By now, it’s no secret that AI will considerably impact the longer term of branding and design—making us query how we will proceed to supply irreplaceable value as designers.
Some creatives like Alif Ibrahim of It’s Nice Which have suggested it’s used to automate mundane and repetitive tasks like resizing, exporting, or mindless pixel pushing.
Others like Evelio, the creative director at IDP Direct, see it as a approach to construct more curated mood boards and quickly communicate brand ideas to a client.
As a founding father of a branding agency myself, I’ve begun a journey to find how AI can improve upon what we create and the way we create it.
For those who’re not conversant in Midjourney, it’s one of the vital outstanding models in AI image generation up to now.
I experimented with the model to see how well it could produce a singular series of graphics for a recent brand identity.
Listed here are the outcomes:
While the exercise was more of a test, I learned some useful insights along the way in which. Let’s undergo the method together.
1. Defining your graphic criteria
When defining a method, first discover and construct upon unique visual characteristics or themes that your graphics should embody.
For this brand, let’s explore a method that captures the ideas of 3D momentum and luminous color mixing.
It’s helpful to reference existing inspiration you either found online or captured personally. Compiling the inspiration into buckets will form a clearer frame of reference and later turn out to be useful as Midjourney inputs.
In our case, I even have already designed the emblem and color palette. It’s essential that the brand new graphics are closely aligned and work together as a unified system.
By abstracting the characteristics of the emblem and color palette (seen above), we may also help guide a more on-brand image end in Midjourney.
Now that we’ve identified each the graphic inspiration and brand asset imagery, it’s time to take them each into Midjourney.
2. Mixing in Midjourney
While most of us are conversant in the /imagine command, I personally feel it will not be as powerful when working toward a really specific visual final result.
In our case, we’ll use the /mix command.
This command “blends” multiple images together and generates a picture somewhere in between.
By typing /mix + (Return) into the Discord message box, the above drag-and-drop modules will appear.
Now it’s playtime. Let’s upload our image inputs to the drag-and-drop modules. Listed here are some various combos I had explored:
It looks like considered one of the outcomes above needs additional refining. For instance, we’ll decide to re-blend this image result:
We’ll re-blend this image with one other in hopes it’ll bring the result closer to what we’re searching for:
There. Repeating this process will help to grow a library of images with one cohesive style.
In the long run, here’s where I landed:
I also created another interesting styles along the way in which:
3. Upscaling your graphics
Now that now we have a series of graphics we’re comfortable with, we’ll upscale them to a much higher res than Midjourney allows.
For upscaling, I like to recommend a free tool like BigJPG.com.
4. Post editing
MidJourney isn’t perfect. There might be situations where further editing is required. Whether it’s fine-tuning colours or composition, I take advantage of Photoshop for the ending touches.
For those who‘d wish to proceed to edit using Midjourney text prompts, Lars Nielsen’s prompt guide is an important beginner’s reference.
This exercise will in no way guarantee the identical results for everybody. Quite, it’s to showcase an example of AI’s power applied to design.
Designers will ultimately need to think about how AI might be used purposefully. Using this technology can have an instrumental impact on streamlining tedious design workflows but in addition has the flexibility to compromise the standard of our work if we’re not careful.
Moving forward, it’s essential that we collectively construct upon our AI knowledge as a community to ensure success in our creative work.
Completely happy mixing!