In the world of design and branding, so many projects utilizing AI tend to be more novelty than novel: Think Coca-Cola’s “Create Real Magic” campaign, or, say, Heinz’s “Draw Ketchup” project.
As with any tech advancement, the gimmick phase precedes the working application phase—but behind the scenes, many studios are inching toward putting AI to real use. Pum Lefebure, cofounder and chief creative officer of Design Army, wanted to experiment with incorporating AI into her agency’s output on a practical level—so she bypassed all the (valid!) is-this going-to-replace-my-job conversations that dominate the subject, and logged into Midjourney.
“As an owner of a design company, I don’t want to be left behind,” she says. “I feel like we humans need to keep up with the technology and find a way to work with it. It’s too late to be against it.”
Design Army—known for its typographic, fashion-slanted output for such clients as Adobe, Bloomingdale’s, Disney, Netflix, PepsiCo and many others—has worked with Georgetown Optician for years, supporting the company as it went from a lone store in Washington, D.C., to a multilocation retailer owned by the luxury corporation, New Look Vision Group. The eyewear purveyor has seemingly always afforded the studio a long leash, as exhibited in such campaigns as “Eyes Say More Than Words,” a promo that’s more Wes Anderson than LensCrafters.
As Georgetown Optician prepared to open a new store in the area, it asked Design Army for a creative campaign to accompany it, just four weeks out. Lefebure says that in a typical project like this, she would hire models, makeup artists, and wardrobe specialists, scout and secure shoot locations, and ultimately it would take at least three months to execute. So without time and a sizable budget, she figured it was time to see what AI was capable of—and Georgetown Optician gave her the thumbs up.
The format dictated Design Army’s concept: “Adventures in A-Eye,” a surreal sci-fi playground that would showcase the brand’s eyewear (while perhaps subconsciously paying homage to the idea that when you take a step back and look at the rapid-fire iterations of AI this year, B movies don’t feel all that alien anymore). Given the timing of the campaign’s spring/summer launch, Design Army selected a travel theme and sought to create a martian landscape and a set of pioneering adventurers (bespectacled, of course) probing the unknown.
Which is all well and fine as a concept. But then you have to get Midjourney to actually execute on it—and that’s where the vital art of the prompt comes in. Just like working with a human design team, the process is, ultimately, all art direction. But when it comes to working with AI, articulating said direction is critical.
While a representative for Design Army declined to share any of the exact prompts used in the campaign (they’re now proprietary IP), Lefebure says she kicked things off as she would any other project—with a mood board. Themes arose that drove keywords for the prompts: 1950s, sci-fi, Hitchcock, safaris, and lots of pink (given the Mars-esque palette that informed the unknown planet).
A giant eyeball character began to emerge, at first a bit menacing in appearance, until Lefebure worked some Japanese animation techniques into the prompt to make it more friendly and, ultimately, cute. Her prompts got longer and more specific, and the results improved. Perhaps ironically, the team added human emotions to them, factors like anger or sadness, which elevated the imagery further. She crossed art history references with architecture cues, and folded various disciplines into others. “Sometimes, we even sketched out what we wanted and then wrote a description of the sketch and used that as a prompt,” she says.
By blending her accrued knowledge from the worlds of fashion, set design, film, and beyond, Lefebure arrived at a result that indeed appears Design Army in tone and aesthetic. Still . . . what of the ethical problems that pervade the tech and the body of unattributed work that underpins it?
“It should not copy; that’s why we cross-pollinate [names and ideas] in our prompts,” says Lefebure. “It’s about using your own imagination to trick the AI a little bit into thinking harder.”
Process-wise, she says she both loved and hated it. She found that she went down lengthy rabbit holes that led to less-than-stellar results, but was at times pleasantly surprised by the AI—such as when it floated a model’s costume around her instead of applying it directly onto her.
As for the models, they’re all 100% fake. In fact, everything in the campaign is AI—except for the type and the eyeglasses, the latter of which are actual Georgetown Optician frames added to the scenes. Lefebure estimates that some of the results came out 80% complete while others rendered around 50% or so.
After finessing the images to final, in a matter of weeks, Design Army had a campaign that Lefebure says would have otherwise taken months—and that Georgetown Optician and its parent company loved. And it’s that speed that leads her to believe AI has secured its place in the future of design. While she has not gone full-bore on another AI project yet, she says she has indeed been using it to conceptualize ideas.
As for the field at large, “We won’t lose jobs to AI,” she opines, “but we will lose jobs to the people who know how to work with AI.”
One coda: Lefebure says that as she was working on the campaign, she excitedly shared some of the results with her daughter . . . who was unimpressed, and preferred her mom’s previous (real) film work with Georgetown Optician.
“It’s up to us humans to put value on the real thing—or to put value on the speed and how beautiful the new technology is,” Lefebure says.
AI may democratize design or destroy it, and who knows—that could be the key to it all: Forget all the Skynet comparisons. It might actually be our decision in the end.
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