5 steps to generate consistent brand images with Midjourney

1. 0:00 – 2:31

   Introduction to Jamey Gannon

   1. JGJamey Gannon0:00

      It all comes down to having a very tight and manicured process, which thankfully I have spent my 10 gajillion hours in Midjourney and Nano Banana everything to figure out exactly what that is, so you're not pulling your hair out prompting all day.

   2. CVClaire Vo0:12

      One of the things I like about the mood board is it's a visual language to explain to Midjourney 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.

   3. JGJamey Gannon0:25

      Mentioning, like, Vogue or high fashion or even, like, a different artist's name is a great way to tell the model a ton of stuff without actually having to tell a ton of stuff.

   4. CVClaire Vo0:33

      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 gonna value me for all this upfront work that I'm gonna 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. [upbeat music] Welcome to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, 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 Jamey Gannon, who is an AI creative director, and is gonna show us how to create consistent, beautiful, and unique brand assets using Midjourney, Nano 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 LangChain, Writer, and Cursor scaled faster and closed bigger deals by getting security right early with Vanta. Listeners can claim a special offer of one thousand dollars off Vanta at vanta.com/howiai.

2. 2:31 – 8:45

   Creating mood boards as the foundation for AI image generation

   1. CVClaire Vo2:33

      Jamey, thanks for joining How I AI. 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 SaaS, 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 is, is the most important part, 'cause I can get a one-off image that's this great, but I can't get this brand portfolio. So you gotta tell me your sorcery.

   2. JGJamey Gannon3:16

      Yeah. I mean, it all comes down to, like, unfortunately, having a very tight and manicured process, um, which thankfully I have spent my 10 gajillion hours in Midjourney and Nano Banana everything to figure out exactly what that is, so you're not pulling your hair out prompting all day. And yeah, I would, I would love to show you.

   3. CVClaire Vo3:35

      Great. So where do we... Where do we start? When you teach people how to do this, you know, where... what's, what's step one?

   4. JGJamey Gannon3:41

      So first thing that I always do is I'm gonna start in either Pinterest or Cosmos, and I'm gonna 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. Um, 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. Um, so I thought this was, 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 Midjourney, and you can basically just copy and paste your images in, or you can start by adding them as SREFs, as you can see here. So SREFs basically are style references, and they kind of do exactly what they sound like. It just tells Midjourney to take the overall style and coloring and camera treatment and 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 used that mood board that you saw that I made, and in this part of my process, in 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's 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 got a sneak peek of, we can see that we're, like, very far off from where we want to be, and I think where a lot of people that are starting to use AI get kind of tripped up is, like, if you've ever just, like, raw dogged generated something in, like, Midjourney or ChatGPT, like, this might be, like, great to you. And, like, some of these images standalone 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 gonna be a better approach to get things going.

   5. CVClaire Vo6:13

      One thing I wanna 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 Midjourney what you're trying to do. What I like about the style references, which we've done a couple episodes, um, that have referenced style, style references in, in terms of Midjourney. We've done one with Zach, um, the creative and design lead at Gamma. We've done one where we were looking at style refs for more photography styles. So these are just lang- alternative languages to tell Midjourney or another tool something specific about a visual aesthetic, which I feel like a lot of people just aren't 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 [laughs] a thousand words. Uh, the other thing that I wanna do, if you go to your mood board versus what was generated, one of the things I wanna 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, uh, they are in the generated images." Um, 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 is people, um, might think about is you could actually upload this to like a, like a ChatGPT or Claude, and you could say, "Explain to me why the photos don't match the mood board." And so, uh, 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, ChatGPT, explain 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.

   6. JGJamey Gannon8:18

      I try and avoid prompting at all costs in my process, but, um, like for this example, we're gonna go like super, super simple with like using SREFs and 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 foolproof to like a consumer eye, that's when like getting really into the details, especially with models like Nano Banana, can be super helpful.

3. 8:45 – 11:15

   Using SREFs for better consistency

   1. CVClaire Vo8:45

      Great. Okay, so this doesn't match. What do we do?

