Brett from Designjoy is this one-man designer who's making millions of dollars a year, but that's not the most interesting part about him. The most interesting part is he's using AI to generate some of the most beautiful designs I have ever seen. And Brett, by the end of this episode, what will people get out of it?
So I think people will be pretty shocked by the simple path it is to to arrive at like beautifully generated graphics what you know no matter what you're doing. Um there is no kind of magic magic behind the scenes all that much. These tools are really powerful.
Long story short it's super easy and I think people will be surprised by that. Hey you you want $5,000 to go build out your startup idea cuz I'm giving away $5,000. So it's a giveaway.
We're doing it. Uh, the way to enter, super simple and free. So, let's go ahead and do it right now.
Step one is like this video. So, go ahead and go find that little like button. Boom.
Like, done. Second thing, comment on this video. Go to the comment section.
Scroll down. Oh, there it is. Answer, what startup would you want to build with the $5,000?
Don't know the answer to that? That's okay. Even what space do you want to go build in?
dating app, fintech app, you name it. And then number three, you're going to want to go to ideabrowser. com.
I've pinned it. Uh it's a pinned comment. So, you can go to that link, hit it, open it up, and you're going to see this website that gives away a free startup idea uh based on a trend uh and it every single day.
So, we're literally dishing out free startup ideas. This is a startup I co-founded. um and go and sign up to it for free and hopefully it'll get your creative juices flowing.
I want to give a special uh shout out to Bolt. new for pwning up the $5,000 to give to you. They're putting their money where their mouth is.
A lot of you know Bolt. new because I've I've used the product a lot. Um and you know, but for for for people who don't know, it's a AI coding tool where you write a few words and software magically comes out of it.
It's a beautiful thing. Check it out. bolt.
new and thank you for supporting the Startup Ideas podcast. And for the last giveaway, we're going to announce who won in a few weeks. I'm actually hoping I can bring them on to the podcast and film their reaction.
So, we'll see. Hopefully, they want to come on. Uh but excited to announce who won the last $5,000 giveaway.
sipping time, baby. And when you say easy, you know, you're you're a super talented designer, so I'm someone who's I wouldn't call myself a designer. Will someone like me be able to create insane value out of these tools?
That's the goal, right? Um, and we'll go through this. There's definitely there's definitely levels to this AI generation thing.
Uh most of the content that I put out there is not geared directly towards designers. It's geared towards, you know, anybody with a with a midjourney subscription, chat subscription. So, um really don't have to have any prior design knowledge at all.
Um having good taste definitely helps, but aside from that, there's no there's really no skill issue here at all if you're a non-creative. All right, let's get into it. Yeah, I mean, so there's a lot of different realms with this AI generative AI sort of uh phase that we're in right now.
Um, you know, you have image generation, you have video generation, you have all kinds of different things. Um, so we'll start with the top. We'll start with like the easiest form if you want to kind of get your feet wet with this AI creation um thing that we're in right now.
Not sponsored by any of these tools. These are just tools that I that I use in different different sort of circumstances. Um, so we'll start with like the easiest, then we'll go into like the realm that I play the most in.
Um, so like if you just wanted to, for example, if we're in here, essentially like Higsfield is is one of those again you have no experience at all. You want to just see how how this works. Um, so Higsfield is um basically all these templates that you can use, right?
So we can try one out if you want to. Can we do that real quick? It's it's a pretty quick thing.
So, um, one of the hardest parts about AI is understanding how to talk to the AI and what to tell it to actually do. I mean, if we're doing an ad, for example, when it comes to video, most of us don't talk like a director. We don't know what dolly in, dolly out, all that typically means.
So, Higfield is like is coming down to our level and giving us these sort of preset uh, actions so so to speak and effects. And so we can just take let's just take this for example here and I'll show you how well this works. So uh let's go let's see hopefully this follows me.
So let's do like a liquid death can. Do you drink liquid death? I I tried it.
