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Microsoft Designer is stepping up its AI integrations, allowing you to make quick social media-style posts using its range of preset options. It’s quick, easy to use, and requires minimal tweaking. Better still, it is available to anyone for free during its beta and preview period (it will change to a subscription model at an unspecified later date).
I’ve been playing around with Microsoft Designer and there are a few reasons you should give it a try—at least while it’s still free to use.
What Is Microsoft Designer?
Microsoft Designer is a newly launched AI-powered graphics design tool with a specific focus on social media posts. First revealed at Microsoft Surface 2023, Designer is a fully cloud-based AI design app that uses DALL-E 3 and GPT-4 to bring almost any potential social media post to life.
Basically, Designer means you don’t have to be a skilled graphics designer to make a great-looking post for your social media feeds, be that for yourself, business, or otherwise. Like other text-to-image AI tools, Microsoft Designer takes your input and creates something from it, integrating your design ideas. You can have a fresh idea for your feed out within seconds, which is great if you’re short on time, lacking in creativity that day, or just not particularly skilled with graphic design. (It’s basically for folks like me!)
It has a few interesting features, too, like prompt templates, the option to expand your idea into a full design, a brand kit generator, and other AI tools, with more set to arrive as development continues.
How to Use Microsoft Designer to Make Quick Unique Images and Posts
Creating a unique image on Microsoft Designer is incredibly straightforward. If you’ve ever used any AI text-to-art generator, it’s essentially the same process, but there are some useful extra inputs you may use.
So, pressing theNew Designbutton brings you to the assisted prompt screen, where Designer will give you ideas in input and output. For example, the text field currently suggests “An Instagram post about my cosmetic product launch,” so you get the idea of what Microsoft Designer is all about. I’ve gone with “A catchy Instagram post for my new cucumber farm” to see what Designer can create. In this example, the output took more than one minute but created an array of 14 different designs (some more useful than others).
As you can see in the image above, many images show different fruits and vegetables entirely, so it’s a little off the mark. However, you can then adjust and refine the output using more specific commands, just as you wouldimprove any other AI prompt. In this case, Designer adds a new option at the bottom of the text field, stating, “Create a fresh and modern Instagram post to promote my new cucumber farm. Include an image of a cucumber or a cucumber field. Use green color to represent freshness and growth.”
Designer generated a few new images among the existing options, with some focusing more on the actual cucumbers and farm, which was an improvement. At this point, you can also adjust the size of the images you want to use. In the top right corner, selectSize, then choose between Square (1080x1080px—Instagram Story), Landscape (1200x628px—Facebook ad), or Portrait (1080x1920px—Instagram Story). The range of images will change again to reflect your preferred size.
Once you’re happy, you can download your image and post it online or opt to Customize the image further in Microsoft Designer. It provides a few automatically generated ideas in the left panel, but you can also select specific elements and adjust them manually. So, if you don’t like the font, you can opt for a different one or even upload the specific font your brand uses to ensure all of your design elements match.
You can also add images to Designer before creating your post to give the AI tool an image to work with. Still using the cucumber theme, I added an image of a greenhouse in front of a lush, verdant cucumber field. Microsoft Designer then integrated that image into its designs (though I have to say, it could use some work on its wording).
Microsoft Designer Has More Features and More Features to Come
As mentioned, Designer is about helping you bring creative ideas to life using AI. If you just want to outline an idea for a new business or similar, you could use the Brand Kit Creator (pictured below) to throw some quick bits together.
There are also tools like the Sticker Creator, which helps you build unique sticker collections; Generative Erase, which removes objects from images using AI; and Remove Background, which erases the background of a selected image. You can also use it as a regular AI image generator, then take those images into the Designer editing tool and customize from there, which is surprisingly useful given the idea generation and editing tools.
But consider that Designer is still a work in progress. Microsoft makes it very clear that access to Designer is on a beta testing basis, and while there is no end date, free access to Designer will eventually end. After this, Designer will become a paid-for tool, though I imagine it will be integrated into the Microsoft 365 subscription.