   2. JGJamey Gannon8:48

      Basically, what I kind of glean from this is like the mood board is not doing its job. It's not communicating, uh, the vibe properly. Um, this is something that happens a lot with Midjourney mood boards. There's not a ton of like documentation from Midjourney on exactly how it works, but as creatives you can tell, like the more kind of consistent a mood 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. Um, when we're doing more generalized vibe stuff like this, Midjourney can tend to average things out with the mood board, and I find that using SREFs 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 SREFs and see if that made it better, and you could 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, um, so what I ended up doing is I just removed that green eye SREF. Um, this is something that comes with intuition. You know, I've been using Midjourney for like three years, so I kind of can like understand like where... I don't know, it feels like sorcery to me, but I can understand like where the LLM is pulling certain things, and I knew that if I removed this green it would solve a lot of my problems. Um, so I did, and as you can see, we're starting to get a little bit more neutral in tone. We're also like a little bit more zoomed out too, especially with like the people photos. So now I know I am on the right direction.

   3. CVClaire Vo10:24

      Can I ask a question real quick? When you say, "I'm using the SREFs," where are you getting those from, your mood board? Or how are you actually deciding what the SREFs are? Just for people who are less familiar with Midjourney.

   4. JGJamey Gannon10:36

      I'm 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.

   5. CVClaire Vo10:56

      Got it. So instead of the SREF codes that a lot of people-

   6. JGJamey Gannon11:00

      Yeah

   7. CVClaire Vo11:00

      ... and we've talked about in the past, you're using literally the UI to just drag in images as style references.

   8. JGJamey Gannon11:06

      Yeah.

   9. CVClaire Vo11:06

      And that, for you, sometimes gets you better results than just using the general mood board process.

   10. JGJamey Gannon11:13

       Yeah. Yeah.

   11. CVClaire Vo11:14

       Cool.

4. 11:15 – 12:33

   Test prompts for evaluating style consistency

   1. CVClaire Vo11:15

      And then I have one more question, which is do you have some go-to like test prompts? Like, I love the astronaut as a prompt, um-

   2. JGJamey Gannon11:23

      Yeah

   3. CVClaire Vo11:23

      ... because there's a lot of ways you could generate an astronaut. Do you have some like 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?

   4. JGJamey Gannon11:32

      Yeah. I would say I love doing like ethereal female model for some reason.

   5. CVClaire Vo11:38

      Mm-hmm.

   6. JGJamey Gannon11:39

      I do like... I do that a lot.

   7. CVClaire Vo11:40

      Ooh la la.

   8. JGJamey Gannon11:42

      Um, yeah, this is like a crazy silver one that I was doing. It tends to just like give sort of like a, a more elevated vibe than just regular model. I think I do cats a lot because there's just a lot of like texture to work with.

   9. CVClaire Vo11:57

      The other thing I would say is that there's probably a lot of training data of cat pictures on the internet. [laughs]

   10. JGJamey Gannon12:04

       Yeah.

   11. CVClaire Vo12:04

       So Midjourney-

   12. JGJamey Gannon12:05

       Yeah

   13. CVClaire Vo12:05

       ... could probably do a pretty good job with a cat.

   14. JGJamey Gannon12:07

       Yeah. Running too, I feel, I feel like I do that a lot. Oh, God, this is like my first generation.

   15. CVClaire Vo12:13

       [laughs]

   16. JGJamey Gannon12:13

       Isn't that crazy?

   17. CVClaire Vo12:14

       [laughs] Yeah. Um.

   18. JGJamey Gannon12:15

       I scrolled all the way down there. But, uh, yeah, I'll do running a lot, or like runner. Yeah, anything with like... Uh, astronaut's fun too. Anything that's like specific enough to kind of like give you the vibe. I hate saying like-

   19. CVClaire Vo12:29

       Yeah

   20. JGJamey Gannon12:29

       ... vibe, it's like kind of nonsense.

   21. CVClaire Vo12:31

       But broad enough that those different styles

5. 12:33 – 24:28

   The iterative process of creating and refining images

   1. CVClaire Vo12:33

      kind of apply. Okay.

   2. JGJamey Gannon12:34

      Yeah.

   3. CVClaire Vo12:34

      So, so you've used these style references. You're getting a little closer. What's the next step?

