What is it?
Midjourney is a generative AI that can convert natural language prompts into images.
How do I use it?
The interface to Midjourney is through Discord; making it hugely accessible to a wide audience. You’ll need a discord account if you don’t have one already though.
The quick start guide below will take you through the easy set up steps if you're interested in playing along.
When you're ready all you have to do is type in /imagine to activate the Midjourney bot. You'll then be able to write in your prompt.
Where to begin
To start, I had a look at the #newbie server I joined to see what kind of things people were trying. I thought I would go simple and try making an anime version of my dog Gwyn. You'll need to pass in the -- niji 5 flag to use the model that creates anime images.
DiscordA happy bernese mountain dog wearing a cape on a white background --niji 5This is what I got, which I thought was amazing.
I really liked the top right image, so I remixed the same prompt using that as the base.
This'll work, I zoomed out by 1.5 using the options in the discord UI.
What about interface design?
I'm a product designer, what could I do with Midjourney to help me with my work?
Before diving in I did a bit of reading and happened upon a formula (shown below) mentioned by Christie C in her article, 40+Midjourney Prompts to Create Outstanding UI Design.
DiscordUI Design of [ Industry or Product ], [ Type of user Interface ][ Description of interface/ Descriptive keywords and items], [Include 1–3 styles], [ Color Palette ] High Resolution, --ar 4:3 --v 5.2I have worked on a few SaaS applications, what could Midjourney do here? A common theme in many of the tools I help design involve flow editors of some description. Let's start here with a few slightly different prompts.
DiscordUI Design of a conversation flow builder, dashboard, nodes linked to other nodes with a side panel showing detail about the node content, clean design, simple lines, Grey tones colour palette with subtle black accent, High Resolution, --ar 4:3 --v 5.2
ok, cool start! let's remix it and see what we get.
This looks neat, in particular the bottom left image. Despite not having too much meaning or context of use it looks rad and if nothing else could serve as inspiration!
Let's play with this image further.
This looks very cool - as far as my work goes this serves as an really cool piece of visual inspiration but of course has non of the 'iceberg' below the water of user experience flows and contextual information for user needs. Who cares, it's an image generator, and it does that job ruddy marvellously!
From inspiration to actual designs?
I've always loved fantasy environment paintings, what if I could use Midjourney to serve as the content generator and inspiration for a fantasy real estate website?
This is what I've come up, please feel free to remix and play with your own using the community Figma file.
Useful guides
Midjourney is forever changing and improving and by the time this has been written I can already imagine the game will have moved on somewhat. My word it is fun though.
Here are some links to help you on your journey if you're intetested in playing further.