I like my water out of Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
out of a glass bottle. You know I hear you. Um that's fair.
I've never tried it. So I'm not neither a fan nor a nor a foe. So So we'll just add this in.
So, let's say you have a drink company or if you have anything, you know, any really anything. We'll see how actually well this works. So, literally all I did was I picked a preset, right?
Uploaded a picture of a of a product and let's just hit generate and see what happens. So, hopefully what it should do, well, actually, we've done this before, so we can we don't have to wait for this. So, what it should do, um, I think there's one down here that was interesting.
Yeah. So, it actually takes into consideration the the can and the branding. It could swap the model out and then when you play this, you know, it's like, oh my god, it's perfect.
You know, it maintains the text on the can. That's one of these things like the text has always been kind of the the problem child of AI generation because it never quite got it right. Well, we're we're past that point now.
It gets text right. I wasn't into liquid death before, but after watching that video, I'm into liquid death. There you go.
There you go. Yeah. I mean it is quick, right?
I mean the the hardest part about AI generation just waiting for the image to generate. Um but with this tool, right, you don't have to prompt it. It has all these presets, right?
So this is and you have if you click over here, right, this is where you could prompt it if you wanted to do something very specific. Upload your reference photo. And then if you click into here, you have again all of these different effects, right?
if I wanted to turn something into metal, if I wanted to just sort of call out different basic camera controls on on certain things and then it it just it just does it really quick. No, no, you this is like again like a good early entry into AI generation. Um, now do I do a lot of this?
Not really. This is like it's fun to show and again if you have a product, it's a great way to create some cool cool like ads for Instagram and stuff like that. Um, but the real fun is is over in the the Chad GBT midjourney side of things.
So, Chad GBT again, all of these, we'll go to midjourney for a moment. Midjourney is where we generate these images, right? Uh, it's not video.
We're going to generate if you're going to do video, this is where you oftent times start because you need a you need a base initial kind of reference image to begin with. And so, what what's your Greg? Have you used Midjourney quite a bit or Yeah, I would say I've used it a decent amount.
A decent amount. Yeah. So, the issue right now is you have all these tools and they pop up all the time, right?
We have we have Cling, we have Korea, we have all these different we have Visual Electric, um Flora, there's a there's a hundred of them out there. Uh I I it's easy to get distracted and figure out, you know, should I be trying all these tools? I pretty much stick to like the top three or four of them.
I keep a pulse on all the other ones, but really like Midjourney, MidJourney and Chap GBT are the two that I use by far the most. And I use them together in a really like special way. Um, so MidJourney is like phenomenal at styling, you know, if you want to like this morning, for example.
Um, I'm doing branding for a work called Leisure Labs, you know, and so I'm generating these these sort of like Kodak vintage aerial photos of of a golf course, for example. Then I wanted to supply a different a different sort of brand direction for for like a surfer or something like that, right? Kind of on that leisure leisure side of things.
um did some other stuff around around creating some some buildings and stuff, but it gets the styling as far as like the artistic styling is hard to none than than any other tool out there. So, this is where I go if I want to create something really artistic. Uh chatbt on the other hand is where I go if I want something very specific.
So, I'll take a photo here, for example, and Mid Journey can sometimes get the image right if I want to add in a person to this photo that's like teeing off or something. Uh, but you could you could tell if I were to zoom in on this, it it kind of it I mean, kind of look at that shadow, right? It's kind of weird.
Um, and in an ideal world, you take this into into chatbt and say, "Hey, take this photo. Just insert an overhead shot of a golfer. " and it would it would get it mostly realistic, way more realistic than mid Journey.
So using them, knowing how to use them together is is definitely key. But these systems are only as good as what prompt you give them or what reference image you provide. So for those that haven't used MidJourney before, it's a very simple system.
We don't need to spend 30 minutes going undergoing how it works, but you essentially have a prompt that you can tell it what you want to do. And then you're basically going to be using image prompts and style references. So image prompts for those don't that don't know is if I insert a photo into here of this surfer, it's going to the next image it's going to generate might have a person in it, might have a surfboard in it, might have, you know, sort of like greenery in it.
