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

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

Jamie: In the past, brand and creative directors or agencies will give you these photos and be like, cool, call us and reup when you want more photos. What I love is that you're like, look, you're going to value me for all this upfront work that I'm going to do to find 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.

Claire: Welcome to How I AI. I'm Clarvo, 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 Jamie Ganon who is an AI creative director and is going to show us how to create consistent, beautiful, and unique brand assets using Midjourney, Nanobanana, Flora, and more.

Jamie: 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... this might be like great to you and like some of these images stand alone 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 going to be a better approach to get things going.

Jamie: So, first thing that I always do is I'm going to start in either Pinterest or Cosmos. And I'm going to 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. I like especially with AI doing like juxiposition. I think that's really fun. So, we have like an orange with piercing. We have like a fluorescent fruit dog on a computer.

Jamie: 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 SRFs 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.

Jamie: And you can tell we're definitely getting better contrast... 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 3 years, so I kind of can like 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.

Claire: So instead of the SRF codes that a lot of people and we've talked about in the past, you're using literally the UI to just drag in images as style references and that for you sometimes gets you better results than just using the general mood board process.

Jamie: And that's where we're going to start like getting a little bit more specific with our process, maybe slightly more technical... I'm going to start to bring in some personalization codes and other mood boards. 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, Mag is going to put you through this like endless flop matrix of images... basically it you're just telling it what you like.

Jamie: So what ended up helping me get these results is um my personalization code that I call late 2025 aesthetic. Um... 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.

Jamie: These prompts are no longer just like woman or astronaut. They are actually starting to give some like aesthetic thought. So, one prompt... it's Dazed editorial photo shoot. So, doing stuff like that, like mentioning like Vogue or high fashion or even like a different artist name is again a great way... to tell the model a ton of stuff without actually having to tell a ton of stuff.

Jamie: I barely know what aperture means. Um, so sometimes when I just want to try changing up the vibe or make things more realistic... I'll just paste in like a camera, um, that mimics that. Um, so the Sony RX100... one word luxury just gives us everything that we need to know about the scene which is very fun.

Jamie: For some of the images in Mid Journey, I'm sure you have all seen the terrible hands... So something I do a lot of the time... I'll take my Midjourney images and I'll take them into uh, Flora uh, or Hicksfield sometimes and I'll just use Nano Banana as Photoshop. Nano Banana uh, literally is just Photoshop.

Jamie: I just said replace the computer she's typing on on a 2026 Midnight Black MacBook Pro... I also usually mention like don't change anything else. I say keep the position and the size of the computer exactly the same... it's going to be like 4,000 x 4,000 versus like 800 by 800.

Claire: I feel like people aren't cultivating their visual taste and 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?

Jamie: One thing that I recommend to everyone is to start a list on Twitter. There's tons of like basically Tumblr accounts still to this day that post like really aesthetic images... Also, I have an AI course coming out. It's called, um, the AI creative director. It's on Maven.

Jamie: Firstly, take a break always. like you're never gonna be able to like see properly if you're kind of like in it... walking away and then... be like okay what is actually the problem? Like for some of these generations I'm like it's just too busy... brutal honesty on like what's going on and trying to like not... make AI work the way you want it to work and actually understanding how it works in general.