1.2 – The Tools That We’ll Be Using Lesson

Lesson Overview

This lesson introduces the main platforms you’ll rely on throughout the course to brainstorm, create, and polish your business’s visual assets. Each tool—ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Microsoft Designer, and MidJourney—plays a specific role in transforming your ideas into usable graphics, logos, and social media content.

ChatGPT acts as your brainstorming partner and prompt generator, helping you shape both business ideas and the descriptions you’ll need for image creation. DALL-E 3, integrated into ChatGPT, allows you to generate original images from your prompts, unlocking rapid visualization of nearly any design concept. Microsoft Designer comes in as a user-friendly hub for editing, resizing, and customizing these images to suit different business needs, from online profiles to printed materials. For advanced, photorealistic visuals, MidJourney is introduced—perfect for creating realistic ad imagery and professional-grade stock images.

Whether you’re looking to design assets on your own or want to streamline communication with graphic designers, this suite of tools is built to save time and provide flexibility. Entrepreneurs and small teams will especially benefit from the ability to quickly mock up, revise, and finalize creative ideas, regardless of technical background.

Who This Is For

If you’re looking to strengthen your business’s visual brand or quickly prototype images, this lesson is a useful foundation. You’ll find value here if you are:

• Entrepreneurs seeking quick, effective branding tools
• Small business owners building marketing materials
• Content creators wanting to visualize ideas rapidly
• Marketers in need of flexible graphic options
• Anyone new to AI design tools aiming for hands-on experience
• People considering collaborations with professional designers

Where This Fits in a Workflow

This lesson sets up the toolkit you’ll use for every creative task in the course, forming the base for everything that follows. Knowing what each platform does enables you to streamline the process, from brainstorming concepts to creating final design assets. For example, you might use ChatGPT to shape an idea, DALL-E 3 to create image drafts, Microsoft Designer to format those images for different channels, and MidJourney if you need ultra-realistic visuals for key campaigns. This toolkit allows you to maintain control over your brand’s look and iterate without waiting on external resources, while still having the option to share mockups with design professionals.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Traditionally, business owners had to rely on outside designers or learn complex software for each stage of the design process, causing slow turnaround and added expense. With these AI-powered tools, you can now move from idea generation to completed designs much more quickly and with less need for design expertise. ChatGPT helps generate detailed prompts, and DALL-E 3 translates these directly into images—often in a few clicks. Microsoft Designer replaces the need for bulky graphic editing programs by providing easy tools for tweaking and resizing images. MidJourney is reserved for when you need images that look like authentic photography, previously something only skilled designers could accomplish affordably. In practical terms, you save hours per asset, cut costs, and retain creative direction throughout.

Practice Exercise

Think about the main visual needs for your business—a logo, a flyer, or social media graphics, for example. Jot down at least one idea for each in plain language. Next, pick one idea and imagine how you’d describe it to a designer or AI. Consider these steps:

1. Write a one-sentence description of a visual asset you’d need (e.g., “A clean and colorful logo for a coffee shop called Daily Brew”).
2. Identify which tool from this lesson you’d start with and why.

Reflect: Would you rather create this directly with AI, or hand the concept to a professional designer? Why?

This helps you start matching your business goals to the right tool, building confidence before tackling the practical lessons.

Course Context Recap

This lesson gives you a clear landscape of the AI and design platforms that shape your creative journey in this course. In previous lessons, you learned why strong visual assets are essential for business growth. After this overview of tools, the next step is to get hands-on: you’ll set up your ChatGPT Plus subscription and begin learning how to use ChatGPT for design brainstorming. Keep going to see these platforms in action and start building your own brand visuals. Explore the full course to advance your skills and unlock new creative potential.