Um, if I insert a style reference, for example, this one right here, it's whatever image I generate, it's going to have those colors, the same shadows, highlights, depth of field, um, that sort of thing. So you use those together in really cool ways. And it's fun to like mix styles.
So, if I wanted to upload like this orange style with this green style, you can get some really cool generations that are quite a bit quite surprising. But again, they're only as good as the prompt that you provide. And so, that's where chat GBT comes in.
So, it used to be that that prompting was a skill and it and it was before GPT got as good as it was. knowing how to describe these things that you wanted was like it almost took you know like author level skills when it come when it came to writing and describing and kind of visualizing and imagining these things but nowadays um prompting is not a skill it's it like people in the AI community like to gatekeep it you know they'll say here's the prompt that I wrote and people like how do you think of those things or or a lot of times they don't even share the prompt but chatbt is very good at giving doing prompts. So, we can see an example here.
So, if I'm going to pull up like for example, I was doing I wanted to do some like cowboy uh cowboy art, right? So, I started with a simple thing. I want I want to write some image prompts to generate a zoomed in photo of a cowboy in the back of a horse riding the rains or holding holding the rains.
The photo should be zoomed in on the hands and rains. basically gives me, you know, a few options for a prompt. And it does it in a in a really well done way where I could never write this stuff, right?
I could never think of it. Um, and if we go over here to chatbt, we can actually see what what these things created. Uh, so let me scroll down here for a moment.
So I used a I used a style image, a style reference of this image right here. This was something that I created in MidJourney. Uploaded it as a style reference.
didn't didn't upload an image prop because I quite frankly I have a prompt I don't really need that all that much. So I put it in here and got several several like really solid options. Um and this is this is sort of in the the realm of perplexity branding for those that are fans fans of it.
Huge fan of it myself. And then you know I basically just talked back to it. I said now I want one zoomed in on a cowboy.
And it gave me some and I was like ah that's not what I wanted. I meant I want it I want it zoomed in on the the cowboy's hat. Right.
So, boom. Got this like amazing image. And it's it's right in line with this.
And I kept that going. You know, I was like, uh, now I want one zoomed in on the c on the on the horse's face. Boom.
Done. Uh, and then, you know, one that was zoomed out showing some mountains in the environment. And all I'm saying is mountains in the same environment.
And it's like adding in all of this extra like rich detail that really makes the image what it is. So I'm just over here. And then you could say like you could even tell JTBT say, "Hey, I want to create a collection of these as posters.
Give me some different scenes that tie back to the to the same, you know, initial prompt, but have different elements in different environments. " And it'll just dream up all these collections. You don't have to say like a zoomed-in photo of the horse, a zoomed in photo of this, or whatever.
you can let it kind of dream and imagine for you which is really cool. So this is the starting point for really good generated uh you know AI art is actually constructing a good prompt and then you take that into here you know you plug in a style image and boom you're you know you're done at this point if you want to do that and you can see I've done this you know been doing this with different worlds and and this is my latest sort of tutorial is on these sort of like you know isometric 3D you know worlds that we bring into runway and add motion to them which we can go through But it's really not that complex. You have to basically have a very basic idea of what you want.
Prompt that in chat GPT. Say, "Hey, make me a prompt around this idea or make me several and take those and just start plugging in the midjourney. Find a style that you want.
" Like Pinterest is phenomenal for this. It's all I use to generate, you know, stylistic directions. I'll come on that.
It may not have anything related to what I want to do, but it may be like the right style, the right like 3D art, or there might the right kind of like feeling and vibe. And I upload as a style im style reference, plug in my prompt, and you just kind of just like at that point, it's just fun to sit back and see what what's created, you know. Um, but yeah, that's that's sort of like that's the the second tier of of AI generation is using CHP and Midourney together in that way.
