Where AI Fits at DC&Co

At DC&Co, AI is part of our weekly rhythm. It doesn’t design logos, pick color palettes, or deliver work to clients, but it does help us move faster. With AI, we break through the boilerplate, sharpen our thinking, and estimate with more confidence.

How do we use AI in our workflow?

• Ideation
• Estimating project duration
• Accelerating our proposal creation

Ideation, with a human at the wheel

There is a lot of noise about AI replacing creative work; that’s not how it is working in our studio. Most projects start the way they always have: a designer sketches, talks to the client, gathers references, and forms a point of view. The original concept comes from the designer.

Next, we explore and discover further, having the designer craft an expert-level creative prompt to leave no stone unturned. Say we are building a brand for a small-batch coffee roaster. The original visual concept is already set: warm, vintage, with a nod to the mountain origin of the beans.

The designer crafts that direction into AI and requests five alternative sketches. Or ten naming angles we have not considered. Or five visual metaphors that connect mountains and slow craft. The creative craft of prompting at this level allows the designer to accelerate and scale creative research.

The designer culls the prompt output and pulls the important pieces. A new visual narrative has been spliced and is ready for further human exploration. On the coffee project, the AI-assisted creative research reframed the roaster's origin story as a quiet morning ritual rather than a mountain adventure. That single shift redirected the visual system and unlocked the final mark. The designer made the call. The thread came from a human prompt rooted in client conversations.

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It doesn’t do the work or make the decisions—it helps us move faster (em dash added by humans).
- Karen Kukta, Creative Director

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We have noticed something else: the quality of the output tracks the quality of the prompt. A thin idea returns thin variations. A strong human concept produces useful sparks, and the tool amplifies what is already there. To get the most out of AI, we focus on crafting clear, specific, expert, and structured prompts. For example, instead of stating, "Give me some taglines for a coffee brand," we might say, "Suggest five taglines for a small-batch coffee brand with a warm, vintage tone that highlights its mountain origins and slow-crafted approach." Adding just a bit more context or sharing a first draft helps the designer find stronger angles. Our advice: treat prompting as part of the creative process, and invest the same care as you would in a project brief.

A time estimator built on our own history

Estimating project hours has always been more art than science. Newer designers underquote. Senior designers pad to be safe. Neither serves the client nor the studio.

So we built a tool that pulls years of historical data from finished DC&Co projects. Scope details, team size, hours logged, and where scope creep happened all feed in. To address data privacy and confidentiality, all project information is anonymized and processed securely, with no client names or sensitive material shared with external systems. Designers can access the estimator directly through our internal web app, enter new project details, and receive results in real time. AI then takes the new project details and returns an hour range grounded in similar past work.

A recent rebrand kickoff is a good example. The project lead entered scope, deliverables, and a rough team plan. The estimator returned a range based on a comparable past project, flagging two scope items that had caused past overruns and suggested a buffer.

The project lead still made the final call. The conversation with the client started with data rather than a hunch. The tool has not replaced human judgment; rather, it replaces the spreadsheet-staring moment before a kickoff call.

A proposal generator that sounds like us

Writing a proposal from scratch used to eat up an afternoon. Most of that time went to formatting, pulling case studies, and reshaping the same boilerplate for a new client.

Our proposal tool ingests past proposals, our service descriptions, and the new project brief. It returns a structured outline in the DC&Co voice. The project lead then writes the parts that matter. They add personal context from discovery calls and shape the pitch around what makes this client different.

The proposals still come from us, yet we have cut the time to create them in half. The strategic angle, the read of what this client needs, and the personal warmth from a real conversation all stay human.

The tool also flags when a brief is missing something. If a discovery call did not surface a budget range or a real deadline, the draft comes back with placeholder questions. The lead chases those down before the proposal goes out. It is a quiet check on our own process.

The point: AI is a tool, not a creator

Here is what I want any designer or client reading this to take away: we use AI because it makes us more efficient. We do not use it to make the design.

Every brand, every layout, and every pitch that leaves our studio passes through a designer's hands. A human decides what makes the cut. A human conceives the original idea. A human catches the thing the model missed.

The end product carries a human signature, and it always will. Quality, taste, and execution belong to the people in the room. AI is a sketchbook, a notebook, a calculator, a tool, or whatever you want it to be that talks back. The work itself is ours. As AI continues to evolve, we will regularly review its role in our studio. Our commitment is to keep people at the center of our creative process and ensure every tool we use serves the work, not the other way around.