I tried Microsoft Designer, and it made quick content creation easy

It’s 2024, and image generators that use AI to bring ideas to life on smartphones, tablets and laptops are everywhere, but a lot of them come with a catch. Tools like Midjourney, don’t have a convenient app for phones, while others like ChatGPT need subscriptions for limitless editing.  

In the mix, though, we found an app that’s perfect for those last-minute edits that you need to pull off without a laptop at your disposal. Meet Microsoft Designer, the latest in the (long) list of generative AI apps to craft images and designs using prompts. Just what it does differently though, is what we’re about to explore today.

What is the Microsoft Designer app, and what does it do?

With an increasing demand for easy-to-use AI tools, the Microsoft Designer app was made to simplify digital content creation and image editing for everyone. 

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The app offers a variety of templates and customisation tools to make designing nearly flawless and efficient. And, it also integrates with Microsoft 365 applications like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel seamlessly.

What did I think of the Microsoft Designer app?

The app has a simple interface with two main tabs – the Homepage and My Projects folder to keep track of all my creations in one place. The homepage displays three main categories for us – ‘Create with AI’, ‘Edit images with AI’, and an option to create a blank design for your Instagram stories and posts. 

With the ‘Create with AI’ option, you can create anything of your choice from images, and invitations to stickers and emojis. It also creates wallpapers, and monograms, even colouring book pages, and more. The image editor allows you to remove or blur the background of an image, restyle images and even add frames to it.

As someone who is not the most skilled at designing, it helped that the app offered various templates to use or take inspiration from.  

With such a huge selection of templates and designs, Microsoft Design made letting my creativity loose, a breeze. With all the customisation options, it was super easy for me to tailor my designs to my liking without spending extra time or effort on it. It’s also great that the app offered tips for me to use while I waited for my image or design to be generated. 

The key advantage of Microsoft Designer is that it is a time-saving tool and is great at understanding prompts. The image generation will be spot-on if you use the right description and give out key details. Once your design has been created, you can save it to your device or share it. 

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Like all other apps, this one also has its drawbacks. There are several apps with premium subscriptions out there that offer advanced features and a larger library of templates.

Microsoft Designer is quite simplistic and might be a better fit for novice designers and editors. It is a great option for someone looking for an economical tool as it costs no additional charge to Microsoft 365 users.

How to get the Microsoft Designer app

Microsoft Designer is available for both Android smartphones and iPhone users. It is also available for Windows as an app and a browser extension. However, it is not available on MacBooks. 

Most features of Microsoft Designer are free to use, though there are certain features that require boosts. For people with a Microsoft Copilot Pro subscription, 100 boosts are offered per day. However, for the ones without a subscription, only 15 boosts can be used in a day.