And then of course, you can take these and throw them into runway and add motion to them. You can bring them into Photoshop and do generative to fill. You can you can do all kinds of things.
You can throw them into magnific upscaler to really get all these like super rich details. Um which I've done in several of my tutorials. So you then you start kind of leveling all these tools on and that's where you get this really dope stuff that is, you know, hard to replicate unless you know how to how to use them in tandem with each other.
Um, I mean even even this, so the stuff that I'm seeing on the screen and I've seen some of this on your ex, you know, I think a lot of people saw these beautiful images and were like bookmark and like, but I can never do that because Brett is a designer. He's like been studying this for years. He's a practitioner.
He's he made millions of dollars, you know, doing design work. Therefore, yeah, I'll see you later tutorial, aka bookmark. But deep down, I think a lot of people are like, I can never do it.
I'd be happy to show you. We can do one in like we can do one of these scenes, for example, from scratch in in, you know, 5 to 6 minutes. It's not hard, right?
Like going through the process of like you can see this for example, right? This beautiful image here. All I did was I went on Pinterest.
I found a picture of a cabin, right? which was Let's see if this loads up. Um, of course it's not going to load.
Ah. Um, right here. Boom.
Yeah. Found a picture of a cabin. This was not AI generated.
This was just simply pulled from a Pinterest uh a Pinterest search. Had a reference image here, which was this one here, a style image that I have saved. I keep these like in folders in my in my computer, so I have all these different styles that I can just reference back and forth.
And so yeah, it's going to create this cabin with the style of these mountains. And then you can see where you know pulling in this color here. But then this this sort of object is is get gets placed here with this simple very simple prompt.
And then you go over to runway, you upload this picture, you give it a prompt which you create with chatbt. You go to chatbt say hey here's the image that I want to turn into a video. Give me a prompt that would tell runway what what like what exactly to move.
And it'll come back and it'll give you, yeah, put soft ripples in the water, have the smoke coming, have the trees blowing softly in the wind, but like tell it to you very eloquently and like sophisticated. And then you just press generate and you sit back, wait for it to generate, and boom, like 5 minutes later, you have a beautiful a beautiful video. Then you can even take that further.
You can go over to cling. You know, Cling is another image to video tool um that allows start and end frame, which means that you can loop it. So, the video will start and end with the same frame and and Cling will just fill in the the in between.
So, that if you had like a an icon that you wanted to put on your site and you wanted to kind of endlessly loop or it wasn't this harsh reset, you just set the start frame and end frame to the same image and it just infinitely loops. And then once that's generated, then it has a little button that says AI sound and it'll take into context the video and give you sound options that are AI generated. So you can I mean you can go and then if you wanted to right these these these prompt tools are limited to about 10 seconds per video.
You can go to the end video, right click on your your computer, save the last frame as an image, upload that as the next video. So the the next video will start at the last frame of your last video and have a continuous shot for as long as you want and then stitch them together with a with a simple video editing tool that you don't have to have really any experience doing. You're just dragging clips onto a timeline and exporting.
So it's not it's not really that it's not really that complicated when you when you look at it this way. Could we look at some of the the more complex runways or you know Yeah. Do you want to Should we like just for the sake of this just do one of these?
Yeah. So, let's do um let's pick an image here. Which one do we like?
Like I like this one. Oh, yeah. This one's cool.
So, what I would do I could probably describe the movement because I've done this a 100 times creating a creating a tutorial, right? Um, but we're just going to throw this in here and we're going to tell it we don't have to be we don't have to be sophisticated in the way we we talk to CHPT. It it can understand very little and expand upon it.
So, I'm going to use runway to add motion to this image. Give me a prompt. Okay.
So, it's going to understand it's not even just going to understand it. Well, it's going to understand what you want to do, but it's even going to understand the tool that you're going to use so that it writes it a certain way. Because if I were to say like I want to use this up at put up at midjourney for something, it's going to give you like the style parameters and all these sorts of tags at the end.
