How to Leverage AI and Web Design to Improve Your Website

Imagine this:

Instead of needing to painstakingly take your web design projects through ideation, mockups, drafts, revisions, and final products, what if you could just tell your AI assistant to create the website for you. 

Think of how much time and effort you could save on your next project…

Well, the bad news is that we’re not quite there yet. But the good news is that you might be surprised by just how helpful AI can be in your next web design project.

While you might not be able to build a beautiful website from a short text prompt yet, you can find AI web design tools that will speed up a ton of different parts of the web design project, from mockups to images, content, colors, and more.

In this post, you’re going to learn all the different ways to use AI in your next web design project, along with some actual AI web design tools that you can start using today.

Let’s jump in!

Understanding AI in Web Design

When it comes to AI in web design, there are two broad routes that you can take.

First, you can use AI to create a completely finished website from a text prompt. All you do is describe what you want, and the AI tool will create the design for you.

While that’s obviously a powerful value proposition, the fully AI-based website builders aren’t quite there yet. They can do it. But the output is probably not something you’d want to share with your audience (or your client).

Instead, most web designers will be better off taking a more focused approach and using AI tools to help with specific tasks of a web design project. For example, you might use an AI tool to help you generate mockups, write website copy, and so on.

By using these tools in a targeted fashion, you can still benefit from the efficiency and cost savings that AI web design tools offer. But at the same time, you can also create a 100% unique website that meets all of your needs (or your client’s needs).

With that in mind, this post will focus primarily on how you can use different types of AI tools to aid with various parts of the web design process.

How to Use AI for Web Design: Nine Ideas (Plus Actual Tools)

Now that you have some basic understanding of how AI can help you with web design, let’s dig into nine specific ways to use AI in web design, along with some actual AI tools that you can use today.

Create Design Design Mockups and Prototypes

To kick things off, let’s start at the early stage of many web design projects – the mockup and prototyping stage.

Normally, you would probably create these mockups from scratch using tools like Sketch or Figma. But with AI, you can generate mockups more quickly based on some simple text inputs.

To create these types of mockups, you can find a number of different AI tools.

Uizard is one of the most popular options, but there are also other alternatives like Visily, Components AI, Mokkup, and more.

To give you an example of how this works, let’s look at Uizard. It gives you a few different solutions for how to generate your mockups:

• Screenshot to mockup – if you have a screenshot of your design, you can simply upload it to Uizard, and the AI will automatically convert it into a fully editable mockup.
• Sketches to mockup – in addition to converting full screenshots, you can also transform basic sketches into editable wireframes. You could even sketch something out on a napkin and Uizard can make it into a wireframe.
• Attention heatmaps – you can use Uizard’s generative AI to create predictive heatmaps for your designs. This can save you a ton of time versus trying to test with real users.

If you want to go even further, Uizard also lets you generate complete user interface designs from simple text inputs.

Again, Uizard is just one example of how AI can help you work more efficiently in the mockup and wireframe phase. We encourage you to explore other similar tools to find the one that best matches your workflows.

Come Up With the Perfect Color Scheme

Ever struggled to pick the perfect color palette for a project?

With AI, you can easily generate a bunch of different color combinations that work great together. Then, all you need to do is pick the one you like the best.

For example, Colormind is a free tool that uses deep learning to create eye-catching color styles based on its training data from websites, photographs, moves, and art.

You can have it generate a color palette from scratch. Or, you can choose one starting color and have it fill out the rest of the palette for you.

You can also find similar tools such as Huemint, AI Colors, and more.

Or, for another approach, the Uizard tool that we mentioned in the previous section can also help you quickly turn the colors from your mockups (or from any screenshot/website) into a cohesive color scheme that you can use in your designs.

Generate the Perfect Font Pairings

Once you have the perfect color scheme for your design project, you’ll next need some fonts to use.

Here again, you can leverage AI to help you generate some excellent font pairings.

Some great options to start you off are Taskade’s AI Font Pairing Generator, Monotype’s Font Pairing Playground, and Fontjoy.

For example, Fontjoy uses machine learning to “systematically find fonts that share similarities but contrast in a key way – e.g., similar in obliqueness and serifs, but different weights.”

Basically, it lets you use AI to generate font pairings that humans might struggle to come up with themselves.

Write Unique Content to Use in Your Designs (No More Lorem Ipsum!)

In addition to the design itself, another important part of web design is content. After all, content and web design should go hand in hand when it comes to creating user-friendly websites and apps.

In the past, you might have relied on Lorem Ipsum early in your designs. But with AI writing tools, you can create quality website copy right from the beginning.

With a little editing, you could use this as the finished copy for your website. Or, you could just use AI content to have more realistic placeholder text while you’re designing your website.

If you’re building your website with WordPress.com, you can use the Jetpack AI Assistant block to generate unique content directly from the WordPress editor. You can create both short-form and long-form content, as well as adjust the tone and voice to match your needs.

You can also find a number of standalone AI content writer tools. Some tools specialize in short-form content like titles and headings, while others specialize in long-form content like blog posts.