   4. JGJamey Gannon12:40

      Yeah. So I consider this part of my like create step. And again, the goal is just to like get some like information. Take like... This should take like 10 or 15 minutes to start the create process, and then what I'm gonna do next is I'm gonna move on to iterating, and that's where we're gonna 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. Um, so what I'm gonna do particularly in this process is I'm gonna start to bring in some personalization codes and other mood boards. So what ended up helping me get these results is, um, my personalization code that I call late 2025 aesthetic. Um, now personalization codes, again, it's kind of like a little bit of a mystery how it works exactly under the hood. But when you're creating a personalization code, Midjourney's gonna put you through this like endless flop matrix of images that you're either gonna vote one or two or skip. Um, and basically, it... You're just telling it what you like, and you can have like as many profiles as you want. So for like this profile in particular, I was trying to think, I was trying to rate images that were of a 2025 aesthetic, so like more iPhone style, and we can see here. Like-

   5. CVClaire Vo13:50

      Mm-hmm. You'd pick that one.

   6. JGJamey Gannon13:52

      Yeah. Or... I, I skip a lot. Um, that's another thing when I'm giving like advice to people on personalization codes is like there's a lot out there on, you know, like Midjourney says like, "Don't skip that much," but some people are like, "Skip as much as possible." Some people like skip a medium amount. I tend to skip like a medium amount and only pick things that I would like if I generated it. Um, but I do find there's kind of like style bleeding. So for example, let's say I like, 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 like wants to be painted-

   7. CVClaire Vo14:26

      Yeah

   8. JGJamey Gannon14:26

      ... or wants to be like this like vintage or Renaissance, whatever aesthetic. So that's something to consider as you're going through this.

   9. CVClaire Vo14:33

      One thing I wanna call out for folks, um, that are... It's a little bit of a side of this, this particular flow, which is when you're building an AI tool yourself, I've, 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 like fine-tune whatever you're gonna provide to your end user. And so a lot of times we get these like end A/B tests in like a ChatGPT prompt, but this is so interesting to kind of put this up front and say, "Okay, 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, in my AI tool, it's gonna look great. Okay. And you can create as many-

   10. JGJamey Gannon15:15

       Yeah.

   11. CVClaire Vo15:15

       I've never... Again, I have not used mood boards or personalized. I'm just like YOLO up in the-

   12. JGJamey Gannon15:19

       Yeah

   13. CVClaire Vo15:20

       ... in the main chat. So, and you can create as many of these as you want-

   14. JGJamey Gannon15:23

       Yeah

   15. CVClaire Vo15:23

       ... um, to, to use. Cool.

   16. JGJamey Gannon15:25

       Yeah. Unfortunately, you can't like go in and like edit them the same way that you can with mood boards, which is why you gotta be good at like naming.

   17. CVClaire Vo15:32

       [laughs]

   18. JGJamey Gannon15:32

       Try to understand like what you were doing six months ago when you spent two hours ranking images. Um, but I have my own crazy system. That's just a quick brief on like what personalization codes are. So what I started to do... Let me go back to these like other images. I w- I just feel like these could use more of my own style, and I felt that they were a little bit over-stylized. Like, I do enjoy the pink, but I was curious to see if like maybe we can get some like other influences in there. So by adding my personalization code, I was able to just get like more of a depth, I would say. Also, because I wanted it to be like very crisp and like modern, you know, um, you start to see like better skin.

   19. CVClaire Vo16:17

       Yeah.

   20. JGJamey Gannon16:17

       This is like-

   21. CVClaire Vo16:17

       That one to me looks like very, a, a good match for some of your earlier ones. That one's the one that stands out to me.

   22. JGJamey Gannon16:24

       I mean, it's kind of, it's, it's nuanced, but I'm liking where this is going now. Um-

   23. CVClaire Vo16:28

       Hold on. And side note, it's just you and me and little astronauts in the middle. [laughs]

   24. JGJamey Gannon16:32

       Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

   25. CVClaire Vo16:35

       So you are combining some of your style refs and this like personalization model on top of each other. You're getting way closer to what you want in terms of iteration.

   26. JGJamey Gannon16:46

       Yeah.

   27. CVClaire Vo16:46

       So how do we take this to the next step?

