AI Design for Writers: A Dream Come True

Building Brand Universes in 15 Minutes

Whenever a new technology or trend emerges, it's easy to get wrapped up in the newness of it all. Seemingly overnight, it's in the ether, it's on tv and in print, on social media, on people's lips; the have you heard’s and did you see’s start to become…err… pandemic.

In just the past few years, we’ve seen a few of these trends emerge, first around Bitcoin, and then more broadly crypto. Which gave rise to “Web 3.0” and NFT’s. But undergirding all of this was something even potentially bigger, more transformational, more terrifying, more magical. AI.

Even to laymen, AI was something bubbling underneath as this theoretical thing that would happen and change everything, it might kill us all or save us all or something or other. And then bam, it hit. It was here and regular people, media, consumers, politicians, technologists, entrepreneurs, creatives, the general public could actually use it, interface with it, and see for themselves in the flesh, the power and promise, the magic, of it.

As a creative director, I work closely with designers, photographers, artists, musicians, engineers and architects, and a good deal of my work ends up as visual product. Brand Identities, Packaging Designs, Marketing Graphics and Websites, Social Media, Displays, Merchandise, Photoshoots, Renderings, et al. All the things that make up the products we buy.

I write creative briefs, memos to colleagues, assemble mood-boards and vision statements, and try to write emotionally resonant and relevant story’s about and for our clients and partners, as well as our internal ideas.

Which means that while I am originating a lot of this work with words, I am not actually designing it. It’s what I love about my work—collaborating with people I find talented and with who I share an aesthetic sense with. But there’s always a lonesome feeling that I am somehow…not ultimately involved.

With the exception of avant garde Jazz musicians, I am probably more envious of visual artists—painters, sculptors, graphic designers, product engineers—than anyone else.

Still, I know my lane and try to stick with it. Yes I provide feedback, critique and design reviews, but at the end of the day, someone else is doing it.

Well, AI just upended that.

Because now, for the first time, I can design. My designer is the AI itself. I can type words and it can punch out designs. Very very accurately and very very quickly. This is truly a dream come true for me and, one might suspect, thousands or even millions of people like me.

Here’s a few quick examples. For a client with a cannabis brand in Colorado I asked MidJourney, one of the design AI apps now available, to help me design a series of brand concepts. The way it works is that the user “prompts” the AI app using words. So I can say “Give me a logo for a beer brand based on Medieval designs,” and MidJourney provided the below (in 45 seconds).

Ok, simple enough right? But I can also develop this even further, again, using language. And get more and more detailed, specific and expressionistic. So my next prompt is

“Provide me an advertisement for a craft beer brand with a knight, the setting is in a dark Bavarian Forest with an alpine lake in then background. Make the scene very cinematic and use a macro photography style as if using a Nikon Film Camera”

Now we are getting somewhere interesting. Now I’ve got the inspiration not only for the brand itself—the logo, colors, marks, packaging, bottling, etc—I’ve got the entire photoshoot planned out. Now just imagine me spending 5 hours on this. And I would have potentially hundreds of images for an entire brand. Previously, this work would take several months and upwards of $50k or $60k. Now it’s a week, tops.

On to my cannabis brand.

I wrote a prompt for a design of a food truck outfitted in a psychedelic skeleton and zombie cowboy brand outside of Red Rocks.

Then I asked for some headshots of a character for the brand.

Then, for some e-Zine’s and newspapers as potential marketing collateral for the brand to be dropped off in the waiting rooms of dispensaries and local coffee shops.

And then, finally, I asked for a full retail display for the brand. The actual work of this took about 15 minutes. Now of course it came with months of brand work, designs, identity, storytelling, scene setting, packaging designs and the like. But, in a word, magical.

But after all that, I sat down and wrote some ideas down and got an ENTIRE COMPLETE UNIVERSE for a brand. Now it is true that, for now, these are truly only concepts. They can’t be literally made or designed as is. A proper team of professional designers would need to analyze these concepts and do their best to replicate them into the various formats: print, retail, web, social, print etc. They’d need to edit and improve upon them where possible.

But that is besides the point. For now, as a writer, if I can imagine it, I can bring it to life. And that is quite literally a dream come true.