You can of course try to reinvent the wheel yourself by dabbling in Photoshop or Canva, but nowadays AI can help you with countless things. This also applies to Microsoft Designer, where you can create very cool stickers for WhatsApp and more. However, you don’t really know where to start? No problem, we’ll give you five tips of cool things to do with Microsoft Designer.
Fun ways to use Microsoft Designer
Microsoft Designer is not a separate program that you have to download: you can simply access it in the browser. To do this, go to designer.microsoft.com and you end up in the preview version, which allows you to do all kinds of things.
Sticker Creator
Do you have an app on your phone that allows you to make stickers for WhatsApp, but are you still looking for cool designs? You can create any stickers you want with the Sticker Creator from Microsoft Designer. Because we are of course cowboys, work on laptops and the writer of this piece loves unicorns, we decide to ask for a sticker of a unicorn cowboy with a laptop:
But it can also be even more specific. You can also ask for a less cartoonish and more photorealistic image. Now a unicorn in itself is of course not super photorealistic, but you can immediately see that it looks a lot more serious:
DesignCreator
There is also a Design Creator, which allows you to create a nice invitation or an Instagram post, for example. For example, let’s have one made for this article. The prompt ‘an Instagram post that tells people about an article about microsoft designer, with a nice visual that fits with this topic’ – after a relatively long wait – leads to a lot of options:
You can click on it and further customize it to your liking, all within Designer itself. For example, we would change the subtitle of the nice one with those buildings, because that is not what this article is about. But you see: Microsoft Designer immediately comes with a wide variety of options and that makes it more fun to choose something that fits your brand well.
Brand Kit Designer
Speaking of your brand: are you still looking for a corporate identity? Microsoft Designer will also help you with that. Imagine that we do a restyle of DutchCowboys and want to make that unicorn from earlier more prominent and opt for a design that is purple, then that is quite easy: The prompt is DutchCowboys and ‘a blog about technology, entertainment, marketing , internet, and popular science. Our brand colors are purple. Logo is a unicorn cowboy with a laptop.’ It had to be a bit staccato, because we didn’t get more characters from Microsoft. To be honest, Microsoft doesn’t fully understand it: it even comes up with a few options where the logo does not contain purple at all:
Just click a few times and there is an option that is more than what we asked for, fortunately:
Remove backgrounds
You might want to spice up that photo of your cat in the sun and turn it into some kind of weird space cat. That’s possible. Schram doesn’t notice it herself, but with Microsoft Designer you can put her straight out of the garden and into space. You upload a photo, click on it, then choose ‘Remove background’ and after a while you see that the cat has been cut out. On the left you can search for space (the space) via Visuals and then Photos and you can then put it behind it (if it does, you can click on it and choose ‘set as background’). In an instant, although its quality is very dependent on the subject and the quality of your source material, but this of course applies to all AI applications.
Image creator
Microsoft Designer will also soon come with the option to create albums, like you used to create a photo album, but that option is still in the works. The fifth and final option we will discuss in this article is the image creator (which you may know from our article about turning yourself into a Funko figure). We have already played with creating images in sticker form when creating stickers, but you can take it a little further with the image creator. Very far in fact, also unintentionally, as our prompt shows. In many prompts we made, the cat was always placed on the unicorn’s back while tapping on the laptop, so the prompt seems a bit strange, but it did take us a step further. Although it is funny that Microsoft Designer suddenly comes up with all kinds of things (and the unicorn’s back is still covered with a rider, namely a kind of space alien without feet that came out of nowhere). The cat has also suddenly become the cowboy. But you can say a lot about the design: it is cool.
You can go in many directions with Microsoft Designer. Now we have not focused so much on the animation style, but you can do that if you are looking for a more cartoon-like look, for example. The world is actually your oyster with this image AI, but you have to think carefully about what that world should look like.