   28. JGJamey Gannon16:48

       Yeah. So I wanna show you guys some like of the other Midjourney techniques and ways, um, again, to like start prompting and kind of like upping the ante on like what we're making. So as you can see here, these prompts are no longer just like woman or astronaut. We're actually starting to give some like aesthetic thought. So one prompt, I actually found this on like the explore page a couple weeks ago. Um, but it's Dazed editorial photoshoot. So Dazed is like this really hip magazine, if you're not familiar. So doing stuff like that, like mentioning like Vogue or high fashion or even like a different artist's name is, again, a great way, kind of in the same line of like a picture's worth a thousand words, to tell the model a ton of stuff without actually having to tell it a ton of stuff. So with like a Dazed editorial, there's like a really famous like A$AP Rocky cover. Um, 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 Dazed editorial, depending on how like famous the publication is, Midjourney's gonna know what you're talking about. Or, you know, uh, Vogue especially, it's gonna know kind of like the level of the highlights and okay, we're gonna be doing fashion stuff. So I love doing that. Same thing with the word editorial. In this case, I say a woman, 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, you know, center frame, zoomed in. It's very human language that I'm using.Um, so what I did for this prompt is I wanted it to really have the vibe of this original SREF 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 sexually and you use that as an image prompt, that stylistically is going to influence a lot of what's happening in your image. It's gonna immediately be more editorial or sensual or scent, et cetera. But anyway, I use this as an image reference 'cause I want that profile, but obviously, as you can tell, we're getting bubblegum immediately. Which I don't hate some of these, but my intention was, uh, more of, like, a thinking photo. So what I did is I literally just zoomed in, like, in the Midjourney UI. I cropped it, and then I just, like, 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, like, image quality, the colors, um. For better or worse, it's also kind of, like, mimicking her, like, bone structure. Um, especially this one, you can see, like, we have, like, these contours. So image references will give you a lot in terms of style.

   29. CVClaire Vo19:35

       One thing I wanna 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 like half of the eye was just 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, a bubble of gum. And so what I like is in both of those you're like, just boot the thing that is so obvious and so overwhelming, and you can either do that by kicking out the image, or you could do that by cropping out, um, 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, like, "I'm just gonna screenshot and drag it over. I'm not gonna, like, try to prompt it to say, like, 'Remove the bubblegum-'"

   30. JGJamey Gannon20:23

       Yes
6. 24:28 – 28:25

   Combining techniques for consistent brand imagery

   1. CVClaire Vo24:28

      for styling. And again, what I appreciate about what you're doing, and we love to hear on How I AI, is everybody just wants to be lazier with their prompting. No one want... I mean, if you go to the Explore page on Midjourney and you look through people's prompts, like, people need a job, man. Like, [laughs] 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, 'cause you're generating a lot, a lot of images.

   2. JGJamey Gannon24:58

      Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Like, sometimes, like, thousands a day, depending on what I'm doing. If I'm lucky, I, like, nail things really fast. Like, like this aesthetic I happened to get, like, very quickly. Um, 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, 'cause 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 prompt do I have here? Like, CMYK highlights for me has been a big one that I've been using. Deep blacks, high contrast, and then we have just a really powerful SREF, which actually came from a previous Midjourney, um, generation I did that day. And then we get all this, like, cool stuff. I think, yeah, the prompt's experiencing music, so we're starting to see, like, ears and, like, you know, maybe body sensations. That's another tip too is, like, when you're... A- and especially the create phase, maybe even iterating phase, they kind of blend together. Sometimes I'll literally, if I'm doing, like, a startup deck or something, like a VC deck, sometimes I'll literally just, like, paste in the sentence and just, like, see what it gives me.

   3. CVClaire Vo26:06

      Yeah.

   4. JGJamey Gannon26:06

      Like, the full sentence. Like, "This is our business model," da, da, da. Just to get me thinking, just to get the model thinking. Um, same thing, like, I'll just do, like, financial markets, really vague stuff. Um, Midjourney is, like, very poetic I would say. You can, like, write little poems to it, and it'll actually give you some... It, it'll, it'll do what you want it to do. Like, this is experiencing music to me. You know what I mean?

   5. CVClaire Vo26:28

      Yeah.

   6. JGJamey Gannon26:28

      You feel, 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.

   7. CVClaire Vo26:35

      [laughs]

   8. JGJamey Gannon26:36

      Even worse, even worse if you do it in, like, uh, Gemini or something-

   9. CVClaire Vo26:40

      Yeah

   10. JGJamey Gannon26:40

       ... ask it to give you... You're just never gonna be able to get this, which is why I love Midjourney so much, 'cause it just feels like an extension of your, of yourself basically.

