AI Tools for Designers: From Sketch to Pixel-Perfect Design
Why Designers Are Turning to AI in 2025
User Interface (UI) design is the cornerstone of crafting engaging, intuitive digital experiences for applications, websites, and software. This complex field requires the seamless orchestration of layouts, color schemes, typography, icons, images, animations, and interactions–all carefully designed to meet user needs and expectations.
However, designing exceptional UI is no small feat, especially for dynamic products that demand frequent updates and iterations. Consequently, many UI designers are exploring the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) tools for designers to streamline workflows and unlock new creative possibilities. According to one of our experienced UI/UX designers,
In daily design workflows, artificial intelligence helps accelerate processes, improve content quality, and automate routine tasks.
Benefits of using AI in design workflows
From streamlining repetitive tasks to enhancing creativity, AI tools are helping designers work smarter, not harder. Here are the top benefits of using AI in design workflows:
1. Accelerates the Design Process
AI drastically reduces the time it takes to go from idea to prototype. Tools like Uizard and Visily can transform text prompts into wireframes or UI layouts in seconds. This allows designers to skip the blank canvas phase and iterate much faster, which is perfect for tight deadlines or MVP development.
2. Enhances Creative Exploration
Instead of replacing creativity, AI empowers it. Graphic design tools like Adobe Firefly and Runway ML generate dozens of visual variations based on user input, helping designers explore different styles, colors, and compositions with ease. This kind of rapid iteration fosters innovation and removes creative blocks.
3. Automates Repetitive Tasks
Tasks like resizing assets, writing alt text, or generating design documentation can be tedious. AI-based automation handles these tasks efficiently. For example, Figma plugins like Magician use natural language to generate UI components or animations, saving hours of manual work.
4. Improves Collaboration and Communication
AI can bridge communication gaps between designers, developers, and stakeholders. Some tools translate design files into clean code or generate user stories from mockups. This not only speeds up handoffs but also ensures everyone stays aligned across disciplines.
5. Democratizes Design for Non-Designers
With AI-assisted tools, product managers, marketers, and founders can jump in and create mockups or landing pages without needing deep design knowledge. Platforms like Framer AI or Durable allow anyone to generate production-ready websites through simple prompts, making design more accessible across teams.
6. Informs Design Decisions with Data
Some AI tools incorporate analytics or user behavior predictions to guide design choices. From heatmaps to user flow optimization, designers can make more informed decisions based on real usage patterns, not just gut feeling.
Top AI Design Tools
Let’s explore some of the most popular and innovative AI tools for UI/UX designers, shaping the future of UI design.
AI Tools for Web Design & Frontend
ChatGPT: Starting with the Basics
While not strictly a design tool, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is one of the most frequently used AI solutions by designers to streamline the research and ideation process. It quickly generates text for UI elements like buttons and tooltips and can gather and analyze large amounts of UX research data, saving days of development time.
Though it doesn’t design directly, ChatGPT helps brainstorm ideas, create user journeys, and assist with prototyping by offering detailed descriptions and suggestions. However, designers should always verify the accuracy of AI-generated data to ensure it aligns with their project needs.
Uizard and Visily: Simplifying Wireframing and Initial Stages of UI Design
Uizard by Miro Labs and Visily are AI-powered tools for designers used to simplify wireframing and the initial stages of UI design.
Uizard leverages computer vision (CV) algorithms to convert hand-drawn sketches into wireframes, while Visily transforms text prompts into UI designs with natural language processing (NLP). These design automation tools are perfect for brainstorming and drafting initial ideas.
While their outputs are great for rapid prototyping, they often require refinement in advanced tools like Figma to create production-ready designs. Perfect for structuring layouts and content, Uizard and Visily are best suited for quick iterations and early-stage idea validation.
Best AI Tools for Graphic Designers
Midjourney: AI-Powered Image Generation from Text Prompts
Midjourney is a leading AI tool for creativity that generates images from text prompts to make unique visuals tailored to specific needs.
With high-resolution customizable images for backgrounds, illustrations, or thematic elements, Midjourney is particularly valuable for projects that require quick concept development and exploration.
However, its effectiveness can vary depending on the design project. For instance, when precision and uniformity are critical—such as when creating icons—stock images or traditional design tools might still be more reliable.
https://www.midjourney.com/explore
Leonardo: All-in-One AI Tool for Image Generation
Leonardo offers a comprehensive suite of AI tools that empower UI designers with advanced capabilities for image generation, quality enhancement, and creative exploration. Using simple text prompts, Leonardo generates high-quality images tailored to your design needs, such as backgrounds, illustrations, and other visual elements.
The platform also includes an AI Canvas, which allows designers to experiment with and arrange these generated visuals into cohesive layouts, offering flexibility and inspiration for the projects.
To refine image quality, Leonardo’s AI Ultra Upscaler ensures that visuals retain sharpness and resolution even when enlarged for high-resolution displays.
https://docs.leonardo.ai/docs/image-variations-with-universal-upscaler
Together, these tools form an integrated design ecosystem, helping designers quickly create, customize, and polish visuals while maintaining professional standards throughout the design process.
Let’s Enhance and Cutout: AI Tools for Image Upscaling and Background Removal
Let’s Enhance and Cutout are powerful AI-based tools designed to improve image quality and streamline editing workflows for designers and content creators.
Let’s Enhance focuses on photo upscaling and enhancement. It uses neural networks to increase image resolution without loss of quality, reduce compression artifacts, remove noise, and improve overall sharpness and detail. It’s especially useful for restoring low-resolution images or preparing visuals for high-resolution displays and print.
Cutout, on the other hand, is tailored for background removal and photo refinement. It automatically detects and removes backgrounds from images or videos, making it ideal for product shots, social media assets, and marketing visuals.
