Mastering Midjourney: How to create consistent, beautiful brand imagery without complex prompts | Jamey Gannon

It all comes down to having a very tight and manicured process, which thankfully I have spent my 10 good Julian hours in mid-Journey and Anna and Anna everything to figure out exactly what that is. You're not pulling your hair out, prompting all day. One of the things I like about the mood board is it's a visual language to explain to mid-Journey what you're trying to do. The picture is worth a thousand words, like literally a picture to an LLM is worth a thousand words. Quintening like Vogue or High Fashion or even like a different artist name is a great way to tell the model a ton of stuff without actually having to tell a ton of stuff. In the past, brand and creative directors or agencies will give you these photos and be like cool call us and re-up when you want more photos. What I love is that you're like, look, you're going to value me for all this up front work that I'm going to do to define the space, give you these codes, really give you reference images. And then now you can go do this for yourself, it's just like a very different model of providing service. And I think it creates a really positive collaboration between the client and the creative director. Welcome to How I AI. I'm Claire Vogue, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today we have an aesthetic episode with Jamie Ganon, who is an AI creative director. It is going to show us how to create consistent, beautiful and unique brand assets using mid-journey, Nana, Banana, Flora and more. This is a workflow we haven't seen yet and goes into incredible depth on how to create awesome brand assets that you can use to uplevel all of your designs. Let's get to it. As an AI founder, you're used to sprinting towards product market fit, your next round or that first enterprise contract. But speed isn't enough for AI startups buyers expect security, compliance and transparency from day one. That's why serious AI startups use Vanta with deep integrations and automated workflows built for fast moving AI teams. Vanta gets you audit ready fast and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring as your models, infra and customers evolve. AI innovators like Lengchain, writer and cursor scaled faster and closed bigger deals by getting security right early with Vanta. Listers can claim a special offer of $1,000 off Vanta at Vanta.com/HowIAI. Jamie, thanks for joining HowIAI. I am having you on the show for a very selfish reason, which is I think I'm the only pink AI brand in all of SAS. And when I saw your work, I was like, oh my god, I need this lady to teach me how to create brand imagery that is beautiful and fun and girly and whatever magic she has I need. So talk to me about how we can get amazing images like what you're showing us right now. I think consistently this is the most important part because I can get a one-off image. That's this great, but I can't get this brand portfolio. So you got to tell me your sorcery. Yeah, I made it all comes down to like, unfortunately, having a very tight and manicured process, which thankfully I have spent my 10 good Julian hours in mid-Journey and Manna and everything to figure out. He's happy what that is. So you're not pulling your hair out, prompting on it. And yeah, I would love to show you. Great. So where do we start? We need to teach people how to do this. You know, what's step one? So first thing that I always do is I'm going to start in either Pinterest or Cosmos and I'm going to create a mood board that is the general vibe of what I want. So for this exercise, I wanted to have like a very pink and cute, but still kind of like not super girly, very internet kind of coded aesthetic. I like especially with AI doing like juxtaposition. I think that's really fun. So we have like an orange with piercing. We have like a fluorescent fruit, dog on a computer, things where they shouldn't be. We have like a grungy unicorn. So that this is like a really cool aesthetic to start with. And I typically start, there's two ways that I usually start. I will either go in with a mood board in mid-Journey and you can basically just copy and paste your images in or you can start by adding them as astrofs as you can see here. So astrofs basically are style references and they kind of do exactly what they sound like. It just tells mid-Journey to take the overall style and coloring and camera treatment on vibe if you will and it like tells it to apply that. Now one of the first prompts that I tried to create this aesthetic is I use that mood board that you saw that I made. And in this part of my process and the create part of my process, I'm just trying to get information. I'm trying to figure out like what what are the images telling AI? What is my prompting telling AI? What the mood board telling AI? And I just want to generate very fast. So I'm not very precious when I'm doing these prompts like right here. I just have beautiful female model. I have astronaut you can see I'm using that mood board here. But if we remember like the original mood board and those final images that you guys have a sneak peek of, we can see that we're like very far off from where we want to be. And I think we're a lot of people that are starting to use AI and get kind of tripped up is like if you've ever just like raw dog generated something in like mid-Journey or chat to BT. Like this might be like great to you and like some of these images stand alone are really cool to me. But if we're working for like a client or we're trying to be consistent with the brand style, we need to be like really, really honest with ourselves on like does this actually look like that vibe. And truthfully it does not. So I think that there's going to be a better approach to get things going. One thing I want to call out what if you could go go back is I think one of the things people lack when they're working with more of these truly creative generative AI tools is they lack language. And so one of the things I like about the mood board is it's a visual language to explain to mid-Journey what you're trying to do what I like about the style