But since it's runway, we just need very kind of a text format. So, we'll head over to runway. And this is just one of many many of these tools.
Cling, Korea, all of them do it. Uh Runway is is certainly on the upper echelon of like quality. Um, so we'll just upload a we'll upload an asset here that we have already generated before.
Let that upload and then so that's our image. We're going to just paste the prompt in here. Let me read read through this real quick.
Just make sure that software is okay. Keep the keep the camera completely still for a piece. See it even get it even understands that.
So there's not this all this movement around. And of course you could tweak all this, right? Then we're going to have the aspect ratio just be square.
Uh, we'll do 10 seconds. Like I said, it's generally five to 10 seconds. We'll let that we'll let that run.
Why did you choose square versus another format? Well, so I'm sh I'm typically sharing these on X. Uh, I like portrait media for for the most, but when you're sharing a video on X, it'll add black borders to the side of it.
I don't like that. I hate it. It kind of ruins the aesthetic for me.
So square is the square is the best. Now, if you wanted to share something super cinematic, uh, you do like 16 by9. But u I like square because you it's it's bigger on your screen.
It catch it's going to catch your eye far more. Um and one other thing I'll say about all this and this goes for chatbt not chatbt as much. It usually nails things um midjourney and runway and all these tools.
They're far from perfect. You know, I've done, for example, I was trying to do a 3D logo uh rotate like on a on an axis and it like got halfway and then just some cartoon character popped out of it and I'm like, "What the heck? Where did that come from?
" So, they're they could be a little finicky. So, you have to you have to kind of understand what it's going to be good at and what it's what it might do some weird things and and just adjust your prompts accordingly. So, we'll do this.
It might nail it, but it might also have like a weird zoom in on it. And so we'll have to readjust things. We won't do this for the video, but you there might be some weird artifacts or something like that that you that you notice and you just have to kind of redo it, reprompt it if you need to and kind of keep trying.
But and while this is uploading, I'm curious your perspective on this. So this podcast is called the Startup Ideas Podcast. It's generally people who want to build startup ideas and and quit their job or do a side hustle or something like that.
What does this whole world of, you know, AI designing or vibe designing enable for, you know, for these people and what are some opportunities that you can think of that, um, you think will will be very lucrative? Yeah, I mean there's there's what's capable today which is again like a lot of what's being shared out there is is really more on just like the fun creative side kind of just you know testing these tools out generating things that aren't quite used every day in the actual design world more more than just like a Twitter post you know sharing a tutorial but uh I think the biggest opportunity right now for creatives is is really on the branding side you know there the the web design side hasn't really had its day in AI quite yet. It's on its way with tools like Bolt and Lovable and all these, but the output's pretty mediocre, right?
Um, branding is, you know, is amazing. So, if I if for example what I can do for you, Greg, if if you wanted to hire me to design like a leisure, you know, leisure brand like I was describing, right? I can go into midjourney over here.
I can as your designer or even you, you know, once you once you find one asset that you really like, you can go into mid Journey, you can actually set up a mood board. Have you ever done this before or seen this before? No.
Yeah. So, you can set up a mood board, right? And I set up a mood board for these for these cowboy images.
Now, anything that I want to do at this point in time, I can use this this code as a prompt, and it's going to reference back to all of this here. And so, it gives you the ability to basically create content that's that's that that's relate that relates to one another. There's continuity between the content and and it's it's uh what's the what's the word I'm looking for?
Consistent, right? Um so I could give either I could give this to you and then you could basically if you if you have, you know, this is a background or whatever for social media post or whatever it is, you have the ability to then begin to kind of replicate that at very fast paces and it's all going to be kind of cohesive. Um there's little things like it's not good at logo design right now.
you can't really like generate the entire brand using it. It's not text isn't perfect. Ve, it doesn't do vector art, you know, things like that.
