes and we can break things down that already exists to create something new.

And so with mid-journey, I may be looking for a specific image and I don't have the time to compile something from scratch or design every icon from scratch because you might look up in a whole workday as it's been going by. But with mid-journey, I can create something very specific. For example, my coworker here, Nia, she needed a specific image for the superhero campaign she was working on. She needed something where the coworkers were on their computer, they were flying in the sky with capes on.

Now, she's very capable of creating that from scratch, whether it's an illustration and design or photoshopping things together. But to speed things up, she was able to create an image from the journey and then take that image and then design on top of it, edit it, layer it, color code it, color grade, excuse me, to make it something new. So you're not really infringing your use it as a foundation and creating something new with it. So mid-journey speeds are processed up and things like that.

And then you have runway, which can take static images and animate them immediately. It could be a sketch that you hand drill. It could be a design that you created years ago, but you want to make it move. You may not have time to spend three two working days trying to animate it from scratch.

You may need something quick to show for a move board to ideate something and runway can do that from scratch in seconds. The only factor in it is cost. Everything has credits these days. And then chat TPT.

I use chat TPT for everything. It's great for brings from an idea. It's great for make this sound better. Like it's still my voice, but just make it sound a little bit better.

It's great for anything that involves words. chat TPT is a great source for it. But once again, they help you visualize things faster. They're not the creator, they're assistants.

So AI gives me the options, but my creativity gives me the direction. So you have automation, but you still have the human aspect of artistry behind it too. So that's just a three I use the most right now. But I'm still discovering new ones.

They keep showing up. Yeah, you're listening to this and you have some good tools. Chris loves testing out and experimenting with new tools. I also think we can probably include some of these ideas too.

And as we recap this up stuff, there's definitely interesting moments. Are there any three tools? Let's say users don't have access credit right now. Is that like, how would you or any recommendations you'd make on how to maybe test or experiment if the budget is limited or there is no budget?

It's really designed or creative coming to the space. Absolutely. I believe a mid journey has a free trial. You have to wait longer and you can't do a concurrent job.

So you have to do jobs one at a time. Most AI tools do have a free tier. But when you want to get super specific with like, I want to choose this model or I need this immediately. I don't have time to wait for it to process.

Then you start having to pay, but yeah, runway is not runway. Runway is expensive. Mid journey, chat, GPT, they have free versions. I believe you can just Google Gemini's a new one that's free.

Nano Banana, but I would just go into Google and type in like AI tools and put in quotes free and then different models will pop up. But yeah, it's a bunch of different tools out there. And I wouldn't necessarily say that one is taking a lead, but they all do different things. So it's up to you to like experiment and YouTube too, YouTube University.

Yeah, that's what got me into marketing. So yeah, no, I think that's a good reminder too that there's an abundance of tools and you just have to be willing to test an experiment. There's not one necessarily trying to solve the other, but it's just a matter of willing to sacrifice the time and it's a good reminder. Absolutely.

Any hiccups, I want to say I'm a tool topic a little bit more than you experienced. Is there any big hiccup that you've had with the tool or any steep learning curve where you were just like, oh, wow, this is something I didn't anticipate? Can I talk us through maybe that experience or a similar experience? Yeah, you spend a lot of time trying to design the right prompt to make the right image.

And then sometimes that's when our seal set comes into play like, oh, this image is great, but I still have to fix the hands or I still have to modify this portion of the tool because they don't create 100% clarified images or sometimes even with like text, right? You know, you can actually just do something. It's not perfect. You still have to go back and edit it.

And that's the reason why it's called artificial intelligence. Like it's not smart, but it's no so it still relies on us a bit. So I think the hiccups are in just like, I'm looking for a certain type of quality and I have to get it there. It doesn't come out like that all the time or even with like images, sometimes images are a bit pixelated.

So you have to upscale them with another program or the videos sometimes are too short. Five seconds, eight seconds is what most of the tools can do. So now I have to figure out a way to either make it longer or just take a segment of this and then try to tell a story a different way. Pickups with credits, everything costs.

Definitely pricey. And I would say those are the most pick up time time when I'm designing with AI or just like, you know, ideating with this, those things. I'm curious to hear how you because you experiment with a bunch of different tools. Where do you find the line?