references, which we've done a couple episodes that have reference style references in terms of mid-Journey we've done one with Zach the creative and design lead at gamma we've done one where we were looking at style rest for more photography styles. So these are just like alternative languages to tell mid-Journey or another tool something specific about a visual aesthetic, which I feel like a lot of people just art trained if you're not trained as a designer if you're not trained as a photographer. You don't have and so I love this a picture is worth a thousand words like literally a picture to an LLM is worth a thousand words. The other thing that I want to do if you go to your mood board versus what was generated one of the things I want to call out about this where you're comparing the mood board to the images is somebody who has been a designer and has been around photographers I bet you can see this and say okay like the saturation and the contrast on these photos is not as high. As there are in the generated images there's this like washed out vibe on some of the photography on the generated images and so one of the tricks that I wonder if people might think about is you can actually upload this to like a like a chat to your clod and you could say explain to me why the photos don't match the mood board. And so you know you are probably an expert at this and have language to figure out why it doesn't match but if for folks that are trying to teach themselves language that's just one trick I think is really useful is throw this in and say hey chat you be explained to me why these top four images aren't in the same style as the bottom and that can sort of give you a seed seed to start I try and void prompting at all costs in my process but. Like for this example we're going to go like super super simple with like using asked for some mood boards but yeah if I'm in one of these like I'm doing some insane editorial work for clients that needs to be consistent across like 100 images and like full proof to like a consumer I that's when like getting really into the details especially models like no banana can be super helpful great okay so this doesn't match what do we do. Basically what I kind of clean from this is like the mood board is not doing its job it's not communicating the vibe properly this is something that happens a lot with majority mood boards there's not a ton of like documentation from majority on exactly how it works but as creatives you can tell like the more kind of consistent and we board is let's say it's like five images of like fuzzy 3D cats you're more likely to get an image of like a fuzzy whatever you prompt when we're doing more generalized vibe stuff like this mid journey content. And to average things out with the mood board and I find that using s refs as the mood board instead essentially can give much better results so this was sort of the next step in my process I wanted to try the s refs and see if that made it better and you can tell we're definitely getting better contrast we're getting a little bit more kind of aesthetic and edgy a little bit more of that like 2025 aesthetic that we want but it's pulling really really green for me. So what I ended up doing is that just removed that green eye s ref this is something that comes with intuition you know I've been using mid journey for like three years so I kind of can like understand like. where I don't know, feels like source for me, but I can understand where the LLM is pulling certain things. And I knew that if I removed this green, it would solve all my problems. So I did. And as you can see, we're starting to get a little bit more neutral and tone, we're also a little bit more zoomed out to especially with the people photos. So now I know I am on the right direction. Can I ask a question real quick? When you say I'm using the S-Refs, where are you getting those from your mood board or how do you actually deciding what the S-Refs are, just for people who are less familiar with mid-jury? I've just using literally the ones that were on that original Pinterest mood board. So you can just copy and paste that image and put it in there. And then as you copy and paste things in, it'll like save in a library for you, like forever. So if I wanted to bring that green one back in to keep trying stuff, it's like already there for me. Got it. So instead of the S-Ref codes, that a lot of people-- and we've talked about in the past-- you're using literally the UI to just drag in images as style references. And that for you sometimes gets you better results than just using the general mood board process. Yeah. Cool. And then I have one more question, which is do you have some go-to test prompts? I love the astronaut as a prompt, because there's a lot of ways you could generate an astronaut. Do you have some go-tos that you run through when you're doing a mood board, or does it really depend on your client and what you're working on? Yeah. I would say I love doing a ethereal female model for some reason. I do that a lot. I do that a lot. I'm, yeah, this is a crazy silver one that I was doing. It tends to just give a more elevated vibe than just regular model. I think I do cats a lot, because there's just a lot of texture to work with. The other thing I would say is that there is probably a lot of training data of cat pictures on the internet. So, majorly, you're doing a good job with the cat. Yeah. Running to-- I feel like I did that a lot. I'm glad this is my first generation. It's not crazy. That's rolled out the way down there. But yeah, I'll do running a lot or runner. Yeah, anything with like an astronaut's fun, too. Anything that's specific enough to give you the vibe, I'd say vibe is like kind of not so-- A broad enough, not those different styles apply. OK, so you've used these style references. You're getting a little closer. What's the next step? Yeah, so I consider this part of mine like create step. And I got the goal is just to get some information. This should take like 10 or 15 minutes to start the create process. And then what I'm going to do next is I'm going to move on to iterating. And that's what we're going to start, like getting a