/imagine: We used AI to help finish a branding project

This isn't an article about how AI is the end of the world. Nor is it an article about how AI is the greatest creative collaborator ever and blah blah blah. This is an article about what happened when the Blokhaus creative team decided to use AI to help create the branding for a project.

The Blokhaus creative team lives all over the world, but we do a pretty good job of simulating the in-office experience by sharing screens, Slacking each other like maniacs, and shooting the shit in regular group meetings on Google Meet. Our creative symbiosis proved particularly valuable recently, when we subscribed to Midjourney to play around with some ideas for XQST, a Web3-powered collaborative exquisite corpse collective, launching in beta next month.

Working with Midjourney was like calling up an endless set of moodboards

What is an ‘exquisite corpse’? It's a collaborative art game invented by artists in the Surrealist movement. A blank sheet of paper is folded into strips, with each artist taking a strip in turn and adding their contribution, without seeing what came before. They then fold the paper over to partially conceal what they just added, before passing it on to the next artist. It’s a bit like Mad-Libs, but for artwork, and with more absinthe.

We had resisted bringing AI in as a freelancer, but this branding assignment presented an all-too-familiar situation: the product promotes itself, but the product doesn’t fully exist yet… plus a tight timeline. So, why not give in and have Midjourney see what it could come up with?

Working with Midjourney was like calling up an endless set of moodboards. For example, a simple seven word prompt: “The letter X made out of bodies” rendered an image that set us off in the right direction, and from there we were off, calling up textures, patterns, and otherworldly renderings with a few keystrokes like:

‍/imagine the letter X made of plastic and people's bodies, wet from rain

/imagine the letter X made out of cement with human bodies carved inside in a futurist style

/imagine the letter X made from black glossy rubber with tentacles inside

We found ourselves stringing words and phrases together, upscaling images, cutting them out in Photoshop and connecting patterns here and there. We realized the usefulness of our collective art history brains as we typed in prompts like “the letter X sculpted on a podium in the middle of an ocean surrounded by giant walls in the style of Hieronymous Bosch.”

But when we called on AI to amplify the qualities we liked, Midjourney proved a blunt tool. The dozens of tweaks and adjustments that we would have made had we been working with someone with a brain: “Blend this part, make this part more saturated, smooth out the shadow there, add another limb! Can we change this expression? Make the palette more like this…” proved impossible.

We were mesmerized and frustrated at the same time. It’s called Midjourney because, oh boy, are you on a journey... The experience is just as addictive as it is infuriating. One team member lamented, “So, I find AI completely terrifying asa concept, and yet I am also extremely frustrated that it can’t read my mind”.

We discovered that Midjourney doesn’t have a handle on the Latin alphabet – our original concept of an identity using the letters XQST was quickly scrapped because Q and T proved nearly impossible for it to render. And, much like us, back in our foundational drawing classes days, AI also seems to find hands really, really hard.

In the end, our collaboration with AI felt a lot like an exquisite corpse: lots of ideas, unpredictable connections, and frustrating twists

Working with Midjourney, we realized that to get something good, considered, and visually arresting, you had better have a human brain involved. And even then, you still have to be okay with it looking a bit like it was made with AI.

We persevered: combining textures, adding new prompts, and collaging using good ol’ Photoshop and many decades of experience knowing how to make things work.

At times, working with Midjourney was like working with a disgruntled art director who held the mouse hostage while creating out-of-this-world images out of thin air. Ugh, damn, you’re good. At other times, we had to wrestle control back, when what the AI could pull off, pulled us in the wrong direction. In the end, our collaboration with AI felt a lot like an exquisite corpse: lots of ideas, unpredictable connections, and frustrating twists, because half the time, we weren’t the ones with the pen.

Would I use Midjourney again? Good question. Sure. We use AI in brainstorming sessions, to quickly generate fantastical images that help us get out of our heads, or more inside them. We've used it as a jumping-off point, but it's certainly only as good as the team using it. In its current iteration, Midjourney can't replace a trained human designer, and I don't believe it ever will.

Every now and then, a Discord channel reminds me that I have unread messages – notifications that someone on the team has queried the bot for an image or two since I last checked in, probably something for a pitch deck we're working on, or key art for the Blokhaus blog. Sometimes I take a look, but frankly, I'm already a little bored of it.

–

Blokhaus is a marketing and communications agency with a focus on Web3 and emerging tech. Since we were founded in 2021, Blokhaus has supported numerous high-profile projects and activations around the globe, working in partnership with some of the biggest brands in the world. To learn more about our work, check out our Case Studies. To get in touch, visit our Contact Us page.