The Role of Midjourney & its Effect on Graphic Design

If you’ve been on social media in the last month or so, you’ve likely seen a wide array of AI-generated images. These range from beautiful vistas to nuclear blasts in the style of Van Gogh, and are only limited by two things — the human imagination and the model’s ability to interpret the prompt.

As a software company we’re always exploring new tech, and boy have we gone down the rabbit hole of this flavor of the month. We’ve spent an ungodly amount of time with Midjourney experimenting with key words, styles, and prompts. As you would guess, there’s currently a war being waged between those who see this as a boon for the masses and those who see this as an extinction event for artists, graphic designers, and the like. I’ll be keeping a close eye on that debate over the next few months, but for now I’m far more interested in something else — what is the role of this technology and the assets it creates?

For us, we see this as a massive opportunity to create high quality and unique images for our IPs in record time and at next to no cost. Even if you factor in the time it takes to hone the prompt, sort the variations, and upscale the final version (even edit in photoshop if you’re feeling a little extra that day), it’s still a fraction of the time and cost it would take to have these assets created by a professional designer. I do recognize that this undoubtedly has negative effects on designers in our industry; however, as a business owner there comes a point where you have to call balls and strikes. As a use case we decided to rebuild our website using images exclusively sourced in Midjourney, and as a project manager I can tell you that the difference is like going from dial-up to gigabyte internet overnight. I’ve added a couple of them here so you can see what we’re working with.

The jury is still out on this tech and how far-reaching the ramifications will be moving forward or whether they’ll be a net positive or negative. However, I am confident that these tools are here to stay, so we’d better figure out what role they fill in our rapidly changing world.

if you’d like to give midjourney a try, you can find it here.

As a final side note, the midjourney model really struggles with goblin faces.