BEFORE & AFTER |THE AI MIRACLE

Getting just the right amount of benevolence in your Celestial Dragon God is now easy, just ask Dall-e 3

In a lifetime there are moments which resonate so deeply as to cause the feeling of a clear line between what was once possible in this world, and what now is possible. It doesn’t take a towering intellect to recognize that presently advancing art generative AI has once again, created such a moment. To think this moment dovetails with the efforts our team is directly involved we appreciate.

Concepting for Chronicle’s logo the theme of both an eclipse and threads were incorporated to represent our story and values: the eclipse, as this moment in time we came together, and the threads, our respective stories we contribute to the greater narrative of our creative effort.

As a small team Radiant embraces anything with which we can leverage our creative potential. Therefore AI naturally plays a large role in our development. Code, concepts, copy, are all assets which AI is able to help produce. We are able to conceptualize, design, and develop, as a result of these tools, at until now, impossible speeds. So what has changed to warrant such an improvement? Come along with me on a visual journey to find out. It may not all make sense. But it’s always been better that way.

Leondardo AI image - I had used this website until Dall-E 3s release. It’s time has already come and gone. This ship is not slowing down.

Following from the story of our previous blog update, we had, since welcoming a new design member to our team, began a total redesign of the website. To start my portion of the work I set out on the internet in search of reference materials and color swatches. An effort with curious results. I’ve learned double-time to appreciate what a glacial rate design moves without constant reference materials to inspire progress and therefore the value of providing lots of it. Sites like dribble or browsing google images provided the lion’s share of references.

Sometimes articles could be helpful as well. As we’ve narrowed down our color redesign to teal / something, I found several written pieces that provided a wide arrange of color options as well as transformed my interior decorative skills. It’s the little lessons we don’t expect along the way which can be most valuable.

When pushed in the aurura borealis direction results were promising.

All of the this reference work was done old-school style. I was looking at the art of artists and that’s cool. I enjoyed it, especially dribble. If you go there you can look at prominent designers accounts and see their portfolios, examples of both skill and reference.

Where I took my fateful detour and departed from well travelled streets of modern designville came from the usual source, a question. I had an idea I wanted to sort out first with chat GPT 4.0, the text generative AI. When I logged in to have that conversation I noticed something new. Dall-E 3 beta was now available for use to open AI plus subscribers, of which, I am one.

‘What lay beyond the void’ - All sorts of inpsiration for the story behind Radiant.

I’d literally written a blog post about how excited I was for this technology not a week prior and now here it was available for use. I could see for myself, was it all smoke and mirrors or would Dall-E 3 usher in the next era of art generative AI? To test this I used D-3 to assist with the concept work for our different teal color schemes. My first request was for a landing pages done with the various possible color combinations.

An example produced for a teal and blue landing page.

Another example for red and teal.

While useful, something was missing from these designs for use in our project. It struck me that I’d not specified we are developing for a dark theme. I updated my request to include the intended dark-theme design and the results were impressive.

Teal and black: effortless sophistication.

Teal and gold: mind, mystery, and class

My brain, so tickled by the results, had another storm. A part of the visual ambition of Radiant is that a story accompany the website. We don’t want some sterilized experience which feels like a commerical interaction. We want our users to enjoy a sense of immersion, just as we do when we interact with our favourite products.

From inception I’d seen Radiant in my head as some kind of magic gem or prescious stone, reminiscent to the one from the much beloved “Dark Crystal” created by, Jim Henson of Muppet’s fame. If you possessed this gem, I imagined, it would create for you anything your heart desired. Although never explicity stated anywhere, I used this imagery as an basic creative anchor for how the website could represent something other than the code it is.

Over time the idea of Radiant as a gem evolved into the idea of a constellation. Sky and star images repeated enough times in the concepts for our landing pages to provide the inspiration for the gem to become several points of light in the sky which (for some reason) would grant the wishes of those that found them.

Dissatisfied with the absence of a ‘why’ the constellation granted your heart’s desire, one small imaginative step away waiting was, ‘Radiant the Celestial Dragon’, who if contacted, may make your dreams come true. With the question of why this constellation (now celestial dragon) granted wishes answered, we had the creative foundation of a story which could grow with the site. It is this request: to incorporate the story of the celesital dragon in its design considerations, that I found the moment named for this blog entry, the miracle. I had dreamed I would see results like this from interacting with art AI. I’d not with all my untempered hopes, thought that it would arrive so soon. The designs Dall-E 3 produced for me… well look for yourself.

We’re able to see here the new ability of Dall-E 3 to write text within an image. As of the beta the success rate is still patchy, but that it can do it at all now is astounding.

The variety and quality of concepts were staggering. Notably, concepts rarely, if at all, repeated. Each itteration was unique and I could produce useful reference at a rate that a career long designer would struggle to keep pace with.

I’ll pause to say, this does not replace career designers (yet). More, it can be leveraged with the vocabulary of those more experienced to garner even better results. To put it another way, the AI is as smart as you. I may get some cool results from my very limited understandng of design and an intuitive sense of how I’d like the overall result to look, but the design vernacular that specifically describes those things I am less well-versed in.

A career designer, knowing better how to describe what they want will, in most cases will get a better result. For example, ‘subsurface scattering’ is a beautiful detail to add to a piece of art. The AI knows what this is and his more than happy to put it in your work, but you must know what that is and ask for it.

The images we’ve examined so far I was more than happy with but I thought perhaps there was room to push the celestial imagery. With that in mind I asked the AI if we could expand on the idea of the Dragon God being a constellation. That’ll do. That’ll do.

We in find ourselves in a moment you’d think might be rarer, perched on the verge of a before and after in terms of what we are capable of as a species. We’ve been here enough times already and our technological tree is extensive at this point, but that never makes the event less significant. If you are lucky enough to stop and take note of such an event, you can feel history being made. Alas it is the nature of humankind to brush by such things and only see them looking back, but what do you do? That’s as predictable as rain. Must mean nothings wrong.

This is the page we used to help develop our color system and landing page design. Not bad reference output for 3 hours of work. Thank you Dall-E.

So much of success in life is timing, timing as it intersects with imagination and effort. All are fine enough on their own, but the magic truly happens when you get them all together, slightly drunk. I can’t help but feel as we work on Radiant, that just maybe, we’ve all three. Dall-E 3 is incredible, ground-breaking, and pure fun to use. However, we are keenly aware that it is in no way a silver bullet replacement to thoughtful, intentioned, development, which requires our very human attention. Balancing these forces is never easy, but a worthy challenge as we move ahead.

Looking forward to further updates. Thank you for reading this (old-fashioned human written) blog post.

The Radiant Team,

Dave, Connor, Aya