   11. CVClaire Vo26:51

       Creative thinking. Every time I see Midjourney, I have to tell people. You know, now I'm 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... Midjourney 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 Midjourney. It's such a creative space, and I feel like it's one of the more, you know, dare I say it, like, soulful AI experiences. Um, and so I love the idea of just getting out of, like, the tactical and practical prompting of, like, "I want this thing and 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 but 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.

7. 28:25 – 35:48

   Scaling out your aesthetic across different subjects

   1. CVClaire Vo28:26

      Okay, so just to recap really quickly on our Midjourney journey, we have done mood boards. We have used those mood boards to kind of, um, 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, um, style references. We've also pulled in specific images as image references. You've shown us how to go from, like, 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 kinda, like, package this up and, and scale it out?

   2. JGJamey Gannon29:01

      I'll basically just keep going with this same SREF stat and just continue to generate images across, um, you know, the subject matter. Um, so for, like, this one, you know, I'm thinking about AI bubbles. I'm thinking about, uh, 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, like, five finger thing. So in this case, I'll hit very subtle or very strong, and it'll help me, like, come up with a couple more generations of the aesthetic. So that's one technique I'll use, kind of, like, fight those. I will also go and I'll, like, steal prompts or get inspiration for prompts from the Explore page, especially when I'm generating, like, usually large kind of, like, stock photo sets of images. So, like, here's, like, an edgy man. I don't have any edgy man photos yet. I thought the basketballs could be a cool motif in this 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 saw at the beginning, all of these images that I'm very, very happy with, and I'll move on to sort of reinforcing my prompts if need be and editing images. Um, 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.Um, so you can literally just add from your gallery. You can just click. So I selected, I think this is about, like, 30 images that I liked, and then what you can do is you can use this again. Um, so what should we prompt? Maybe, like, turtle in the sea.

   3. CVClaire Vo30:39

      I was thinking turtle. This is weird. [laughs]

   4. JGJamey Gannon30:42

      You were thinking turtle?

   5. CVClaire Vo30:43

      We're floating through Midjourney together. I was like, "Maybe she'll do, like, a turtle." [laughs]

   6. JGJamey Gannon30:48

      Yes.

   7. CVClaire Vo30:48

      Very funny.

   8. JGJamey Gannon30:49

      So this is, like, one ... Again, kind of back to the beginning. We're gonna try the mood board, see if it works. If it doesn't, um, the good thing is we already know this SREF stuff works. Something else that I was trying, um, I'll take that new mood board with the images, uh, and then I'll try with a different mood board that I have. So this one's called Real Skin. Um, this is just one I'm trying to make, like, really realistic images of-

   9. CVClaire Vo31:12

      Yeah

   10. JGJamey Gannon31:12

       ... of skin or of models. Um, obviously it, it influences a little bit of, like, what they look like, too. So I will use both mood boards at the to- at the same time. I might just say model, and then we're able to kind of, like, play with using those aesthetics. Um, 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-

   11. CVClaire Vo31:37

       Yeah

   12. JGJamey Gannon31:37

       ... is gonna, like, be-

   13. CVClaire Vo31:38

       Get better

   14. JGJamey Gannon31:39

       ... supreme here. Yeah, so what I'll do is I'll just take that, um, this mood board here and I'll click that, run the same prompt again, but using the SREF-

   15. CVClaire Vo31:48

       SREF

   16. JGJamey Gannon31:48

       ... and using the mood board.

   17. CVClaire Vo31:50

       And we'll see what it gives us.

   18. JGJamey Gannon31:51

       Yeah, so same for this. Like, closer to what we want, but, like, not as, like, stylistically-

   19. CVClaire Vo31:58

       Yeah

   20. JGJamey Gannon31:58

       ... 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, um, 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. Um, so, like, good example here is, like, this turtle. Our mood board and our SREFs is, like, not super optimized for animals.

   21. CVClaire Vo32:25

       Yeah, that's what I was gonna say.

   22. JGJamey Gannon32:26

       It's way more ... 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. Um, and I never delete my mood boards, so I'll just, like, keep them around and we'll see.

   23. CVClaire Vo32:44

       Just in case.

