Develop artistic or design concepts for decoration, exhibition, or commercial purposes
Most of the output can be produced by software today.
Producing the draft is the single thing current models are best at, and it needs no integration at all: a prompt and a couple of reference documents are enough. A person still edits it and takes responsibility for what goes out.
| How automatable | Mostly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Drafting and content production |
| Jobs that do it | 12 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Generalist agents, Builders |
| O*NET activity | Thinking Creatively (4.A.2.b.2) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 12 occupations that perform it.
- Conceptualize and help design interfaces for multimedia games, products, and devices.
- Develop concepts or creative ideas for craft objects.
- Integrate and develop visual elements, such as line, space, mass, color, and perspective, to produce desired effects, such as the illustration of ideas, emotions, or moods.
- Create basic designs, drawings, and illustrations for product labels, cartons, direct mail, or television.
- Modify and refine designs, using working models, to conform with customer specifications, production limitations, or changes in design trends.
- Examine sample garments on and off models, modifying designs to achieve desired effects.
- Plan arrangement according to client's requirements, using knowledge of design and properties of materials, or select appropriate standard design pattern.
- Plan and design interior environments for boats, planes, buses, trains, and other enclosed spaces.
- Develop ideas or plans for merchandise displays or window decorations.
- Examine objects to be included in exhibits to plan where and how to display them.
- Design sets, lighting, costumes, and other artistic elements of productions, in collaboration with cast members.
- Design spaces to display pottery for sale.
- Script, plan, and create animated narrative sequences under tight deadlines, using computer software and hand drawing techniques.
- Coordinate the look and function of product lines.
- Adapt other designers' ideas for the mass market.
- Create and change in-store and window displays, designs, and looks to enhance a shop's image.
- Develop set designs, based on evaluation of scripts, budgets, research information, and available locations.
- Design custom clothing and accessories for individuals, retailers, or theatrical, television, or film productions.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for drafting and content production, and what it costs.
Drafting needs no tools, no integration and no platform. One $20 assistant and two reference documents beat any agent builder here, and every extra thing in this stack is cost with nothing behind it.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Generalist agents
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
12 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Art Directors
- Choreographers
- Commercial and Industrial Designers
- Craft Artists
- Fashion Designers
- Fine Artists, Including Painters, Sculptors, and Illustrators
- Floral Designers
- Interior Designers
- Merchandise Displayers and Window Trimmers
- Potters, Manufacturing
- Set and Exhibit Designers
- Special Effects Artists and Animators
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Create artistic designs or performances”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
| Activity | Jobs |
|---|---|
| Design costumes or cosmetic effects for characters | 3 |
| Design jewelry or decorative objects | 3 |
| Create musical compositions, arrangements or scores | 2 |
| Choreograph dances | 2 |
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.