what is the future of carbon

May 19, 2023

By now, it’s no secret that AI will considerably impact the future of branding and design—making us question how we can continue to provide irreplaceable value as designers.
Some creatives like Alif Ibrahim of It’s Nice That have suggested it be 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 way to build more curated mood boards and quickly communicate brand ideas to a client.
As a founder of a branding agency myself, I’ve begun a journey to discover how AI can improve upon what we create and how we create it.

What I did

If you’re not familiar with Midjourney, it’s one of the most prominent models in AI image generation to date.
I experimented with the model to see how well it could produce a unique series of graphics for a new brand identity.

Here are the results:

While the exercise was more of a test, I learned some valuable insights along the way. Let’s go through the process together.
1. Defining your graphic criteria
When defining a style, first identify and build upon unique visual characteristics or themes that your graphics should embody.
For this brand, let’s explore a style that captures the ideas of 3D momentum and luminous color blending.
Graphic inspiration captures two buckets: 3D momentum and luminous color blending
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 become useful as Midjourney inputs.
In our case, I have already designed the logo and color palette. It’s important that the new graphics are closely aligned and work together as a unified system.
Distilling the brand assets down into abstract snapshots
By abstracting the characteristics of the logo and color palette (seen above), we can help guide a more on-brand image result in Midjourney.