Where do you draw the line of this takes too much time to explore and learn and then have to change and edit on the back end versus this is saving me enough time to make it worth some of the tweaks I need to do? How do you make those decisions and really find what works for you? Experience, definitely experience. I know it.

I can create this animation faster. For example, with text, I'm not going to say they're in hours trying to have mid-journey create text that's not missing a word or oh, it looks good, but now it doesn't even this is not English anymore. So I know I can go in Illustrator or Compose something up in Blender and have this text be completely accurate versus me trying to edit the prompt to oh, redo this and make sure it says label L-A-B-E-L because now the image is reading L-A-B-L-E. It is getting better with stuff like that, but I know I can do this myself.

So I won't bother it. Or even if I'm animating something, I could probably create the initial design myself and scratch but have Runway do it and animate it. Oh, but now with the result that Runway produce, there's a specific part where it's glitching. So I now have to go back and try to fix that when I can just make the whole thing from scratch.

So it just depends on what you're making. If it's super complex, you may have to do it yourself, which is fine because not everything we produce is AI. But if it's something that's very mundane, something that's repetitive, oh, I can probably use AI for this. So I can focus on the hard stuff and say time.

A good little matrix to kind of think about too, right? The complexity of what you're trying to deliver or if you're just in experimentation mode, but I kind of run by this rule. Like if I have to correct the prompt three times, I need to pivot because something's not working. And it's probably how I'm communicating it to it, but just the time that we can burn on sometimes just like irradiating the prompts to your point or like just spelling errors at the time sucks.

So I feel satisfied in my aggression sometimes when I see that. Oh, yeah. Don't make the robots mad. Oh, hi, definitely would be flagged for some of the stuff that I say back to them.

But for sure. I think, um, so no. So there's this AI tool called soo no, and it can create songs from scratch within seconds. You guys, I'm talking about singers that are doing runs, riffs, they're making the lyrics, they're making the instruments, they're doing the full song.

And so with AI tools like that, it's like, Oh, as an artist who makes music too. I, I kind of like, I'm going to write long lyrics. I'm not going to use these tools to create a song from scratch. I'm going to use it to help me create a melody or a certain instrument or a certain baseline.

But as far as the lyrics go, those need to be mine because that's part of my story. It's part of my narrative. And so I would probably use something like that for instrumentation, but in terms of like the actual story part, I have to keep that. So I have different lines that I draw in terms of what form of creative I'm producing.

So if it's image, image generation, and I'm like, okay, you know, I can do this, but music, this is different. This is a different game or tag TPT, right? You know, I'm glad we went to school before tag TPT became so prominent because now, you know, I would have to debate with myself, do I have tag TPT, right? Or do I want to test myself and write this essay myself?

So it's just, I have these different compartmentalizations of where do I try to line for different tools or what I'm doing? So no, but that like that form of media literacy that came from not having these tools all the time and being able to make those decisions for yourself. That's something that we've heard. And this is the third creative that refund lives creative that we've been chatting with.

And that's been consistent across all of you. Your lines may be different from each other, but you all have that very strong line that you are drawing for yourselves. And I think that's a really cool like through line to pull out that there are different tools that each of you is using. There's different like excitement versus apprehension around these tools.

But all of you are very committed to like protecting your creativity in different spaces. So I think that's just a really fun, fun, common denominator between you. That's good to hear. AI is still controversial, right?

We have designers, artists, people who love it. They can have artists, designers, copywriters who hate it. You can have the environmentalist who want to completely eradicate it. And I do hope things get better with that.

But yeah, it's for drawing lines and it's just to protect the artist within us. But I just, I still didn't raise it too. Yeah. Yeah.

Let's let's talk a little bit about that kind of, you know, as we think about AI coming mainstream for a lot of us in the creative space with marketing or design and kind of specific to your role in this design sphere, was there a moment that you thought like, holy shit, this tool actually might be replacing what I do. How did you work through that or whatever? I know you're embracing it as a tool. But how do you think through that honest reflection of like, oh, is this changing my trajectory where I thought I was going to go?

I never was really concerned with all this thing that's coming to take my job because AI still is output based. You still need someone to, as I mentioned before, to do the storytelling to create with these images to still design with these results. So you still need someone behind someone going to work, right? Number two, people are lazy.