   24. JGJamey Gannon32:44

       Yeah, we'll see what this gives us, um, using the SREFs. All right, I see we're getting a sexy lady, um, naturally.

   25. CVClaire Vo32:50

       That is one of the downsides of Midjourney, is you're gonna get a lot of sexy ladies.

   26. JGJamey Gannon32:55

       Yeah. So again, cool. Not super 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-

   27. CVClaire Vo33:14

       Yep

   28. JGJamey Gannon33:14

       ... but it's of animals," to give Midjourney a little bit better information to work with.

   29. CVClaire Vo33:19

       What I, I wanna say is I love this process of you're just, like, finding the right two or three things to mix in Midjourney, and sometimes it's a style reference and a prompt.

   30. JGJamey Gannon33:29

       Yeah.
8. 35:48 – 38:23

   Using Nano Banana for targeted image refinements

   1. CVClaire Vo35:48

      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?

   2. JGJamey Gannon35:56

      I guess to continue on with this one, I can show some that I already have done. So for some of the images in Midjourney, I'm sure you have all seen the terrible hands. Um, oftentimes, too, 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. Um, so something I do a lot of the time, even just for my personal stuff I post on X, uh, I'll take my Midjourney images and I'll take them into, uh, Flora, uh, or Higgsfield sometimes, and I'll just use Nano Banana as Photoshop. Nano Banana ...Uh, literally is just Photoshop. That's exactly how you should think of it. Um, you're just able to speak to Photoshop essentially for most people. So what I have here is this image that I really like. We generated it, uh, but I wanna upscale it, so like get more texture in her shirt and stuff, and then I want this to be like a real computer. Nano Banana does require a little bit more prompting than Midjourney, but it's much more, I don't wanna say forgiving. It's much less complicated, like if you're a, a beginner in some ways, depending on what side of the line you stand on, whether you're more like technical or, or more artistic. But anyway, I just said replace the computer she's typing on, on a 2026 midnight black [laughs] MacBook Pro. Um, so Nano Banana, uh, is like a reasoning model, so it like 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 sphere.

   3. CVClaire Vo37:20

      Mm-hmm.

   4. JGJamey Gannon37:21

      I also usually mention like, "Don't change anything else." I say, "Keep the position and the size of the computer exactly the same." And then just because I've done this so many times, I know sometimes Nano Banana might, you know, change the angle slightly-

   5. CVClaire Vo37:32

      Yeah, zoom in and zoom out

   6. JGJamey Gannon37:32

      ... so I just say exactly, I 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'd seem to be like 4,000 by 4,000 versus like 800 by 800. Kept the style pretty much exactly the same. We just slotted in like a real computer, so it would be relevant to like use now on social media.

   7. CVClaire Vo37:55

      I'm just gonna... Be- behind the scenes at How I AI, we use a very similar process to upscale screen caps from the podcast for our YouTube thumbnails.

   8. JGJamey Gannon38:07

      Mm.

   9. CVClaire Vo38:07

      And so, you know, I like make, make these faces, and then we wanna clip them for the podcast, but the screen capping from the video is really low resolution. And so we use a very similar prompt to upscale and improve the lighting on, on our photos, and then we drop those into our thumbnails.

9. 38:23 – 43:04

   Creating realistic AI self-portraits for content

   1. JGJamey Gannon38:23

      Oh, I gotta show you. Um, you don't actually have to take thumbnails anymore.

   2. CVClaire Vo38:28

      Ugh.

   3. JGJamey Gannon38:29

      Um, and, and even-

   4. CVClaire Vo38:29

      Oh, okay, show me. Live-

   5. JGJamey Gannon38:31

      Yeah

   6. CVClaire Vo38:31

      ... live demo.

   7. JGJamey Gannon38:33

      Yeah. Have you been seeing my like X articles?

   8. CVClaire Vo38:35

      No.

   9. JGJamey Gannon38:35

      So, um-

   10. CVClaire Vo38:36

       Show me. Detour

   11. JGJamey Gannon38:38

       ... so this is a really like kind of, Flora has all these like notes and stuff. So, uh, my profile photo is AI. I think I got quite a bit of attention for doing that. I think I ended up making it in Higgsfield at some point. But basically, what I do is I'll take a bunch of selfies of me that are like more realistic looking, [laughs] um, 'cause sometimes like, you know, you'll take like the best 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 reference photos, and then I can just make me do whatever I want.

