On October 28, the 2025 ZCOOL Design Week kicked off in Beijing. With the theme "Super Designer in the AI Era," the event marked the official launch of ZCOOL's AI design tool and announced the 2025 ZCOOL Top 100 Design List and the 2025 ZCOOL Super AI Designer awards.

Launch of the "Super Designer in the AI Era Research Handbook"

Five Major Industry Trends Revealed

Wu Xinhong, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Meitu, delivered the opening address and released the "Super Designer in the AI Era Research Handbook", outlining five major trends in "AI + Design":

I. From "experimentation" to "deep collaboration" — AI is now part of most designers’ workflows. No longer merely an assistive tool, AI has become a collaborative partner that thinks and evolves with designers.

II. From “prompts” to “node-based workflows” – AI design tools are becoming more precise and controllable. Designers can now orchestrate generative logic like a flowchart and achieve multi-modal synergy, rather than relying solely on keyword prompts.

III. From “visual design” to “full-process R&D” — AI gives individual designers team-level capabilities. Designers can now take the lead on project direction instead of participating only in the visual stage.

IV. From “giving a fish” to “teaching to fish” – AI opens new monetisation opportunities. Beyond traditional copyright design and design services, designers can now sell models and prompts, develop tools and plugins, and even establish digital asset stores and digital humans, diversifying their revenue streams.

V. The potential rise of "anti-AI creation": "handcrafted design" may become a future luxury. This "anti-algorithm" aesthetic could become a powerful counter to homogenization and a pursuit of true uniqueness.

A Designer-Tailored Agent

Covering Diverse Use Scenarios

At the event, ZCOOL officially launched ZCOOL Design Agent, an AI design tool tailor-made for professional designers. It enables the rapid creation of AI design workflows to meet a wide range of production needs.

Founded in 2006, ZCOOL operates the professional designer community "ZCOOL Community", the one-stop licensed visual content marketplace "ZCOOL HelloRF", and the creative marketing solution platform "ZCOOL Co-Creation", serving 18 million creative professionals with copyright solutions and visual marketing services covering learning, showcasing, networking, employment, transactions, and entrepreneurship.

Integrated directly with ZCOOL Community, the new AI tool allows designers to share their workflows or reuse those created by peers, amplifying the value of quality design resources. As more designers create and share AI workflows on ZCOOL, the platform is expected to accelerate exploration of new creative models across the industry.

2025 ZCOOL Top 100 Design List Revealed

70% of Selected Works Combine Design + Technology

As the flagship release of ZCOOL Design Week, the 2025 ZCOOL Top 100 Designs feature works such as the VFX for "Ne Zha 2", OpenAI's Super Bowl commercial, the poster for Jackson Yee's concert, the physical album design for Wu Tiao Ren's "Earth Love Song", and the art design for the animated short "Little Monster from Lang Lang Mountain". The 100 selected works span AI, industrial, graphic, web, and motion design, demonstrating the breadth of contemporary creative practice.

As China's first global annual design ranking based on open nomination, professional recommendations, and big-data analytics, the Top 100 received nearly 10,000 high-quality submissions this year. More than 30 judges, together with over 1,000 ZCOOL-recommended designers, evaluated works across four dimensions: social value, insight & innovation, design aesthetics, and results.

Notably, 70% of the selected works focus on "Design + Technology". Highlights include AI short films, interactive installations, stage concepts, consumer electronics, and transportation designs — among them: "Dave Decides to Jump into the Sea," winner of the Most Commercial Potential Award at the AIGC Film Unit of the 15th Beijing International Film Festival; the Osaka Expo "Shining Hat" light show; "Dream Recorder," a bedside device integrating AI, hardware, and art; Pixboom Spark, the world's first cinema-grade high-speed camera with back-illuminated sensor; and the world's first one-button flying car, partially founded by Elon Musk.

Gathering Global “Super-Designers”

Accelerating the Integration of New Technology and Design

The 2025 ZCOOL Design Week also brought together super-designers, industry pioneers, artists, brands, and aesthetics enthusiasts from around the world. The program featured 16 keynote talks and the 2025 ZCOOL Super AI Designer award ceremony.

Wu Xinhong, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Meitu, noted that super-designers of the AI era are already using AI for cross-domain creation and are deeply engaged in feature definition, technology trade-offs, marketing, and even business decision-making. "ZCOOL is committed to helping more people become super-designers in the AI era," he said. "

At the event, internationally renowned artist and AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale) member Kan Tai-Keung delivered a new interpretation of creative design; Pan Hu, product & packaging designer and founder of Pan Hu Lab, shared frontier insights into packaging design; Tommy Li, celebrated brand designer and creative director of Tommy Li Design Workshop, discussed the evolving role of designers; and animation producer Peter Dodd demonstrated how character creation drives storytelling in animation.

Other speakers include Li Xibin (founder of Super Plants and Rong Qi), internationally acclaimed animation director Hu Yibi, Yu Yimeng (head of fashion design at CAFA School of Design), Bai Wuchang (founder of Bai Wuchang Studio), Mr. Shu (copywriter-blogger & founder of Copywriting Science), Yan Yongliang (creator of the Tsanger Font Library), Bei Bang (co-founder of AI·DAO), Victoria Lu (curator & critic), Hai Xin & Simon A-Wen (AI creators), Zay-G (cross-disciplinary designer & digital artist), and MERJIC (digital artist/visual-modeler) all shared forward-looking perspectives on industry transformations.

Industry experts noted that by centering on the theme "Super-Designers of the AI Era", and through trend reporting, tool releases, and industry rankings, the ZCOOL Design Week 2025 helps designers understand the AI era, expand their capabilities, and accelerate the integration of new technologies with the design industry.