little bit more specific with our process, maybe slightly more technical, and then starting to combine more styles to get like your own unique style and get better consistency. So what I'm going to do particularly in this process is I'm going to start to bring in some personalization codes and other mood boards. So what ended up helping me get these results is my personalization code that I call late 2025 aesthetic. Now, personalization codes, again, it's kind of like a little bit of mystery how it works exactly at the end of the head. But when you're creating a personalization code, you're just going to put you through this endless flop matrix of images that you're either going to vote one or two or skip. And basically, you're just telling it what you like. And you can have as many profiles as you want. So for this profile in particular, I was trying to think-- I was trying to rate images that were of a 2025 aesthetic. So more iPhone style. And we can see here. You'd pick that one. Yeah. Or I skip a lot. That's another thing when I'm giving advice to people on personalization codes. There's a lot out there on-- like, Mitch or Nees says, don't skip that much. But some people are like, skip as much as possible. Some people like to skip a medium amount. I tend to skip a medium amount and only pick things that I would like if I generated it. But I do find there's kind of style bleeding. So for example, let's say I like the quality and the colors of this image. If I like a bunch of images that look like this, I might get a heavily influenced style that wants to be painted or wants to be the sake of inture, friend of songs, whatever aesthetic. So that's a way to consider as you're going through this. One thing I want to call out for folks that is a little bit of a side of this particular flow, which is when you're building an AI tool yourself, I have not seen this like this or that personalization flow in a lot of AI tools. And I think it's such a good way to fine tune whatever you're going to provide to your end user. And so a lot of times we get these end AB tests and a chat, GBT prompt. But this is so interesting to kind of put this up front and say, OK, let's spend five minutes telling me what you like. Then we can be more confident that when you have a downstream experience in my AI tool, it's going to look great. OK, and you can create this. I'm never-- again, I have not used mood boards or personalized. I'm just like, you'll low up in the main chat. So you can create as many of these as you want to use. Cool. Yeah. Unfortunately, you can't go in and edit them the same way that you can with mood boards, which is why you've got to be good at naming. Try to understand what you were doing six months ago when you spent two hours ranking images. But I have my own crazy system. That's just a quick brief on what personalization codes are. So what I started to do-- I think I'm back to these other images. I just felt like these could use more of my own style. And I felt that they were a little bit over-styledized. I do enjoy the pink. But I was curious to see if maybe we can get some other influences in there. So by adding my personalization code, I was able to just get more of a depth, I would say, also, because I wanted it to be very crisp and modern. You start to see better skin. That one to be looks like very a good match for some of your earlier ones. That one's the one that stands out to me. I mean, it's nuanced. But I'm liking where this is going now. Hold on. And I know it's just you and me in little astronauts in the middle. Yeah. Yeah. So you are combining some of your style reps and this personalization model on top of each other. You're getting way closer to what you want in terms of iteration. So how do we take this to the next step? Yeah. So I want to show you guys some of the other mid-journey techniques and ways, again, to start prompting and kind of up in the ante on what we're making. So as you can see here, these prompts are no longer just like women or astronauts. We're actually starting to give some aesthetic thought. So one prompt I actually found this on the Explore page a couple weeks ago. But it's days editorial photo shoot. So days just like this really hip magazine, if you're not familiar. So doing stuff like that, mentioning like Vogue or high fashion or even like a different artist name is again, a great way kind of in the same line of like a pictures worth 1,000 words to tell the model a ton of stuff without actually having to tell a ton of stuff. So with like a days editorial is a good really famous like ASAP Rocky cover. It's like super gritty, high contrast. All these words that like are really hard to find. Even if you are like a professional photographer, but when you just say days editorial, depending on how like famous publication is, majority seem to know what you're talking about or you know Vogue, especially. It's going to know kind of like the level of the highlights and okay, we're going to be doing fashion stuff. So I love doing that same thing with the word editorial. In this case, I say a woman in her mid 20s, deep in thought, up close macro photo. So not the most crazy prompt. I think everybody knows what a macro photo is. Up close is not like center frame zoomed in. It's very human language that I'm using. So what I did for this prompt is I wanted it to really have the vibe of this original ASRF we have here. I wanted to make sure it was like the same composition. So what I did is I used an image reference. Image references are kind of tricky because definitionally, they just structure your composition. But a lot of the times like the structure of an image and the composition kind of is the style. So I kind of don't like to separate style references and image references. If you have a woman posing like really sexily and you use as an image prompt, that stylistically is going to influence a lot of what's happening in your image. It's going to immediately be more editorial or sensual or sent, et cetera. But anyway, I use this as an image reference because I want that profile. But obviously, as you can tell, we're getting immediately, which I don't hate some of these. But my intention