   12. CVClaire Vo39:06

       Love it.

   13. JGJamey Gannon39:07

       Um, this was another one. I had a Midjourney photo that was this, and I wanted her to be annoyed. Uh, I, I, I kinda already had this processed in my head. I, 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 multiple 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 doing like an anti-agency post. Uh, 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 Nano Banana, sometimes you just gotta like write that prompt, uh, 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 pose reference. And then this was for my article on, uh, AI legal stuff. What else have I done? And this is one recently. Funny enough, I could not get it to give me extra fingers, which is hilarious 'cause-

   14. CVClaire Vo40:13

       [laughs]

   15. JGJamey Gannon40:13

       ... 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, uh, like AI fingers. That was a recent article I did too. Uh, again, we're like using SREFs. This one didn't actually kind of like carry through, um, but in earlier references it did.

   16. CVClaire Vo40:30

       So I just wanna call out for people who are listening, not watching, 'cause I'm making a face, which is Phoebe basically dragged in a bunch of like realistic, um, but still my face, which is really hard as somebody who's trying to generate images of themselves realistic but still my face selfies. And then has used Flora to generate a bunch of mix and match remixed versions for articles and thumbnails. Y'all, my YouTube thumbnails are about to get real-

   17. JGJamey Gannon40:55

       Yeah

   18. CVClaire Vo40:56

       ... real good. I'm so excited. This is very, very helpful. And, 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, um-

   19. JGJamey Gannon41:08

       Travis's job

   20. CVClaire Vo41:08

       ... was back in the day when you actually didn't have these beautiful UIs, is I fine-tune a model on, directly on my face that I could-

   21. JGJamey Gannon41:16

       The Lora?

   22. CVClaire Vo41:17

       ... could call. Like a, it was like a light... I forget what it was called. Um-

   23. JGJamey Gannon41:20

       Yeah, it's a Lora I think.

   24. CVClaire Vo41:21

       Yeah, yeah.

   25. JGJamey Gannon41:22

       You showed me that.

   26. CVClaire Vo41:22

       A Lora model. So I, I fine-tuned it on my face, and then, um, I generated a bunch, 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.

   27. JGJamey Gannon41:32

       Yeah.

   28. CVClaire Vo41:33

       And I never wanna see this, um, Chad Steve job ever again, but I love the idea of dragging these two notes together, um, into-

   29. JGJamey Gannon41:43

       Yeah

   30. CVClaire Vo41:43

       ... into an image.
10. 43:04 – 46:50

    Building a visual reference library for inspiration

    1. CVClaire Vo43:04

       you hit those edges.

    2. JGJamey Gannon43:05

       Yeah.

    3. CVClaire Vo43:05

       Jamey, 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, on a-

    4. JGJamey Gannon43:11

       Awesome

    5. CVClaire Vo43:11

       ... thumbnail today.

    6. JGJamey Gannon43:12

       Yeah, I'll do the prompts.

    7. CVClaire Vo43:13

       So let's, let's skip over to lightning round, and then I will get you out to generating another 1,000 images.

    8. JGJamey Gannon43:19

       Cool.

    9. CVClaire Vo43:19

       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 or that camera" and I feel like people aren't cultivating their visual taste in language enough. So what are some of your, you know, other than Pinterest, what are your, some of your sources where you're, um, continually improving your language and your aesthetic taste through exposure to other things?

    10. JGJamey Gannon43:45

        Yeah. Um, 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, uh, this account's literally called Pink Glitter. So she posts a lot of, like, 2000s stuff, um, so that's really great to use for Midjourney. Fashion accounts. A lot of fashion accounts are what I follow. So I have, like, a Twitter list of, like, really aesthetic photos. Like, this is obviously great if you, again, want more sexy ladies. So that's what I do. Also, Cosmos, of course, is superb. So let's do, like, ethereal model here.

    11. CVClaire Vo44:26

        One of your favorite images.

