Skip to main content
Participant
October 2, 2026
Question

Illustrator + AI: is there a way to adapt a key visual to multiple digital formats using per-format rules, keeping everything editable?

  • October 2, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 19 views

Hi everyone,

I'm a graphic designer in an internal communication team, working mainly in Illustrator. Our campaigns start from a key visual, usually an A3 poster, and I need to adapt it to several digital formats. Each format has its own content rules, which I've already defined. For example:

  • Newsletter banner (640×480 px): only the headline, the key visual image and our company slogan. No subheadline.
  • Lobby screens (1080×1920 px, vertical): all the information from the key visual must be present, but recomposed for the vertical layout.
  • Other formats follow the same logic, each with its own rules.

I'm not looking for a simple "resize". I need each format to be recomposed: deciding which elements appear, where they go and at what scale, following the rules of that format.

The final pieces must also stay fully editable (text, image, vector shapes), because our project managers often request changes after delivery. Anything that flattens or rasterises the artwork won't work for us.

I'd love to know if something like this already exists using AI, whether in Illustrator, Firefly, Express or any other tool. It would be a huge help for me and my team, since this adaptation work is repetitive and recurring.

My questions:

  1. Is there an AI-powered tool or workflow that can apply my rules per format and generate the adapted versions from a single key visual?
  2. If not, what is the most efficient workflow in Illustrator today (artboards, symbols, scripting, variables/data merge…), and could AI help automate part of it?
  3. Has anyone built or tested something similar? How far did you get, and what were the limits?

Thanks in advance :)

1 reply

CORCTON34033231
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 3, 2026

Hi! Honest short answer to Q1: no — neither Illustrator, Firefly, nor Express currently offers an AI feature that takes a set of per-format rules and re-composes a layout while keeping everything editable. Firefly generates imagery; it doesn't do rule-based layout adaptation. The closest built-in option is Adobe Express's Resize, which quickly re-fits a design to other sizes — but it doesn't follow custom per-element rules, and the result lives in Express rather than Illustrator.

 

For Q2, the most efficient Illustrator-native workflow is: one artboard per format, with the shared elements (headline, slogan, key visual) built as Symbols. Place symbol instances on each artboard and re-compose freely per format — editing a symbol updates it on every format at once, so project-manager changes stay quick. Combine with consistent paragraph/character styles for the text-heavy variants.

 

Scripting (ExtendScript/UXP) can automate placing elements per format from your own rule set, but the "AI decides the layout" part doesn't exist yet. Hope that helps!