Microsoft recently made news with a major collaboration with OpenAI, which leverages its Generative Pre-Text Transformer (GPT) technology to add an artificial intelligence (AI) co-pilot to the Bing search engine. But the company was laying the groundwork for its own AI-based platform when it launched Microsoft Designer in October 2022, leveraging his DALL-E 2 application of OpenAI. For those who don’t know, DALL-E is an AI image generator that displays prompts in natural language text format. Microsoft Designer was touted as an AI-powered design his platform that offers an advanced feature set that allows users to create his Instagram posts, presentations, digital postcards, graphics, and more. On April 27th, Microsoft launched a public preview of the platform, showcasing its advanced feature set.
Bryan Rognier, General Manager of Microsoft 365 Consumer, said: blog post.
Now, if you’re someone who needs to generate/create visuals, your first destination is usually Adobe Photoshop and then Canva. It goes far ahead and really helps during the creative process of following an idea and completing a product. And that’s where Designer is considered one of the biggest threats to Photoshop and Canva.
Microsoft Designer: What it offers
The AI-powered design platform has a wide range of features that enable users to create designs and graphics quickly and seamlessly. Like DALL-E, it requires natural language input. So you can give a text prompt: “Post on social media about affordable smartphones.” For better results, you can also add accompanying images with your design suggestions.
But design and graphic proposals are just the beginning. You can also customize whether your design is for Instagram or Facebook posts or other use cases to get the right dimensions. Once you’ve selected your image, select the purpose of your post (with multiple options such as awareness, engagement, community building, and sales), add a short description, and multiple caption choices that you can choose to add is generated by AI Platform. to the post. You can also select trending hashtags on your topic to add to your post. Once done, if you have social media connected to Microsoft Designer, it will automatically post to your account.
It also now has more manual control to allow users to fine-tune the image to their liking. The platform has added a new feature that allows users to resize images to fit different social media post formats. According to the company, images don’t lose resolution when resized.
Another new feature added to the platform is animated visuals (transition slides and similar effects) to make your designs eye-catching. Microsoft also plans to add more features in the future, such as editing options to place objects on canvas and fill the rest with AI, erase background, replace background options, and more.
During the preview, Microsoft has allowed free access to the platform, which can be accessed from the sidebar of the Microsoft Edge browser.
Can Microsoft Designer Compete with Adobe Photoshop and Canva?
Microsoft Designer provides AI tools to automate design tasks that previously had to be done manually by users. We tried out the platform and in our experience the generated images were fairly accurate to the description. It also eliminates the manual work required to place the text in the correct position.
This is a powerful tool that allows you to quickly create a large number of posts tailored to your users’ needs. Handpicked hashtags and captions also take away the headache of thinking about the right content to appeal to your audience. However, the generated images lack the personalized creativity that some organizations and individuals prefer. Due to the lack of editing features, more creative users may be a little underwhelmed with the final result at this point.
Microsoft Designer has the potential to offer powerful alternatives to existing design platforms such as Adobe Photoshop and Canva, but given the sheer amount of tools these platforms offer, it will be difficult for Designer to catch up. There is still some work to be done.