was more of a thinking photo. So what I did is I literally just zoomed in in the mid-journey UI. I cropped it. And then I just dragged it back in. And then I ran the prompt again. And then we got something very similar to what we were working with here, especially in terms of image quality, the colors. For better or worse, it's also kind of mimicking her bone structure, especially this one. You can see we have these contours. So image reference will give you a lot in terms of style. One thing I want to call out that I've noticed in two of your flows is on the-- we're getting too much green. There was just such a compelling element in that green eyeshadow photo, which was half of the eye was very green. It was clearly the most obvious thing about the photo. And with this image, the most obvious thing about the photo is she's blowing a bubble of gum. And so what I like is that, in both of those, you're just boot the thing that is so obvious and so overwhelming, and you can either do that by kicking out the image, or you can do that by cropping out the part of the image that is pulling the rest of the generations down. So that's a really clever technique. And I love that you're just like, I'm just going to screenshot and drag it over. I'm not going to try to prompt it to say remove the bubble gum or whatever. Yes, yes. Yeah, oh my god. You will spend all day in mid-journey, even if you're using some of you can do is the no feature or you can say no bubble gum. You can try and like say like lips are showing. Sometimes it'll work most of the time it won't. And you really want to get specific. You could take this in an end of an end and say like remove her bubble gum. But I don't think it's going to get us like that. Well, that's what I was going to say. And I know we're going to get to Nana Banana in a minute. But then also if you move into Nana Banana, you are going to wait like 45 minutes for the photo to come back and like waste a bunch of credits and stuff that you just don't need, right? Yeah, you do this. Yeah, that's another thing too. Like doing all this S-Ref and this like the profile codes, I don't have to prompt. So like 2025 aesthetic, you know, like model ask. Like it already knows that I'm going to have like a very conventionally attractive blonde woman because I gave it a conventionally attractive blonde woman or vice versa. I don't have to type in the colors and the greeting every time. I don't have to do those horrible JSON prompts that no one can use. So this is like the laziest way ever to do prompting. Okay, let's go into some like more specifically prompting my archdiocese. So one thing I want to do, again, I like the juxtaposition of like the images on the original board. I thought it might be fun to have like a deer in a New York City apartment kind of like bringing like the forest into the city and that can be cute. I got these images like they're definitely on par in terms of like general style, but I was kind of missing like the New York aspect of it. So instead of like going and maybe finding like a New York City S-Ref or like finding an image of an apartment, putting it as an image reference, which potentially could have worked. This is one time that I do actually do some prompting. So all I said was like New York's fine line can be seen in the window behind it. So again, not doing anything super crazy with the language, I'm literally just saying what I want to see. Another example, I thought the pink couch was a little bit too fantastical. So instead I just said on a matte black other couch. And now we're starting to get, we know it's in New York. It's a little bit more kind of playing for you to ask I guess. A couple other things I tried was I said at night, I think kind of give me at night, maybe since at vibes. And then one, the craziest I'll ever get is I have a list, this is included in my course of like all these different cameras. So I have like DSLR, I have mirrorless, I have digital IA film. That's kind of like quick shortcuts because that's really hard to remember all of them and the aperture and stuff. I barely know what aperture means. So sometimes when I just want to try changing up the vibe or make things more realistic, make them have like a more 90s aesthetic, I'll just piece in like a camera that mimics that. So the Sony RX100, I think I'd probably generate it with like chat to you. I'm assuming that this is a 90s digital camera. And this is kind of like what I would consider the final image. So we know maybe the likes seem to be fixed, but we know it's in New York, we can see it's in like a high rise, we have that couch, it's a deer. Oh, another thing to know what the prompt is like saying luxury, New York City apartment, instead of saying on the fourth floor of a high rise in a new post-war New York City apartment, you're just saying luxury. Because like everybody knows and the alumnus or not alum, the I know luxury is going to be like a big metal thing, super high up and retrieval of all the top. So that one word, luxury just gives us everything that we need to know about the scene, which is very fun. What is great about this particular prompt is it reminds me of what Ravi in an earlier episode did talking about mid-journey for generating images again. And he's like, you need the subject, and you need the setting, and you need the style. And so you have the subject, which is the deer. You have the setting, which is this luxury apartment at night, and you have the style. And he did a very similar thing, which is like cameras are cheat codes for styling. And again, what I appreciate about you're doing, and we love to hear on how AI is everybody just wants to be lazier with their prompting. No one want, I mean, if you go to the explore page on mid-journey and you look through people's prompts, like people need a job, man, like, this is too long. And so I love the idea. You're just trying to find shortcuts for yourself to make these shorter and shorter and shorter, but still get the same quality. Because you're generating a lot, a lot of it just. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Like sometimes like thousands of a day, depending on what I'm doing. If I'm lucky, I nail things really fast. Like, this is aesthetic. I happen to get like very quickly. I'm whole point of it being 30 minutes. But yeah, if you're trying to do something that needs like a lot of different aspects, like I was doing a stock photo project recently, I'm doing like nature stuff. I'm doing people stuff. I'm doing skin. So like in this case, like, I can't really have just like one mood board. Because there's a lot of different things that we need to do in terms of treatment. So like being able to get like super, like what's probably I have here? Like CMYK highlights for me has been a big one that I've been using. Deep blocks, high contrast. And then we have just a really powerful SRF, which actually came from a previous mid-journey generation. I did that day. And then we get all this like cool stuff. I think yeah, the prompts experiencing music. So we're starting to see like ears and like, you know, maybe body sensations. That's the other tip too is like when you're in, especially the create phase, maybe even in a ring phase, they kind of blend together. Sometimes I'll literally, if I'm doing like a startup DAC or something like a VC DAC, sometimes I'll literally just like paste in the sentence and just like see what it gives me. Like the full sentence like this is our business model. Just to get me thinking, just to get the model thinking. Same thing like just to like financial markets. Really vague stuff. Mid-journey is like very poetic, I would say. You can like write little poems to it and it'll actually give you some. It'll do what you want it to do. Like this is experiencing music to me. You know what I mean? You see like the vibrations through your body. Versus, you know, if you were to describe this image, it's gonna sound like a whole bunch of nonsense. Even worse, even worse if you do it in like Gemini or something, you have to give you, you're just never gonna be able to get this, which is why I love mid-journey so much because it just feels like an extension of your self basically. Every time I see mid-journey, I have to tell people, you know, now on this host of this AI podcast, I get to see a lot of tools and I do a lot of things every day and I mid-journey was the first tool that just switched my mind about what was possible with AI. It really is an inspirational tool. It's fun. It's accessible to not just people like you that are building a business off of this, but my kids love mid-journey. It's such a creative space and I feel like it's one of the more, you know, Darius' hate like soulful AI experiences. And so I love the idea of just getting out of like the tactical and practical prompting of like, I want this thing in this camera, blah blah blah, and just playing in a space with it to see if it can inspire, inspire things for you. This episode is brought to you by Lovable. If you've ever had an idea for an app that didn't know where to start, Lovable is for you. Lovable lets you build working apps and websites by simply chatting with AI. Then you can customize it, add automations, and deploy it to a live domain. It's perfect for marketers spinning up tools, product managers prototyping new ideas or founders launching their next business. Unlike no-code tools, Lovable isn't about static pages. It builds full apps with real functionality and it's fast. What used to take weeks, months, or even years, you can now do over the weekend. So if you've been sitting on an idea, now's the time to bring it to life. Get started for free at lovable.dev. That's lovable.dev. Okay, so just to recap really quickly on our mid-journey journey, we have done mood boards. We have used those mood boards to kind of create some and get a sense of what's working well with the mood boards or not. We've pulled in those mood boards via style references. We've also pulled in specific images. As image references, you've shown us how to go from the most generic astronaut prompt to slightly more specific, but still pretty lazy, dear New York City luxury prompt. Now you're starting to get stuff that you want. How do you kind of like package this up and scale it out? I'll basically just keep going with this same asterisk stat and just continue to generate images across the subject matter. So for this one, I'm thinking about AI bubbles. I'm thinking about talking about technology. I'm thinking about talking about culture. So I literally just prompted AI bubble using the same prompt. But as you can see, we're getting into the dreaded five finger thing. So in this case, I'll hit very subtle or very strong. It'll help me come up with a couple more generations of that aesthetic. So that's one technique I'll use, kind of like fight those. I will also go and are like steel prompts or get inspiration for prompts from the explore page, especially when I'm generating like, a really large kind of like stock photo sets of images. So like, here's like an edgy man. I don't know how many edgy man photos yet. I thought the bastard balls could be a cool motif in the aesthetic. So then I kind of like pick apart those prompts and I use them here. And then eventually I get to kind of like what we're saw at the beginning all these images that I'm very, very happy with and I'll move on to sort of reinforcing my prompts if need me and editing images. So one thing that I always try, especially once I have like the exact outputs that I want already, I'll go ahead and I'll make another mood board again. So you can literally just add from your gallery, you can just click. So I sucked it, I think this is about like 30 images that I liked and then what you can do is you can use this again. So what should we prompt? You're like turtle and this is I was thinking turtle, this is weird. You're thinking turtle, we're floating through the journey together. I was like, maybe she'll do like a turtle. Yes, everybody. So this is like one again kind of back to the beginning. We're going to try the mood board and see if it works if doesn't. The good thing is we already know this Sref stuff works. Something else that I was trying, I'll take that new mood board with the images and then I'll try with the different mood board that I have. So this one's called real