Here are some tools to start you off:

• Copy.ai – can help with short-form and long-form content.
• KoalaWriter – more focused on long-form content like blog posts. 
• Wordtune – more focused on helping you use AI to refine your existing text rather than generating copy from scratch.

Write Code for Your Designs

If you’re using something like WordPress.com to make your website, you might not need to use any code to set up your website.

However, you still might have situations where you want to use code to make certain tweaks to your site. For example, maybe your WordPress theme doesn’t allow you to make a certain customization, so you want to use some custom CSS to get the job done.

Rather than writing your code from scratch, you can use an AI tool to write the code for you just by entering a simple prompt.

If you don’t know much about code, this can let you unlock more advanced customizations that you might not be able to perform yourself. And even if you are capable of writing your own code, using AI can still speed up the process so that you can focus on other areas of web design.

Many general-purpose AI tools can help you write code, such as ChatGPT.

You can also find a bunch of AI code generator tools that are specifically focused on writing code. Some good options to consider include OpenAI Codex and Meta’s upcoming Coda Llama model. 

Create a Logo for Your Website

A quality logo is an essential part of pretty much every web design project. It plays a huge role in your website branding, as well as just generally tying together the design of your website.

To help you save time and money while making your logo, you can find a number of AI-powered logo creators.

You could use these tools in a few different ways:

• Live logo – if you like what the AI logo generator comes up with, you could use it as your site’s finished logo.
• Placeholders – you could use an AI logo as a placeholder while designing your site, as it might make it easier to visualize how everything is coming together.
• Brainstorming – you could use the AI logo generator to come up with a bunch of different ideas and then have a human designer iterate on your favorite styles.

To create a logo with AI, you can check out tools like Brandmark, Logomaster.ai, Logo.ai, and others.

Generate Other Graphics for Your Website

In addition to using an AI logo generator, you can also use AI to generate other graphics that you need for your designs. These could be hero images, background images, icon-type images, and so on.

You can find tons of tools for AI image generation, as this has been a huge focus of a variety of AI tools and models.

If you’re using WordPress.com, you can also use the Jetpack AI Assistant block that we mentioned earlier to generate unique graphics right from the WordPress editor.

Outside of WordPress, there are also tons of standalone tools that you can use for all types of graphics. Here are two to get you started:

• Canva – while Canva might be best known for its browser-based image editor, the Canva team has also fully integrated AI image generation and design into the platform. One advantage of this approach is that you can easily edit and adjust any AI graphics that you create.
• Designs.ai – a graphic design tool with an AI-first focus.

You can also find AI tools to enhance existing graphics that you might have. This can be especially helpful if you’re building client sites and your client has provided you with low-resolution or otherwise low-quality graphics. With a tool like Let’s Enhance, you can use AI to increase the image resolution and generally improve the quality.

Use an AI Website Builder

Finally, the last option to use AI for web design is to just use an AI website builder. These builders can generate an entire finished website based on some simple prompts and inputs.

Sounds like the pinnacle of web design AI tools, right? So why is it last on the last?

Well, primarily because these AI website builders are not quite there yet. While they can generate a website that works based on your prompt, these sites are still unlikely to be as nice as a site that you design yourself.

Instead of relying on an AI website builder to do everything for you, you might find that you get better results by using AI web design tools to enhance your human-powered web design process.

That way, you can still save a ton of time and access new design capabilities, but you’ll also still retain a human touch for your website.

The Pros and Cons of Using AI for Web Design

Now that we’ve given you a bunch of web design AI tools, let’s finish things out by looking at some of the pros and cons of using AI for web design.

Advantages of AI for Web Design

• Save time – using AI web design tools can help you save time while designing websites.
• Save money – by reducing the amount of time that a human needs to spend on web design, AI can also help you reduce the monetary costs of web design. After all, time is money, right?
• New design styles/aesthetics – using AI tools might help you generate new design styles and aesthetics that you might not have thought of by yourself. Think of it kind of like a brainstorming assistant.
• Access new capabilities – AI tools can help you access skills/knowledge that you might not personally have. For example, you might not be a very strong coder, but you can still access code customizations by having an AI tool create the code for you.

Disadvantages of AI for Web Design

• Lacks unique human creativity – while AI can help you generate tons of different ideas, AI tools are still only as good as their inputs. As such, AI tools will still struggle to achieve the same level of creativity that a quality human designer can offer.
• Ethical concerns – if a human designer copied another human designer, most people would have an issue with that. So how does it work if an AI tool were to do the same thing (which caused you to inadvertently mimic/copy some other site)? These types of ethical concerns are still being hashed out, so you might want to consider them as you go through your project.

Try AI for Web Design Today

Using AI for web design is still a relatively young field, but there are already a number of different ways in which AI can make your web design work faster and more efficient.

You can use AI to create prototypes, write website copy, create unique graphics and logs, write custom code, and plenty more.

If you’re interested in using AI for your next WordPress web design project, the Jetpack AI Assistant block can help you write website copy and create graphics without needing to leave the comfort of your WP Admin. Give it a try today to see how it can help.