So, you still need a designer for some of those pieces. But once those pieces are set, the ability for you to take those references and continue to build new additional creatives um off of it is really really where the opportunity is today. I think that'll get even crazier as times go on, especially with the website side of things and like that sort of thing.
But branding is really the biggest the biggest leverage point at this point when it comes to AI and the ability to just generate consistent assets, you know, at a very quick pace. Um, yeah, that's that, you know, obviously outside of that, Chad GP and stuff can be used for all kinds of things when it comes to startups, but the actual design piece that that's really where that's really where the majority of the of the opportunity is at this point in time. Let's go back to this and see if it did it.
So, we'll play this and hope hopefully we cross our fingers and it it just nails it. put that in a museum. You know what I mean?
Right. And then what's crazier? Okay, we can we can sit down here and we can say upscale to 4K and we just click it and it just does it.
You know, now we have a 4K a 4K video. And then what's crazy is you can you can take this I can right click on this and save a video frame. I can bring this back over here to here and say, "Hey, runway, you know, uh or or chatbt or or midjourney.
" Like pretend as if you're a a real estate photographer. and I need different different angles of this building shot for for a a listing or a magazine or something like that and it can get into that role and and take this reference and and take different shots of it. Then you could throw those into runway, add the same motion we just did, stitch them together in one video and then you have this amazing, you know, multi-frame, multi- scene scene video very quickly.
So, it's pretty it's pretty uh it's pretty amazing. I would imagine the use case for a lot of these videos is going to be ads. Yes.
Um, how would you if I wanted to put text on top of these videos? Is that possible? Yeah.
So, text on top. So, you it does require it. There's certain things where you want to branch off, right?
Like you could tell runway to do that. It may get it, but if it doesn't, it's slightly off. You can't just like use your mouse pointer to like move it, right?
It's embedded in the video. So, this is where I would I would say this video, use a very userfriendly um video platform like Cap Cut where you're just going to drag this in and then drag a text layer on top and you're done. You can position however you want.
You don't have to have any video experience at all to do that. Very simple. Takes, you know, 5 seconds.
So, there that's where there are certain points where you do want to use traditional tools to get to get those things quite right. Um, but again, like Chad GBT does a good job of that, but Chad does doesn't do video really. They have Sora, but it's really poor output.
But yeah, just like I was doing stuff this morning for an e-commerce shop, and they have their products on set on these like cool background images and stuff, and so I was just generating all kinds of psychedelic weird like background images. Um, yeah, it's it's it's a creative person's dream, but it's definitely fun, even if you're a non-creative, to be able to just generate something as beautiful as this. like you could never have done anything remotely close to this.
I'm a creative and I could have never done anything remotely close to this um for the rest of my career most likely, but now I can do it in 5 minutes. Um Brett, this has been eyeopening. Um I'm getting my hands dirty literally right after this.
Um thank you for coming on. I'm going to include uh where to find Brett and follow his tutorials in the show notes so people can go and follow him there. Brett, is there anything uh you want to leave people with or say?
Yeah. No, I mean, like I said, get like what you're going to do, get your hands dirty. Utilize Chatb2 to help you talk to these AI tools.
Uh and and know which ones are good at different things. But yeah, mostly just get your hands dirty. Don't don't stress about there being too many tools.
Like pick a couple that you're that you like. Stick with them, learn how they work. Um, yeah, you can do you can do really remarkable things with very little effort, which I think is the is the coolest part about AI and something not a lot of people want to say or admit.
You know, I think there's a there's a a level of gatekeep keeping this around this sort of stuff and and my goal is just to kind of break down those barriers and show pretty much anybody can do this sort of stuff. So, yeah, that's it. Well, I appreciate that.
Like, this is sauce as far as I'm concerned. this is like good sauce that you're sharing and and you demystify this for thousands of people watching and it's going to make a difference in their lives 100%. So, thank you for sharing your knowledge and being here and being so generous.
Of course, my pleasure. Thanks for having me on, Brett from Design Joy. This.