skin. This is just what I'm trying to make like really realistic images of a skin or of models. Obviously it influences a little bit of like what they look like too. So I will use both mood boards at the same time. I might just say model and then we're able to kind of like play with using VOS aesthetics. Now I will say, so these are generated with the mood board. Definitely like closer than like if we hadn't used it, but I still think the Sref is going to like be supreme here. Yeah, so what I'll do is I'll just take that this mood board here and I'll click that run the same prompt again, but using the Sref and using the mood board. We'll see what we give this. Yeah, so same for this like closer to what we want, but like not as like style, so click consistent as these, which sometimes depending on what you're making like in my opinion, like all these images are great, but like over time it might start to look a little bit flat or like too much pink. So like weaving in a couple images that are like not the exact same style can also be good too, as long as you have this kind of like through line. So like good example here is like this turtle or mood board and our Sref is like not super optimized for animals. Yeah, that's what I would say. Yeah, it's way more optimized for like editorial stuff. So what I might do here, I do have like a nature mood board that I have, adventure core, and I never do leave my mood boards. So I'll just keep them around. I'm just in case. Yeah, we'll see what this gives us using the Srefs. Or just here, you're getting a sexy lady. Naturally. That is one of the downsides of mid-journey is you're going to get a lot sexy ladies. Yeah. So again, cool, not too realistic. So this might be a part of the process where we kind of go back to square one in a sense and think like okay, maybe we need to find reference photos of vintage national geographic that kind of have this like print aesthetic, but it's of animals to give mid-journey a little bit better information to work with. What I want to say is I love this process of you're just like finding the right two or three things to mix in mid-journey and sometimes it's a style reference and a prompt. Sometimes it's a prompt in a mood board. Sometimes it's a mood board in image reference. You know, and so you can just combine all these things and ultimately iterate to a package that you want to want to send to clients. Yeah. And then I'll just deliver this usually in Figma. The only thing I've been to any, they don't have any sort of like sharing. I think I've literally seen designers like if they're on a big enough project, they will like literally create a mid-journey account just for that. And then what I usually do, I'll literally just paste in in Figma. What that like final prompt is. So the most important stuff is like the profiles that you're using for this one, I happen to go like very crazy with the profiles, stylization if necessary. And then I just say like these are the reference photos. So for like all of these images that you see here, I think like 100% of them, if not like 90% of them, regenerated with like this exact setup right here. So I just give the clients this. I'll give them a set of images. Also, these images are going to be like in context, but yeah, it's still kind of a wildest. What I think is really cool about this and the reason why you're leaning into it, I really appreciate is, you know, in the past, and we've talked about this a little bit in our episode with Zacket Gamma, who got a very similar package like this from their brand team, is in the past brand and creative directors or agencies would like give you these photos and be like cool call us and re up when you want more photos. And what I love is that you're like, look, I put in all this, you're going to you're going to value me for all this upfront work that I'm going to do. Yeah. To find the space, give you these codes, like really give you reference images. And then now you can go do this for yourself. And if you want to involve the brand or you're not quite getting what you want, great, come back to me and I can give you another package that we can go forward. But it's like a very different model of providing service. I know some of them kicking myself in my gosh, I probably should just not get to some and just continue charging them, but I'm kind of allergic to retainers. I like doing this beginning process so much that I don't want my old clients to bother me. I just want to keep making new stuff. Well, I love it. And I'm sure people are going to see this and you might have a few more for new client. Okay. So you showed us kind of end to end how we get through these packages. What are just a couple other workflows that you find yourself using? I guess they continue on with this one. I can show some that I already have done. So for some of the images in mid-June, I'm sure you have all seen the terrible hands oftentimes to when you're doing kind of like more vintage aesthetics. If it ever can give you an Apple logo, it might give you like some weird old computer. This is a big idea a lot of the time, even just for my personal stuff, I post on X. I'll take my mid-June images and I'll take them into Flora or Higgs Field sometimes. And I'll just use Nana Banana as Photoshop. Nana Banana literally is just Photoshop. That's exactly how you should think of it. You're just able to speak to Photoshop, essentially, for most people. So what I have here is this image that I really like to be generated it, but I want to upscale it. So like get more texture in her shirt and stuff. And then I want this to be like a real computer. Nana Banana does her car a little more prompting than mid-June, but it's much more, I don't want to say forgiving. It's much less complicated like if you're a beginner in some ways, depending on what side of the line you stand on, whether you're more like technical or more artistic. But anyway, I just said replace the computer. She's typing on a 2026 midnight block MacBook Pro. So Nana Banana is like a reasoning model. So it actually knows what things are. So you don't have to give it a reference photo all the time, especially for stuff that's in like the