Studio Dumbar is a Dutch agency that works on strategy, branding, design and motion for clients like OpenAI, Instagram and the Utah Jazz. Here the studio, as a collective, tells us how they use AI, and how they feel about it.
You can see all the articles in this series here.
Broadly speaking, are you excited for how AI will change the design industry, or nervous?
Definitely excited. We’ve always looked for ways to create outside our mainstream design software.
We have embraced motion and 3D early on, and we love finding interesting concepts using tools that are not specifically made for design. That is also the reason why we started using creative coding in our design process – so we could make our own tools, but also come to and embrace unexpected results.
Of course, there are things about AI that we need to solve before we fully welcome it, like ownership and claiming your own creative input while using i., But it opens so many more doors than it closes.
Do you have an agreed policy around AI as a business?
We are a part of DEPT®, and as such, we have a Digital Ethics Advisory Board to analyse the societal impact of our craft, to develop our perspective, to align results with our values and goals, and to collaborate with our clients in all matters related to AI.
Next to this we have global AI guardrails, which we check every time we want to use a new tool to make sure it’s safe. Lastly, we always ask our clients for their AI policies, to make sure we are sticking to those as well.
When did you realise AI was going to have an impact on design?
Our first real introduction to AI was around 2018 when image-generation GANs came on the scene. It was before the current AI boom, and the quality and usability was nothing compared to what we are used to now.
Still, there was something magical about watching images appear that were drawn by a non-human. They carried a distinct aesthetic where one image would dissolve into another, which we wanted to replicate for a project we worked on at that time.
We never got it to work because the outcome was unpredictable and impossible to control. It needed immense training time – that we didn’t have.
The struggle with control is still there, but transformers have changed the scale and quality of what AI can do. The question is no longer about generation itself, but about how much ownership we hold over the results.
Have you undergone any AI training, either as a studio or individuals?
As a studio, we did not do any official AI training, but we definitely had work sessions where we all experimented with AI in image, video and sound generation, as well as vibe coding explorations.
Some people in the studio have a natural interest in AI and delve way deeper into how it works, and how we can apply it in our design process.
How do you use AI in the studio’s creative process?
The obvious uses are there – brainstorming, generating images or video for early inspiration, or coding experiments that help us explore ideas quickly. We also use upscaling and editing tools to move faster and often to get better results than we could otherwise.
For all technologies we use in the studio, we believe the more you understand how it works, the better you can work with it.
So, using AI to speed things up is all fine. But to make actual strong work using AI, we either want enough control to shape the details exactly as we want, or treat the AI as a partner in the process.
This goes beyond typing a clever prompt and waiting for results. It’s about knowing how to push, guide, and play with the system until the work feels truly ours.
Do you think clients care if/how you use AI in your work?
Yes, most of our clients – around 80% – strictly forbid us to use AI in the end product, due to potential legal issues.
Even clients that are in AI themselves, as a business, often still want bespoke manual work that fits their question better. However, we also see more and more specific demand for AI-generated work, where the generation of images and video is part of the assignment.
What matters most to us is the final result. We don’t limit ourselves to one process, so if AI gives us something unique or impossible otherwise, we’ll embrace it when we have the chance.
Do you use AI for any non-creative aspects of running your business?
Yes, we use it to review quotes, check mails, analyse research and for investigative strategy work for new clients
Beyond the best known tools, what is one AI tool that you would recommend to other design studios?
We like tools where it still feels like we’re the ones steering, not just AI doing its thing.
For example Flora, where you can chain genAI models together and build images or videos in steps, feels closer to design work than just prompting 20 random variants and picking one.
Lately we’ve also been trying out training our own models and messing around with set-ups in Automatic1111 or ComfyUI. It’s about putting AI into our workflow, not turning the workflow over to AI.
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