Aleksey Pushkarev on using ai as a partner for independent work

Aleksey Pushkarev, is a Russian multidisciplinary artist and designer. He spoke to us about using AI to facilitate independent work.

I’m extremely grateful that I’ve been able to combine my passions into a career. I’ve spent the past 15 years developing a career in the intersection between extreme sports and design and now I’m a design director in the active sports industry. I’ve had the privilege of working with Lego and Google and have been recognised by several international festival awards including Cannes Lions.

I suppose some of the credit should go to Dima Babanel - my first real teacher and master. He introduced me to the reality of working as a creative, the intricacies of the design world and how to carve out a place for yourself in that ecosystem. Then in 2008, I attended my first retraining campus for design professionals, and that experience changed my path completely. I left my advertising job to pursue my own design practice and work directly with clients.

I’ve always loved being active - snowboarding, surfing, cycling and longboarding, so when it came to finding clients to work with, that's what I was attracted to. In the past 5 years I’ve released over 100 snowboard designs working internationally with brands like Terror, Prime and Proteus. This year over half the designs I release will feature some AI-generated illustrations.

AI has made the whole process of design work easier. It’s enabled me to work independently which, not being the friendliest guy, is important for me. I used to struggle organising collaborations with suitable illustrators and persuading them to match my ideas. Now I’m able to use exactly.ai to experiment without the small talk.

I’ve got to admit, I was drawn to exactly.ai in particular purely out of national pride. When I heard that CEO Tonia Samsonova was Russian, my inner patriot kicked in. I was eager to see what my fellow citizens were bringing to the world of AI. I wasn’t disappointed - as expected, exactly.ai is a uniquely artist-focussed platform which concentrates on working with author’s illustrations. Everything I had been looking for.

Working on designs used to require hours of dedicated searching to find the right illustrators who could understand my vision. Even after finding the right person, collaboration could be a headache, with deadlines, diaries and different revisions preventing everyone from moving forward. Now I can cut down the entire process to a number of hours. Using exactly.ai as my sketchbook means I can work independently, without needing to employ specialists to try out different graphic techniques and styles.

One of the areas in design I’m fascinated by is typography. Designing lettering is all about working with the form, the plasticity of a letter. Contour and counterform. You have to understand the characteristics of the particular shape - manifesting itself simply in black and white. AI lacks the ability to work with these parameters for now, often producing lettering which breaks and distorts at the seams.

The sketch tool in exactly.ai has allowed me to bridge the perceptual gap between human and AI. I take an approach now where I design the letter plasticity, shape, proportion and contrast. Then, uploading this design as a sketch to exactly.ai I can generate stylised images. It’s not perfect yet, but as a tool for illustrative design of artistic text it’s a fantastic source of inspiration.

It’s cases like these which convince me that AI still needs the input of humanity to be creative. Creativity is the process of our neurons working in direct contact with our experience of reality through our senses. Without having access to our sense experience AI still needs the human input to create. This means it won’t replace us, it’s just a wonderful tool.