public mind's here. I also usually mention like don't change anything else. I say keep the position of the size of the computer exactly the same. And then just because I've done this so many times I know sometimes it doesn't open in. I might change the angle slightly. So I just say exactly what it's seeing. So like only the left side and the keyboard is visible. And yeah. And then if I were to download this photo, it's going to be like 4000, 4000 versus like 800, 800, kept the style pretty much exactly the same. We just slotted like a real computer. So it would be relevant to like use now until she made you. I'll just going to behind the scenes at how AI we use a very similar process to upscale screen caps from the podcast for our YouTube thumbnails. And so you know, I like make make these faces and then we want to clip them for the podcast, but just screencapping from the video is really low resolution. And so we use a very similar prompt to upscale and improve lighting on our photos. And then we drop those into our thumbnails. Oh, I gotta show you. You don't actually have to take thumbnails anymore. Show me live live demo. Have you been seeing my like, articles? No, show me detour. So this is a really like kind of for us all these like notes and stuff. So my profile photo is AI. I think I got quite attention for doing that. I think I ended up making in Higgs Photo at some point. But basically what I do is I'll take a bunch of selfies of me that are like more realistic looking because sometimes like, you know, it's like a selfie and like it doesn't look like you at all. I'll also like show my teeth. I don't have like perfectly straight teeth. I'll take a couple of reference photos and then I can just make me do whatever I want. This was another one I had a mid-journey photo that was this and I wanted her to be annoyed. I kind of already had this process in my head. I knew I wanted a photo of me in this vibe, but angry. So I took this photo, made her angry and then I replaced my face, which like, me on my best day, this 100% looks like me. I have like, muffled reference photos to make sure it's like actually getting my vibe. And then from there, I'm able to, you know, I was thinking about it like an anti-agency post. I think I just ended up using this photo. This was one, took me a couple tries. This is where again like reference photos kind of really come in and sometimes, especially with Nana, sometimes you just got to like, write that prompt, you know, like with the actual camera angles with the background. But I ended up just finding these on Pinterest, I believe, of like the aesthetic reference and the actual post-reference. And then this was for my article on AI legal stuff. What else am I done? - This is one recently, funny enough, I could not get it to give me extra fingers, which is hilarious, 'cause there were years of my life where I was trying to do the opposite. So I was like 15 minutes, I was able to get it to give me like AI fingers. That was a recent article I did too. Again, we're like using S-Rafs. This one didn't actually kind of like carry through, but in earlier references it did. - So I just wanna call it for people who are listening, not watching, 'cause I'm making a face, which is, do you mean basically dragged in a bunch of like realistic, but still my face, which is really hard as somebody who's trying to generate images of a real ethnic, but still my face is filthy. And then has used Flora to generate a bunch of mix and match remixed versions for articles and thumbnails. Got my YouTube thumbnails are about to get real good. I'm so excited, this is very, very helpful. And if I could throw back to probably three, two or three years ago, so it had to be three years ago, one of the first things that I did was back in the day when you actually didn't have these beautiful UIs is I fine-tune a model directly on my face that I could. - In the Laura. - Like it was like a light, I forget what it was called. - Yeah, it's a Laura I think. - Yeah, yeah, Laura. So I fine-tuned it on my face, and then I generated a bunch of images. And it was so useful to have this specific one. And now we're all spoiled. We can just do this in this UI. And I never want to see this Chad Steve job ever again, but I love the idea of dragging these two notes together into an image. - Yeah, people struggle, it's hard to get to nail it. I think it's like a really strange face. I'm like big eyes and stuff, that just latches on to me really well. Like I have an Asian boyfriend and it just like refuses. - Like every generation I make of him is just like a generic Asian guy. - We can do the aside of like the bias of what goes into these training set. I mean, we can get a lot of conventional, as you said, conventional attractive blonde women. - Yeah. - We can generate all day, all night, 'cause they're all over the internet. - Fingers crossed for men. - Every athlete, if you want an athlete in a journey, it's gonna be a very large black man. It's gonna be a very strong, beautiful, punk man. - Oh my God. - You can't even knock in a white athlete in a journey. - I mean, this is what's really interesting, is as you start to play with these monies, you really start to understand they are trained on the internet. And I was mentioning recently in some like Chit Chad about Malt Book, which is where all the open floor lobsters are together and people are like, why are they weird? And it was like they're weird because it's a fake Reddit trained on Reddit data and people on Reddit are weird. And so I think one of the things you have to know about using these models is like, where's the trading data come from? And therefore, what's it gonna generate for you and what isn't? And the more you explore it, the more you hit those edges. Jamie, I love all this. This is all super useful. I'm gonna be able to go put this into practice literally today 'cause we're working on a thumbnail today. - Awesome. - Yeah, I was doing it from. - So let's skip over to Lightning Round and then I will get you out to generating another thousand images. So my first question is, where do you go for inspiration? I think one of the things that you sort of like pass through