Leighton McDonald

QuHarrison Terry presents Leighton McDonald with the WTF Innovators Award for being a leading example for how designers can adopt generative AI into their workflows and openly sharing his learnings along the way.

The WTF Innovators Award recognizes excellence at the precipice of societal change, with the inaugural class focusing on AI innovators. As a memento, each of the 34 awardees are gifted a featured song by QuHarrison Terry and Genesis Renji. We present “Shades On”, produced by Nimso, to Leighton McDonald.

Leighton McDonald is a multi-faceted industrial, concept, and experience designer that is always pushing the limits of our perceived reality. Leighton experiments with using DALL-E and ChatGPT to warp reality, change perception, and inspire free-thinking in order to inform his product design and concept work. He frequently shares his experiments on Instagram and has released a book on his learnings called “Evolve With AI.”

I admire the honesty and curiosity with which Leighton approaches AI for design. He creates and shares with lots of freedom and is not afraid to dive into the tool that is supposedly poised to replace his profession. He is giving us a glimpse into how future designers will collaborate with AI in real-time, which is why he should be on everyone’s radar. – QuHarrison Terry.

Leighton McDonald is a Concepts Designer at Under Armour where he creates innovative, brand authentic, future-forward, yearly and seasonal design directions leading 2-5 years out; influencing the brand aesthetic and design organization. Leighton is also a Meta Spark AR Partner where he is given access to cutting-edge augmented reality development projects and tools at Meta.