Big corporations, they delegate. Some people don't have time. So they're still going to hire people to create these designs because they don't want to do it. So while it may speed things up, and I might have a bigger workload now, but I'm still going to be working.

And then I like to always say this too, there are millions of videos on YouTube saying, oh, how can I become a graphic designer? How do I design a flyer? These videos haven't existed for decades, but people are still hiring designers. If that was the, I mean, if this information is so accessible and these tools are so accessible, everyone's still not using it.

So there's like, there's going to be a balance. I will say though, there may be a decrease in like, not designers completely, but just like maybe this role doesn't need as many as it did before. But there's also a catch 22 with that because it's like, if you want me to use AI in my job, you have to be comfortable with an AI created result. If you want this image in 24 hours, you're going to get an AI produced result.

If you want me to use AI, I might not have the time to go back and put my creative just on it and make it look pretty in terms of like authentic human who main way, because you want me to use AI strictly for this result. But there just needs to be a balance I feel like. And I don't think that balance is going away anytime soon. I think you nailed it in a perspective I haven't really thought about.

But of course, you're going to probably or this role is going to absorb more work because they're almost a move faster. I think that that's kind of like the pendulum that's swinging right now is like, more and more and more because suddenly, like people are hearing the AI is and has the ability to unlock a lot of speed at a lot quicker rate. We're designed to make a lot quicker rate. And I think that that's probably like where that human judgment that you keep talking about the line is so important.

And I think companies that like push away from that and get away from that, we all can tell an ad that's AI created on LinkedIn or you can just easily transparent it's like that banner blindness back in the day when you just see a banner ad you're like I don't want to see anything like this anymore. I feel like we're conditioning ourselves to already feel that with the AI space. So, yeah, it's it's nice to hear that like you're fearful of your role. It's just you have to be respectful to your role could evolve a little bit.

So your specialties could change. You could become more adaptive to the tools and how to utilize them and prompt building with that human element versus like truly in the design one to two ads based off of bandwidth. Yeah, kind of a ramble there, but just like reflection of what I'm doing. It's super important for us to all just understand that it's case by case, but you can't you shouldn't run from it.

Yeah, absolutely. And then there's just so much that humans bring like it's not just pixels, it's purpose, you know, I love that. They don't know empathy, these tools, they don't know culture, humor, you know, even like the nuance behind a brand. I can't give AI a 30 page brief and say, Hey, create a whole campaign out of this.

If I do, it's going to be it's not going to be cohesive. It's going to be all over the place. You have to keep fine tuning in. That's where we come from.

That's our human edge. And I think we can double down on that. I think our personality is to impact that right. There's some weeks I'm like flying high and I'm super excited and passionate about it.

There are days I'm like rock bottom could care less about what we're doing. And I think that ability to look at something that you're creating gives you different perspectives in your own delivery of how you're like interpreting it versus AI is going to be consistent, feel look deliverable each time. So yeah, it's, I love to hear Chris. I love to just feel like you're not afraid.

We need more of that mentality in the marketing sphere right now and not this echo chamber of AI is taking a whole lot of our role. Yeah. You mentioned, you know, being proud of what you bring to the table as a human and as a creative. And so as we after we've talked about the doomsday mentality, let's, let's swoop it up a little bit.

And I want to hear from you. What have you through this journey with experimentation of AI and embracing it and changing it and working through it? What have you learned to appreciate about yourself and your skill set through that? My ability to adapt for sure, because there is a full force towards AI right now.

And there is the, you know, the common messaging or whatever. If you don't use AI, you're going to get left behind. So even if you don't necessarily want to use it, it is nice to know that you can use it. You know, and it's also it makes me value my how I can think strategically without AI, because I built the foundation.

I built the ground, the groundwork way before these tools. So I know I can always rely on myself, my creativity, and it makes me more confident. Like, I don't need these tools, you know, they do make me, I can optimize my workflow. But once again, it's not them, it's me, you know, I love that.

Me too. So kind of pulling ourselves out of this AI sphere a little bit, just a question I like to close on, or we like to just kind of get your perspective is what's like a non AI shift that's taking place from your perspective in this creative world, and how should listeners, whether they're new to the kind of the their journey, or whether they've been here a long time, how should they embrace that or prepare for it from your perspective? What not AI shift? Okay, this is more philosophical, but so I think for the next three to five years, it's going to be full force in terms of driving towards AI.

