Superside is a design, branding and creative service that works with the in-house teams at clients like Reddit, Pernod Ricard and Antler. Executive creative director Kae Neskovic explains how they’re using AI.
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Broadly speaking, are you excited for how AI will change the design industry or nervous?
I’m definitely excited. There’s always been a natural progression of technology in our field, and it would be unreasonable to think that it wouldn’t keep evolving. AI is just the next chapter.
But I also think we need to stop thinking of “AI” as one big thing. It’s not the same when your mom uses ChatGPT for a recipe, a creative uses Runway to edit videos, or a scientist uses it to speed up calculations.
It’s not one thing, so it’s not going to have one single effect.
Instead of being nervous, I think it’s much more productive to focus on how do we, as a group, make AI work for creatives instead of waiting for it to be decided for us?
Do you have an agreed policy around AI as a business?
Yes, we do. We’ve defined a set of principles that guide how we use AI, built around our company’s vision, our brand values, and the needs of our customers. We developed these in collaboration with our leadership team.
Some of the key pillars:
Opt-in, opt-out flexibility – Customers always have a choice.
Human-guided creativity – Technology is powerful, but creativity starts with people.
Data security first – We protect assets and keep everything confidential, safe, and compliant.
Customer-first approach: Different clients want different levels of AI involvement, and we adapt to that.
When did you realise AI was going to have an impact on design? Was there a moment, a tool, a conversation?
It’s hard to pinpoint a single “aha” moment because things have been changing so fast.
A year ago, many of us thought, this is cool if you’re a 15-year-old wanting to make a poster, but what can it actually do for big enterprise brands?
So many companies leaned into that grotesque factor of AI making fun of what it can do, the Super Bowl Minions ad comes to mind, or Fiverr’s Nobody Cares, trying to talk about AI as this sort of fad or trend that doesn’t really work, like NFTs.
Now things are changing. Month by month, quarter by quarter, the improvements have been massive. It’s been incredible to watch, and it keeps pushing our thinking.
Have you undergone any AI training?
Yes, and this has been a huge priority for us.
In the beginning, we encouraged self-training. But we quickly realised that’s not scalable, fun, or aligned across the team, so we built a structured training program.
Our L&D team collaborates with AI experts to run regular workshops and up-skilling sessions. Over the last six months, we’ve trained our entire creative services team of 300+ people on the latest tools, and we’ll keep doing it as the space evolves.
How do you use AI in the studio’s creative process?
There are so many different ways we use AI, it’s integrated across the full creative process:
Ideation and research – From desk research to note-taking, brainstorming, summarising conversations, and distilling insights, AI helps speed up and streamline early-stage thinking.
Moodboarding and exploration – It’s great for early visual exploration and riffing.
Image manipulation – Think of it like Photoshop on steroids, adapting, transforming, and refining visuals at scale.
Custom workflows – We’ve built AI-driven systems to support design ops, like auto-populating design templates, plugging into Figma, and manipulating design systems. It’s more than just generating images, it’s an engine behind smarter, faster work.
The one thing AI isn’t great at is taste and judgment. It’s a powerful assistant, but creative direction still starts and ends with humans.
Do you think clients care if and how you use AI at work?
Absolutely. We always discuss AI usage up-front with clients, and they’re in full control, at both the project and account level. They can opt in or opt out entirely.
Some brands are all-in on using AI to multiply what they’ve already built. Others want to keep their image generation 100% human.
Do you use AI for any non-creative aspects of running the business?
Yes, AI is everywhere behind the scenes.
AI note-takers in meetings, ChatGPT for quick research, writing, brainstorming, automations across dev, product, marketing, pretty much every tool we use now has AI baked in, and people across the company are encouraged to experiment and build new workflows.
Beyond the best-known tools like ChatGPT, what’s one AI tool you’d recommend to other design studios?
Some of our favourites right now:
Krea – Great for campaign generation and marketing workflows.
Leonardo AI – Our go-to for visual exploration and enhancement.
Runway – Amazing for video work.
Visual Electric – Super fun and the most intuitive for designers.