Designer Dominik Korolczuk on how generative ai could transform the branding process

Dominik Korolczuk is a Warsaw-based designer, and the founder of his own branding studio: Bearly Funny. He talked us through his approach to AI, and why he believes a future of less repetitive labour and more creativity beckons.

I’m originally from Poland and now based in Warsaw, but I actually grew up mostly in the UK – in London and then Manchester. The story of how I ended up back in Poland is funny. My illustration teacher at Salford University tried to have a conversation with me about Polish artists and graphic designers, and I was drawing a blank. I knew nothing about Polish culture back then. So, in 2013, he organised everything for me to go to Poland as part of the Erasmus programme – I actually went back to my own country on an exchange trip! I came to live in Warsaw for half a year and fell in love with the place. So I decided to stay.

My background was more in illustration, but at that time in Poland there was a massive IT boom happening – and still is, actually. A bunch of software houses were popping up, and these companies needed designers. I had a degree in design and communications, so I got a job, and it was there I started to learn about all these other areas of design – UX, UI, graphic design, typography – all things I remembered from my degree. My second job was with a really nice software house, with a bunch of cool people who I was able to learn from. It was here I fell in love with design even more than art; in particular design as a solution to problems, and specifically business problems.

I love that art has this intersection with business, which we call design. And I'm a big proponent of separating visual identity from actual branding. Branding is impression management; it’s strategic. Visual identity should stem from those strategic decisions. Design has this beautiful power of making a “mom and pop store” look like an enterprise. (Or in my case, it has the power of making one guy in his office in Warsaw look like a proper design studio!) It has that magical allure that can elevate things to a different level. And it’s not about making someone into something they’re not. People are already doing amazing things, it’s about presenting them in the right way.

Now I run my own studio: Bearly Funny. When the pandemic hit, and then the war in Ukraine, it shook up the market, and the company I was working for had massive layoffs. I could have looked for another job in a bad market, but I felt I was ready to go to the next level. I was in a good situation in my life – I had my own place, a supportive partner – so I decided to go for it, start my own company and do the work I want to do.

I want to work with companies that do a little bit of good in the world. That’s why Bearly Funny only works with socially conscious companies, often in areas like health, mental health and green technology. I think a business should be pushing the world in a certain direction, helping people to live a better life. Because I feel close to many of these issues, I want to do everything I can to help the people I work with succeed; to help them identify who they're talking to, and help them talk to them in the right way. I called the company Bearly Funny because branding is all about communication and in my opinion the best communicators in the world are comedians. In comedy you can talk about something serious or tragic, you can educate, you can entertain, and you can leave people feeling hopeful. I try to use humour in my communications too – emphasis on “try” – hence Bearly Funny.

I use AI tools every day in my work. Chat GPT to help me write better emails, and I’ve played around with Midjourney a fair bit too. I think AI has its place and it’s probably going to be one of the best things ever for brand consistency. Imagine how much more consistent a brand will be when you can set up and design a series of prompts that generate artistically similar images for whatever use. As soon as generative AI arrived, I had thought about how cool it would be if something like exactly.ai existed. Something that allows me to train a model on my illustrations, to generate them for every occasion a brand might need.

If I want to make a carousel post for a brand for example – ten slides with an illustration on each – suddenly that’s a couple of grand to get that done. Or if you have an illustrator in house, that’s tens of hours of work. Imagine if you could cut that down to a couple of hours, because they can generate the images from a properly trained model. Or if it’s really well trained, maybe even the social media manager can just generate them. It’s going to reduce the barrier to entry, particularly for small businesses. There are always barriers that stop smaller businesses from upping their game. Tools like this lower and remove them.

I had a passion project in my portfolio, and a client reached out to me because they liked it and wanted illustrations just like it. So I thought, why don’t I try and upload the images to exactly.ai and at least do some ideation with it. It’s a good use case, because they want a style they can use for biweekly or monthly newsletters they send out. Normally in my process I start with a rough sketch, then a clean sketch, then I move onto the final images. Once I get the model trained properly on this style, I could save the most time consuming part. I could do an initial sketch, throw it into the exactly.ai model and get back something pretty close to the final illustration.

Something that would have been a 30-35 hour project suddenly becomes a sub-10 hour project. That helps me grow as a business as well, because I can still serve the client that needs the illustrations, but I can take on other projects as well, concentrating on the stage I love the most: the discovery, the strategy, and initial design of the visual identity. I know a couple of illustrators and we love developing new styles. What we don’t necessarily love is creating 50 illustrations in the exact same style. That’s what exactly.ai can do – take away the repetitive labour. If I can produce those images using a model, and instead start a new round of discovery and strategy, I'll be a very happy guy.