But I think it's going to be a natural regression that starts to happen where people are going to prioritize, oh, let's move away from AI for a minute, kind of like Instagram, right? When Instagram first came out, filters, everything, filters on food, filters on events, filters on pictures with your family and friends, and then it got to this wave where it was like hashtag no filter. Everyone's like hashtag no filters. This is me when I wake up.

This is how I look without a filter. I don't need to filter on my food. This is how I cook. So there's going to be a point where that starts to happen.

And then there's going to be a point where they both coexist just like, no, we have we still have snapchat filters. We still have TikTok filters and things like that. We still have authentic, you know, no filter pieces. So I think that's it's going to be like the ebb and flow, which is only natural.

People fear what they don't understand. And artists want to protect things that they feel that are close to them. And but both can coexist at the same time. But I think that's going to be the next shift.

And if we're focusing like strictly on like how AI is going to change the world or or even like non AI shifts, everything is going to get, I feel like it's going to allow things to be more, I don't know, I feel like it's going to be an influx of artificial tools, right? We have this new robot coming out called Neo that can perform household tasks for you, or it's going to be like, you know, like, if you're watching Marvel and in Iron Man movies, he's talking to Jarvis, these these robots, these artificial intelligence bots that are super smart and everyone's like, Oh, I need that in my house. But that's where we're right now we're building, we're building towards that goal. And so while it may not be, while it may be a non AI shift, it's still even the AI things are going to affect the non AI stuff, because now it's going to become immersed.

And we have to adapt, we have to adapt. So I think it's going to be kind of like a mixture of all of that. And we'll see, we'll see what happens when we get there. It's exciting and terrifying all at the same time.

Yeah, absolutely. Like we saw iRobot, we see the like, you have the Jetsons where everything looks so cool. And then you have iRobot. You know, and then a mixture behind it.

It's really, yeah. The self-driving car is like one of those technology, you know, like, that just breaks me out. Also fascinated by it. But yeah, it's just those little things that you thought, like, when you're younger, that would never be part of our daily lives.

And really are such a year point, like five years from now stuff that we seem so far so mainstream, so far ahead, so futuristic could be the reality of there are things doing these mundane tasks that we didn't even realize were mundane tasks at the time, you know, so absolutely. I think with the self-driving cars here in LA, they have waymos and they look cool but I haven't built up enough courage to get in one. So, um, do it. Have you been in one?

Yeah. Okay. And Scottsdale, sure. Yeah.

Don't need to say this, but I had some liquid courage. Yeah. Yeah. I need to get in there for my brother's bachelor party.

So four of us got in there. And I think the weird part is like three in the back, one in the passenger seat and a no driver but taking no driver. You have to turn at a light and you're just going like, we're all dying because we're on the passenger side and turning into traffic. Insane.

Oh my God. It is really insane. But I've been using driving on golf courses the wrong way. So there's like moments of like, if I was in the car, could be entertaining if I'm on like a par three just cruising along on the green.

But yeah. Oh my gosh. It's impressive. It's impressive.

It's fearful sometimes. And I think the minute that we all acknowledge that we don't know everything about a guy is the moment everything will get better. Everyone's still trying to figure it out. Good.

So, you know, so awesome. Is there any last piece of advice you'd give anybody that's kind of on their marketing journey, like any advice you'd give and leave them with in general? Yeah. Yeah.

Like just like for training to like how you would, you know, mentor somebody or tell them like think about this in your future. I would probably say just to you stay up to date. Like say research always continue trying to challenge yourself. I am my biggest critic.

So I'm always trying to enhance my skillset. I'm always learning new things, new design tools, new methods, anything that I can try just try it out. It's going to make you a better marketer, designer, whatever it is. We live in age where there's so much inspiration everywhere.

There's tutorials everywhere. There's everything. Just try something out. It'll make you stand out more.

It'll give you more confidence because you know something that you didn't know before. So I would say just always stay learning and always stay challenging yourself. Yeah. That's very vague.

But it's true. No, it's great. It's awesome. This has been wonderful, Chris.

Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us. We're so grateful for your time and insights and we hope everyone listening will embrace experimentation. Hold on to that balance between automation and humanity and value your own strategic thinking. Thank you all so much for listening.

We'll see you next time. Hi.