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🧰 Create Pro Visuals (No Designer Needed)
Published about 1 month ago • 5 min read
🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.
Hola friend 👋,
I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.
This week: AI tools for creating images and videos (from scratch).
We’ve all seen the AI text revolution – now anyone can generate a big chunk of text in seconds. But until recently, creating custom images was a genuine pain, often requiring a degree in "prompt engineering" just to get a hand with the correct number of fingers 🖐️.
I’ve been testing the latest evolution of these models, and honestly? I’m impressed (and obsessed).
There are now so many alternatives for creating visuals from zero and editing them seamlessly. And it’s not just static images anymore; AI video tools are getting cheaper, faster, and better.
This week, I’m sharing three tools to upgrade your visual game.
Plus: a brilliant way to use paid AI models for free, a quick browser cleanup tip to boost speed, and the story of when the screens went dark for 800,000 people.
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Canva isn't just an easy Photoshop alternative anymore; it has aggressively rolled out AI generation. And the idea is solid: make AI image and video creation easy for people who aren’t tech‑savvy – e.g. I love Replicate (as you’ll see below), but it can be technically intimidating.
As illustrated by the video above, Canva’s AI features are on par with OpenAI’s and Gemini’s – in fact, they use many Google models. Customizing your output is easier thanks to filters like “Style”, “Aspect ratio”, “Framing”, and more.
Sadly, you can’t pick and choose the specific generative models under the hood, but it’s perfect if you want a beginner-friendly solution that just works. While video generation is still paid (or credit‑based), they offer some image generation for free.
On top of that, you can generate AI designs (e.g., social media banners or presentations), documents (like an ebook or pitch deck), or even code – though I have to admit I’ve never tried that last option.
🛠️ Alternative to: Adobe Firefly, Google AI Studio and Sora
Replicate is essentially a massive marketplace for open-source AI models. Instead of registering with twenty different platforms to use Flux, Sora, Gemini, Kling, etc, you have dozens of them available here in one place – making it really easy to compare results. As you can see in the short video above, I even use it to train an AI model on my face and generate new visuals of ‘me’ for my online content.
It’s technically designed for developers to run code (APIs), but they have a "Playground" area that is incredibly useful for the rest of us. You can interact with almost any available model directly in your browser to generate images or videos and tweak parameters to adjust the results.
I use it to access high-end models that would usually require an expensive subscription or an enterprise account elsewhere. The interface isn't the most beautiful but it works perfectly.
Plus, when I compared the pricing to other platforms (like fal.ai), Replicate often comes out as the more affordable option, at least for the models I normally use.
Envato is renowned for its massive library of stock assets (images, videos, animations, website templates, etc). However, their Gen AI division has released a dedicated AI image, video, music, and even voice generator that is worth a look.
I haven't replaced my entire workflow with it yet, but for specific "stock-video" style shots where I can't find the exact real-world equivalent, Envato is a solid contender to fill the gap.
It’s a great alternative for online content creators and designers, because on top of the AI‑generated media, it gives you access to over 25 million stock assets to enhance your projects.
🛠️ Alternative to: Shutterstock AI, Getty Images AI
Most people think their computer is slow because the hardware is getting old – that may be right for some.
But in reality, the biggest performance killer is often your browser. Every extension you install loads scripts in the background, listens for events, and reserves memory. Add cache leftover from months of browsing, and your browser starts feeling like it is running through mud.
A quick monthly cleanup can make your machine feel new(ish) again:
Open your browser’s extension menu (usually the little puzzle icon).
Check what is installed.
Remove anything you have not used in the last month.
Clear your browser cache to free up even more resources.
A lighter browser means faster load times, smoother calls, and fewer “why is my laptop freezing again” moments.
Ironically, there are several browser extensions that can help you with some of these, making the process a bit more efficient. One that I have used in the past is Click&Clean.
Want to generate free images or use the latest GPT, Gemini, Grok and Claude models without paying a cent?
Meet LM Arena. It’s ostensibly a benchmarking platform where users "blind test" models to see which is better, but it’s also a massive hack for accessing paid tools for free.
I use it constantly to decide which models I actually want to subscribe to or what to use for my AI workflows. If you browse to the "Direct Chat" section, you’ll be allowed to chat with premium AIs for free – and yes, even create images.
🛠️ Alternative to: Paying for ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini
We usually assume platforms like YouTube are invincible, but a massive outage left over 800,000 users unable to access videos (source). The issue hit YouTube TV particularly hard, freezing live sports and news broadcasts right in the middle of the action – oopsie.
While Google eventually fixed the issue, it was a chaotic few hours on social media as people realized how dependent they were on that one Play button.
Lesson learned: Even the tech giants trip over their own cables sometimes. If you rely on hosted video for your business, having a backup plan (or a good book) isn't a bad idea.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time, we’ll dive into building a website... without writing a single line of code. The AI builders are coming for the developers (or are they?).
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