    12. JGJamey Gannon44:28

        Let's see this one. Yeah. Um, so obviously this is just, like, a treasure trove of SREFs, 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 I will still use Cosmos for, like, art direction things. The great thing about both of these is, like, Pinterest has a plugin, um, so you can literally save from, like, 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 any time I'm, like, shopping online, again, X, Instagram, um, 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 on Pinterest are actually shockingly simple, because I realized if I had too many, I was, like, ah, 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, what is 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, SREF. And any time I see anything on Pinterest that I would like love to bring in to Midjourney 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, a sock brand soon, so I'm, 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 up.

    13. CVClaire Vo46:08

        [laughs] You were looking up the-

    14. JGJamey Gannon46:10

        But

    15. CVClaire Vo46:10

        ... like, it's like shells and it, it seems like very similar-

    16. JGJamey Gannon46:13

        It was like a-

    17. CVClaire Vo46:13

        ... to the stuff we found on Google

    18. JGJamey Gannon46:14

        ... 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, saved 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 gonna save anyway, like, this is just from, like, high fashion Twitter. I just saved it, and it has, like, 200,000 impressions, so.

    19. CVClaire Vo46:39

        Not only this, this is a kinda, like, source of inspiration for you, it could actually be a source of business for you, 'cause you're sharing-

    20. JGJamey Gannon46:44

        Yeah

    21. CVClaire Vo46:44

        ... out, making these resources useful to people. Jamey, uh, my last question I have to ask you, I ask everybody, which

11. 46:50 – 49:49

    Troubleshooting techniques when AI isn’t cooperating

    1. CVClaire Vo46:50

       is, you know, you, you have seemed to, your prompting 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, l- you know, you don't wanna spend a bunch of time in Claude. But-

    2. JGJamey Gannon47:03

       Yeah

    3. CVClaire Vo47:04

       ... if AI is not giving what we want, if we're getting the ugly stuff here, what's your promp- 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?

    4. JGJamey Gannon47:18

       Firstly, take a break, always.

    5. CVClaire Vo47:20

       [laughs]

    6. JGJamey Gannon47:20

       Like, you're never gonna be able to, like, see properly if you're kind of, like, in it. Um, so, like, sleeping on it or just, like, walking away, and then sometimes I come back, and I just, like, do-do, new SREF, different prompt.

    7. CVClaire Vo47:33

       Yeah.

    8. JGJamey Gannon47:33

       Like, grab this reference, use this camera, and then it immediately works. Um, 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 Midjourney.

    9. CVClaire Vo47:50

       Yeah.

    10. JGJamey Gannon47:50

        I'm using, like, 18 SREFs, like, this is just not gonna work.

    11. CVClaire Vo47:53

        Yeah.

    12. JGJamey Gannon47:53

        So I'm gonna, like, take a step back, I'm gonna redo the mood board, and I'm gonna 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 gonna 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 giving me what I want. Midjourney's not listening to me. So again, like, think I talked about this in the beginning, like, brutal honesty on, like, what's going on, and trying to, like, not, I don't know, make AI work the way you want it to work, and actually understanding how it works in general.

    13. CVClaire Vo48:25

        Ah.

    14. JGJamey Gannon48:25

        But I think time away is probably-

    15. CVClaire Vo48:27

        I, I love it

    16. JGJamey Gannon48:28

        ... the way.

    17. CVClaire Vo48:28

        Time away and seeing things from the AI's point of view.

    18. JGJamey Gannon48:31

        Yeah.

    19. CVClaire Vo48:32

        Well, Jamey, this was great. How can we find you, and where can we be helpful?

    20. JGJamey Gannon48:36

        Yeah, um, so I spend all my time on X, so, uh, X @JameyGannon or techbimbo is my name. And yeah, I have an AI course coming out. It's called, um, The AI Creative Director. It's on Maven. Um, 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 from me and hearing more of my, my yapping on AI, I would highly recommend you do it. Um, it's meant to be able to make you create consistent client-level work, like I showed today, so.

    21. CVClaire Vo49:11

        Join the course.

    22. JGJamey Gannon49:12

        Join my course.

    23. CVClaire Vo49:12

        Awesome. We'll link to that in the show notes. Well, Jamey, thank you so much for sharing this, and I'm gonna go dive into Midjourney.

    24. JGJamey Gannon49:18

        Awesome. Cool. Thanks, Claire.

    25. CVClaire Vo49:20

        [upbeat music] Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed the 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 howiaipod.com. See you next time.

Episode duration: 49:49