is you're like, oh, if you know this magazine or that editorial style of that camera, and I feel like people aren't cultivating their visual taste and language enough. So what are some of your, you know, other than Pinterest, what are your some of your sources where you're continually improving your language and your aesthetic taste through exposure to other things? - Yeah, one thing that I recommend to everyone is to start a list on Twitter. There is tons of like, basically Tumblr accounts still to this day. That post like really aesthetic images. So like some of these are like, this account is what they're called pink glitter. So she posts a lot of like 2000 stuff. So that's really great to use for mid-journey fashion accounts. A lot of fashion accounts, so I follow. So I have a good Twitter list of like really aesthetic photos like this is obviously a great view. Again, want more sexy ladies? So that's what I do. Also, Cosmos, of course, is superb. So let's do like, theorial model here. - One of your favorite images. - Yeah. So obviously this is just like a treasure trove of astrap, especially for like specific moods and vibes. I feel like as a designer, I still, as much as I love Cosmos for like branding stuff, like logos and like website inspiration, I still use Pinterest a ton as like my home base. But it will still use Cosmos for like art direction things. The great thing about both of these is like Pinterest, Paws, a plug-in. So you can literally save from any page, especially like again, if you're on like X, you can go save to Pinterest. Cosmos, I believe has the same thing, but I don't have it turned on right now. So that's what I do. And then anytime I'm like shopping online again, X, Instagram, something I teach in my course as well is a daily taste practice. So just like get really on top of saving and archiving stuff. My mood boards and Pinterest are actually shockingly simple because I realized if I had too many, I was like getting kind of like decision fatigue, which is why my design inspiration board is 7,000 pins. It's probably time to like switch that up. But I have like, I don't know, one of this like 20 mood boards. So like instead of having like ethereal model mood board with like 10 images, I just have like one that's like astroph. And anytime I see anything on Pinterest that I would like love to bring in to mid-Journey one day, I just save it. And then when I need inspiration for like any project, even like client projects, like I'm doing a sock brand soon, so I have a lot of running stuff. I just save it all here. And then it's really easy for me to go through and just like copy and paste into mood boards. As you can see here, like these are images that I've saved. I don't know what the hell I was looking at. You were looking at that. It's like shells and it seems like very similar. It was like a website for like technical 3D scans, but this is like a grain of rice or something. But it was sick. So I like save this. And then I really need someone to do this for me. But I get like millions of views on Pinterest a month now because every time I see something and I save it, like images I was already going to save anyway. Like this is just from like high fashion Twitter. I just saved it and it has a 2,000 impressions. So not only this is a kind of like source of inspiration for you, it could actually be a source of business for you because you're sharing out and making resources useful to people. Jamie, my last question I have to ask you ask everybody, which is, you know, you have seemed to your profiting technique is keep it dead simple. We also talked a little bit before the show about how you don't love to prompt a lot. And you're not like, you know, you don't want to spend a bunch of time in cloth. But yeah, if AI is not giving you what you want, if we're getting ugly stuff here, what's your, what's your prompting or personal technique to just get it going in the right direction, whether it's images or text, are you mean? Firstly, take a break always like you're never going to be able to like see properly if you're kind of like in it. So like sleeping on it or just like walking away. And then sometimes I come back and I just like, do you new SREF? Didn't prompt like grab this reference, use this camera and then immediately works. So I would say walking away. And then part of my process too is just like during that walk away, when you come back, be like, okay, what is actually the problem? Like for some of these generations, I'm like, it's just too busy. It's too mid-journey. I'm using like 18 SREFs like, it's just not going to work. So I'm going to like take a step back. I'm going to read it in the mood board. And I'm going to figure out what exactly from these images is important. And it's like, all right, I keep getting this like stupid red color. I'm going to take out this red color. Like even though I love this image and I would love for, I would love for it to like come through, it's not give me what I want. Mid-journey's not listening to me. So again, like, I think I talked about this in the beginning, like brutal honesty. I like what's going on and trying to like not, I don't know. Make AI work the way you want to work and actually understanding how it works in Java. But I think time away is probably, I love it. Time away and seeing things from the AI's point of view. Yeah. Well, Jamie, this was great. How can we find you and where can we be helpful? Yeah. So I've been all my time on X. So X at Jamie Ganon or TechBembo's my name. And yeah, I have an AI course coming out. It's called the AI Creative Director. It's on Maven. You can find that on my X or my website as well. So if you are interested in like really deep diving into this and getting live coaching for me and hearing more by yapping on AI, I would highly recommend you do it. It's meant to be able to make you create consistent client level work I've shown today. So join the course. Awesome. We'll link to that in the show notes. Well, Jamie, thank you so much for sharing this. And I'm going to go dive into mid-journey. Awesome. Cool. Thanks, Claire. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiipod.com. See you next time.