Editor's Synopsis
Tomasz Opasinski, a veteran designer with over 20 years of experience in entertainment advertising, details how he adopted a fully generative AI workflow using Adobe Firefly and Adobe Photoshop to design a poster for the 22nd Kinoteka Polish Film Festival. Rather than starting with traditional hand sketching, he went straight to prompting in Firefly, treating prompt refinement as a form of digital sketching. Six hours of prompt exploration produced hundreds of images—a process that would have taken significantly longer by hand—and he notes he won't go back to sketching for ideation.
The article walks through three distinct phases: exploration and ideation, where prompting replaced sketching and yielded unexpected results like an origami-like camera concept; pre-production, where he used Generative Expand in Photoshop to test compositions at various aspect ratios and prepared assets for print; and production, where he composited, retouched, and mocked up final deliverables. He submitted 77 images to the client (triple his usual volume) and mocked up 17 as posters, with the client ultimately selecting two designs that each evoked a different emotional response.
Key practical insights include how prompt refinement works like iterating on a creative brief, the limitations of AI-generated images (no individual layers, resolution constraints, occasional need for manual retouching), and how generative tools shifted the bottleneck from illustration skill to creative direction and language. The piece serves as a concrete, step-by-step case study for designers considering how generative AI might reshape—rather than replace—their established workflows.
