Big Deciding: The Impact of Midjourney on My Creative Process
AI-driven design has become commonplace as we approach the end of 2023, but with its inclusion as an integral part of the process in my most recent design project, I wanted to document how including Generative AI, more specifically Midjourney, affected my usual design process.
The Project
Having designed The Zutons’ logo and art-directed their first two albums, I was approached by the band to produce the cover art for ‘The Big Decider’, their first album in sixteen years. Their debut ‘Who Killed The Zutons’ is about to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its release in 2024, so I have had a close working relationship with the band for a long time.
I had been experimenting with Midjourney for a while and thought this project would be a good opportunity to see how it could operate as a tool within my design process. During my Master’s at the RCA I explored the potential for AI to deviate from intended outputs , so I was interested to see what arrived from misinterpreted prompts during a live project.
Inviting Midjourney into the discussion
Early work involved deep discussions about the album’s essence, sound, and emotions. Listening to the album, I felt there was an open optimism to the tracks, but an underlying darkness could be seen through the cracks. This seemed to be the essence of what the image needed to convey.
At this early stage, I entered various prompts into Midjourney based on my initial thoughts, trying to investigate imagery around a singularity exploding into a psychedelic universe, channeling a sense of growing optimism or self-realisation. It didn’t go unnoticed that we were looking to AI to produce an image that represented a spiritual sensibility.
There were also the remnants of initial discussions around the particularly memorable intro sequence for Arena, which prompted initial investigations into neon signage. I found the most interesting outputs from Midjourney were the errors in rendering text properly (or maybe it was the prompter) but the imagery still had a presence to it. The process produced ample amounts of slick, great-looking images for discussion, to the point where it sometimes felt overwhelming to continue generating more imagery.
Wayfinding
With the album already titled ‘The Big Decider’, I suggested we look at decision-making as a catalyst for potential ideas. Initial research in this direction brought up stock imagery with directional arrows, decision trees, brain mazes and lots of question marks. This reminded me of Escher’s work with isometric, multi-dimensional mazes and how it illustrated changing perspectives and planes, reflecting a sense of confusion that was present in the songs.
After another review with the band, we confirmed the maze as a representation of the essence of the album, a point in a journey, or feeling our way to the light from the darkness. With many maze-like images in the public consciousness, We were aiming to produce an image that stood out and didn’t feel derivative, inspired by geometric, isometric structures that added an otherworldly sense of space.
Turning back to Midjourney, I explored various prompts, the result of which felt quite generic, except for a selection of images that looked like soft play environments. Every parent knows the difficulty of navigating soft play as an adult, and I thought that this humourous reference might have relevance for The Zutons audience.
Refining and Defining
At this stage, I think the words ‘Isometric Neon Maze’ were mentioned and I entered a prompt into Midjourney and one image was produced that felt right.
The image was shared more widely with everyone agreeing it was a strong image, and from here logistical considerations came into play. I approach work like this in a modular way, with the cover image being a component of a wider visual campaign, so began investigations into text usage and how the image sat with the idiosyncratic Zutons logo.
Since the advent of Digital Service Providers and online music stores I have come to the conclusion that the need for any text on the cover of a music release isn’t usually necessary. Finding a distinctive cover sleeve that utilises every pixel within a (compared to a physical vinyl) tiny box is the priority now that band name and title are usually next to the imagery — in online spaces it’s the cumulative effect of multiple executions of a champion image that compounds the campaign’s recognition.
Another important aspect is producing imagery that can enable extended use, for example animations, merch and potential singles, and sometimes having just one champion image limits your options. Midjourney enables zooming out which was useful, and can produces different versions of the same image, so this restriction might lead to some interesting workarounds further down the line.
It only took a minute
Any client could be forgiven for thinking that the image arrived with a click of a button — I typed in a prompt and AI did all the work, which from one perspective is true. But it reminds me of Picasso’s napkin story — it takes years of experience to wield the tools effectively. The collaborative process with the client, defining intentions, and navigating decisions still forms the crux of the design journey.
The process also illustrated that there is value in the unfinished nature of a sketch that helps form the edges of a creative target incrementally. I like to keep renders of ideas quite loose in order to provide more discussion points and rationalisation of the concept, highly polished renders of an image produced by AI perhaps obscure the fact that it is just a moment along a creative path. This project revealed a shift in the process, in as much that the concepts and imagery were being judged much earlier than usual because of this.
The designer’s role has always been one of an editor of existing resource, being influenced, inspired by and finding ways to reassemble imagery embedded in the public pyche, reforming and translating it for contemporary society. There is an obvious parallel here with Midjourney’s process of resourcing and image building, in as much as it is editing from existing visual material.
Midjourney’s stages of production, with images emerging from various states of blur, could also be a pleasant metaphor for the creative process. Starting from a vague vision, you begin to see the edges, and over time, the final work emerges from the blur.
However, it is the process of defining the question, or the prompt, that decides what makes the image a successful one. Once an image has been produced, or resourced, there is still a significant period of editing and refining that goes into producing a final image.
Navigating Choices
It is apt that the work was for an album called ‘The Big Decider’. Ultimately, the project highlighted that the design process still comes down to choices.
Finding the right image is easier once all the stakeholders set the parameters for a successful image, which usually arises from workshops that refine the project’s intention — sometimes the brief isn’t specific enough to reveal what everyone is aiming for.
Although the image itself was produced almost instantly by a complex algorithm, this doesn’t represent the commitment to refining the project’s goal and the large amount of visual output that took place over 4 months. The designer’s role remains one of navigating complex and uncertain decision-making processes with a client to achieve a result that communicates a particular intention.
In the end, ‘The Big Decider’ cover image stands as not only a visual testament to The Zutons’ return, but also as a reflection of the intricate interplay between intent, serendipity and choice guided by the band and their designer.
