This Changes the Game; Prepare
AI can now produce perfect text inside of images!
AI can now produce perfect text inside of images!
My audience on Medium may have noticed, I have not written much in the last week. I have been thoroughly distracted by one of the coolest developments to hit the AI world since Chat GPT sucker-punched the world last year.
What happened?
AI can now produce perfect stylized text inside of graphics, and this is a MAJOR thing for my automated print on demand shops!!!
I have been working non-stop getting an API working and tweaking my prompting with a new generative AI service I’ve added to my automated workflows.
I have been running a fully-automated All-Over-Print hoodie store for the last 9 months, happy with the results so far, but I have to admit — I’ve been waiting for this day the entire time. This development officially kick starts the logo creation game, and opens the door to every kind of T shirt and graphic project imaginable.
Introducing : Ideogram.ai
This is the moment where designers should pause and maybe reconsider hating AI, because….. it’s coming for you….
…..for me too.
I’m a designer first, long before becoming an automator. I have been building websites, designing logos, creating adobe illustrations, etc, for as long as I have had access to a computer. My memory reaches back to making dot matrix drawings on old dot matrix printers and DOS computers when I was 8.
The potential here is not just to hijack our design work, which is certainly a possibility, but to speed up various idea processes that were always just tedious. It doesn’t have to be an ominous thing.
The magic is all in how we prompt the AI.
Ideogram makes this easy by including a feature they call Magic Prompt, which refines the user prompt for use on Ideogram and produces surprisingly consistent professional grade results. This isn’t uncommon — many platforms have features that will modify your prompt and upgrade it. But the results here are kind of shocking. This is producing text that is consistently better than any other system I have tested — Dalle3, StableDiffusion, Vertex, MidJourney, Canva, etc.
Ideogram can still crank out a messed up text sometimes, but you get perfectly formed text over 90% of the time, a radical improvement over other AI models.
I have been generating T Shirts all night and will be publishing them to my new ebay store “Bad Dad Jokes Inc”.
Here are some of the designs I cranked out :
This isn’t the only new shirt store I will be cranking out. I’ve wanted to test several, and I have a few ideas… this is just the first.
Wanna know something really cool?
I could have 5 new stores in 5 days with 500 products each if I wanted to, and I wouldn’t have to do much more than top-up my generative AI balances, and set my processes to run. It would cost about $100, total, in AI generation costs, and maybe a couple hours of curation, deleting the designs that I don’t want to publish.
I’m going to take this a bit slower, while playing an elimination game.
First up, Dad Joke store, next, Insult Shirts, then….. whatever I feel like at random. The first store to take off and become the most profitable with the least effort, becomes my primary POD project.
Ready, Set….. Go!!
If you are interested in learning about the automated workflows I use — here is a video showing how to set up the API inside of Make or Wondr AI :
What does the future hold?
I still believe human design and designers will only push forward. Call me a hopeless optimist, in spite of the reality of economy, population, and now, endlessly automated design, all that will force a change, but it will not end …..Human Aided Design?
That is so amusing when I think about it.
For decades the human touch has always been implied in the design role, so that anything made by a computer was a “Computer Aided Design”.
In the future, computers might make almost everything, and the things humans touch may carry a special designation instead of the other way around.
Plenty of lower value high volume designs will be created with AI, and the higher value things will still made by human hands and even sought for that reason, while some higher value things will made by humans with notoriety, who happen to use AI in their process the way a DJ uses synthesizers.
Those who leverage AI will end up in a position to generate more, in less time, and spend less time doing their work.
Is this really so bad?
After all, when I think about my design work, instead of getting angry with AI, I have to be honest with myself here.
Only about 10% of my work is so personal that the idea of AI replacing it is just plain offensive.
The other 90%….. when I really think about it……do I really care?
MOST of the design I have ever been paid for have been generic corporate stuff that impressed someone looking for a specific thing — and I expose myself here, when catering to that kind of customer, I took their queues, and branding lead — the client always had as much input as I did, my creativity was just crafting something someone else might say “Yes” to. I did not give one single flying-fuck what the end result looked like as long as the customer was happy. Yet, those designs took just as much of my time as anything personal that I ever made.
Why not cut the fat?
Why not crank out 90% with lighting speed so I can get paid, without having to spend 40 hours a week for it?
Just a thought….
My Project
For the last year I have been working on something that has been in my imagination for at least 10 years, but was only truly possible in the last two years.
End-to-End-Automated Ecommerce Store, Print on Demand
The 4 Simple Tools I Use to Automate my Print on Demand Store End to End with Artificial Intelligence.
My dream is having a fully automated online store that can run itself, by itself, while I hike and fish. This was only partially-possible up until ChatGPT hit.
After the GPT 4 upgrade earlier this year, and now Ideogram’s amazing text ability, this dream is now truly a reality, and all that is left is tweaking and refining my concept until it walks on it’s own and the village comes for me with pitchforks and torches.
Continue to the Next Story in this series:
Thank you for reading!
Until next time….
Onward and Upward Everybody!
-Chris
#printondemand #imagetext #textinimages #aiautomated #ideogram #wondrai