Additionally, Cutout offers tools for upscaling, denoising, and artifact removal—streamlining what used to be time-consuming manual edits.
Both AI tools help designers save time on routine image editing tasks, enabling them to focus more on creativity and visual storytelling. Whether you’re enhancing a product photo or preparing assets for an e-commerce site, Let’s Enhance and Cutout make the process fast, easy, and professional.
Vectorizer.AI: Transforming Raster Images into Vectors
Vectorizer.AI harnesses the power of deep learning networks and a proprietary computational geometry framework to convert raster images into high-quality vector graphics, without losing quality.
Beyond simple conversion, Vectorizer.AI offers automated edits and localized optimizations, ensuring that every element of the design is polished and precise. Its intelligent algorithms adjust line thickness, smooth curves, and enhance details, saving designers time and effort while delivering professional-grade results.
Top AI Tools for UI/UX Designers
Looka, Tailor Brands, and Brandmark.io: AI-Powered Logo Design for Quick Concept Exploration
Looka, Tailor Brands, and Brandmark.io are AI-driven platforms that help designers and business owners generate logo concepts quickly and easily, making them ideal tools for kickstarting the brand identity process.
Looka offers a straightforward user experience: users input their company name, industry, preferred styles, and color palette. The platform then generates multiple logo concepts tailored to the selected aesthetic. These logos can be downloaded in various formats and used as-is or further customized.
Tailor Brands goes a step further with branding automation. In addition to logos, it generates brand kits, social media assets, and even websites, giving users a full suite of tools to build a consistent visual identity — all guided by AI.
https://www.tailorbrands.com/blog/how-to-use-tailor-brands
Brandmark.io uses machine learning (ML) to analyze style preferences and create logo ideas that align with the user’s vision. It emphasizes minimal, modern designs and supports full customization after the initial AI generation phase.
While these tools are excellent for generating a broad range of logo options in seconds, the final output often benefits from further refinement, such as tweaking fonts, adjusting colors, or rebalancing layout elements.
For that reason, these platforms are a source of inspiration or a starting point for more polished, professional branding.
Hedra and Kling AI: Revolutionizing Video Clip Generation and Image Animation
Hedra and Kling AI are cutting-edge tools designed to bring static visuals to life with AI-powered video clip generation and image animation.
Hedra specializes in transforming still images into dynamic video clips, adding subtle motions, effects, and transitions to create engaging visual narratives.
Kling AI, on the other hand, focuses on animating images with advanced motion-capture algorithms, allowing designers to simulate realistic movements, such as facial expressions, object rotations, or environmental shifts.
https://www.generativeaipub.com/p/kling-ai-video-generator-is-now-accessible
Both tools streamline the process of creating captivating animations and videos, enabling UI designers to produce dynamic content for social media, advertising, and other short video clips, where dynamic visuals are highly effective at capturing attention.
Bonus: AI Plugins and Add-ons for Designers
Adobe Photoshop: Built-in AI Features for Graphic Designers
Adobe Photoshop leverages powerful AI features to streamline the image editing and enhancement process. With tools like Content-Aware Fill, powered by Adobe Sensei, designers can easily remove unwanted elements from images and seamlessly fill in gaps with minimal effort. Additionally, Neural Filters allow for advanced retouching and image adjustments, such as skin smoothing or style transfer, in just a few clicks.
https://business.adobe.com/products/sensei/adobe-sensei.html
Adobe’s Firefly models take it a step further, providing AI-generated suggestions for design elements and color schemes. These models can even help generate custom graphics and textures based on specific design needs, making it easier to tailor visuals to a project’s unique style.
One of the most popular features, Content-Aware Fill, allows designers to remove unwanted elements from photos and automatically fill in gaps with contextually accurate pixels—saving hours of manual retouching. Similarly, Neural Filters enable advanced image editing in just a few clicks, such as smoothing skin, transferring artistic styles, adjusting facial features, or even colorizing black-and-white photos.
Other features include:
- Text to Image: A Firefly-powered feature that converts simple text prompts into unique visuals, enabling rapid generation of concept art, backgrounds, or design inspiration.
- Generative Fill: One of Photoshop’s flagship AI tools for designers, it allows users to add, remove, or modify elements in an image based on a text description. Whether expanding a background, inserting new objects, or changing an image’s style, this tool brings unprecedented flexibility to visual editing.
- Select Subject: AI automatically identifies and selects the main subject in an image—be it a person, animal, or object—perfect for quick isolation and background edits.
- Remove Tool: With a single click, users can erase unwanted elements (like people, wires, or blemishes), and Photoshop intelligently fills in the area to match its surroundings.
These AI-driven functionalities significantly reduce editing time, improve accuracy, and give designers more creative freedom.
Conclusion: Embracing the Creative Power of AI
AI-powered tools for UI design are revolutionizing the way designers create content and user interfaces for digital products. By leveraging AI capabilities like natural language processing (NLP), computer vision (CV), and deep learning, these tools offer an efficient way to streamline the design process.
AI excels at assisting with tasks like generating reference ideas, inspiring concepts, and creating harmonious color palettes. As a powerful assistant, AI’s potential is undeniable, but it’s not quite ready to replace traditional design methods just yet.
At this stage of technology development, AI tools for designers are not yet fully capable of independently creating complete website or app designs. Generated interfaces often require substantial refinement, sometimes taking more time than starting from scratch.
Next steps
Get in touch with experts for professional UI design!
While UX design AI tools are invaluable for web design, there are times when a professional touch is essential to achieve the best result.
At Itera Research, we combine cutting-edge AI technologies with 20+ years of UI design experience to craft effective, user-friendly interfaces that elevate your product.
Ready to take your UI design to the next level? Book a consultation with our experts today, and let’s bring your vision to life.