Global design firm Pentagram uses generative AI tool Midjourney to create a U.S. government website performance.govWe have redesigned the website. This website was created to clearly communicate the strategic goals and progress of the federal government to the public. As a platform for collecting and reporting related data from major federal agencies such as the White House, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Defense, and Department of Transportation, we needed a visual and intuitive design that would make complex content easy to understand.
The Paula Scher team at Pentagram set the design goal of the website as being accessible and approachable to the general public. The team visualized the vast amount of government data in various ways and created approximately 1,500 icons as part of the project. They used Midjourney to combine traditional illustration techniques with AI generation tools.
Pentagram explained that using AI was not just a technical choice, but a strategic choice to enhance the efficiency and creativity of the design process. “Design is planning, and this project is designed to be self-sufficient,” Paula Scher said in an interview. She added that AI was used as a tool to complement, not replace, the human role in design work, “We’re going to use the best tools to realize our ideas.”
The industry’s response to AI-powered design approaches has been mixed. Some designers have expressed concerns that AI undermines the role of human creators. There has been ongoing debate over the ethics of AI tools using images created by learning from existing artists’ work. However, in this project, AI has gone beyond simply being an automation tool to support human designers’ creative decisions and speed up their work.
The Share team used Midjourney to feed handcrafted samples and styles into AI to achieve the desired results. These icons were designed to be flexible for use by each federal agency. “It would have been impossible to do this work manually in such a short period of time. AI was a critical tool to help us accomplish what we needed to do,” Share explained.
