A client of mine, they have this annual project, to make some postcards to send across their hundreds (or even thousands) of employees. It has to be some generic funny ‘Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year’ postcard. Nothing too fancy, nothing too complicated. Yet, I’ve been failing this project for years!
First Attempts#
First time, I’ve asked my illustrator to draw me something.
Yet, the prompt was as vague as possible. ‘Some Chrtistmas motives, vyshyvankas, ornaments, hearts, snowflakes, you know.’
The prompt was persistent all the years I knew the company (over 10). Some abstract vague things. Try to guess what they’d like this year!
These ten years ago, at our first year of working with the company, this very first illustrator’s attempt failed, and I needed to invent something. I had no budget, it wasn’t a commercial project. And the client wasn’t paying too much for me to pay for it. I invested into their company too much of my development resources already. I was motivated not with money, but with complicated projects.
I tried to make the next iterations of the postcard myself, before attempting another iteration with illustrator. I tried to solve this not with an illustration, but with some style instead. These attempts failed as well, because it’s not a luxury fashion house in need of a conceptual stylish graphics. And not everyone needs super-stylish postcards.
They weren’t super-stylish, but they were stylish. Ten years later, I’d call them at least okayish. It was a decent work. It was much better than what they were doing before.
I failed my first Christmas postcard project, so they made that project with someone else. I don’t want to show you the postcard they made that year. I have it somewhere in my archives, but … let’s say, I don’t really want to put it here.
I would rather not do that, please.
Instead, try to imagine. It’s some ComicSans-ish font. The picture as if it was scaled up, pixelated and uglied. It was so unprofessional, that I was shocked. I couldn’t believe it is true, and genuinely thought it’s some kind of trolling. Right? But it wasn’t.
Next Attempts#
The following year, they asked me for help again. I don’t recall what it was, I guess I tried again. Possibly, with less enthusiasm.
But I remember the tendency. Over the years, I’ve been trying to fuck-off-already them politely. This tiny Christmas project did not affect how much did they pay me, as they were underpaying me significantly anyway. So I wasn’t motivated to even attempt at doing something here. That wasn’t what they hired me for, it’s just that I was the person who— how to place it, gets some visual aesthetics.
At some time, they just stopped even asking me about those Christmas cards. And we had some years break. Before this year.
This Attempt#
I don’t know why did they asked me for help again, all of the sudden. I think they weren’t aware of the development of AI too much. But that’s my only version, as for them I am that hacker-guy.
So they asked me to try to design this postcard. Again.
This year, I have Adobe Firefly alongside my Creative Cloud subscription. Try it yourself, if you have subscription: firefly.adobe.com.
I generated some images. For me, most of the output was okayish. Especially for the first iteration, where I show available options, so the client could determine the desirable style.
I sent them a bunch of Christmas trees:
And some hearts too:
That was a super low-effort attempt. Basically, I didn’t care too much. Yet, they liked the result! It was the first time they liked what I sent them during these ‘Christmard’ projects, and from the very first iteration. But … I liked the result as well! It wasn’t even close to what rubbish they were making previous years.
I could have some extra iterations, I won’t bother publish everything the AI gave me. The point is, it was super-easy to generate a decent postcards to send to the workers.
Texts#
Then, they send me the texts. They were written poorly and in Ukrainian language. I had to translate them to English and German languages. But the original copywriting was so bad, I struggled to do that. I had to improve original version first.
It was a challenge in itself, due to me not being a native speaker and knowing the language poorly. I couldn’t properly speak the language just a couple of years ago.
- I asked ChatGPT to re-formulate the original text. Which it did pretty good.
- Then, I took the text and tried to Google Translate it to English and German languages. The result was so bad, I was amazed at how bad Google Translate could be with this generic ‘Merry Christmas and Happy New Year’ message.
- The text is so generic, you don’t even need to actually translate that, and could just search instead.
- So, instead, I asked ChatGPT to translate the text. And I was amazed by how good it was! I re-read it over and over, and found nothing to improve. It was short and eloquent. It was good.
- Then, I asked it to help me find some fonts.
List me free popular good-looking italic fonts for a Christmas Postcard.
And I narrowed my search, to make this project even more low-effort:
List only those fonts that are freely available in Figma.
The result was:
As of my last knowledge update in January 2022, Figma supports Google Fonts, which means you can use any Google Font in Figma. Here are some italic fonts from Google Fonts that you can consider for a Christmas postcard:
- Great Vibes
- Dancing Script
- Pacifico
- Caveat
- Sacramento
- Courgette
- Cookie
- Allura
- La Belle Aurore
- Qwigley
- Tangerine (italic) — I chose this one
- Raleway (italic)
Result#
I took the texts, I chose the font, I opened Figma and was done within minutes.
Some of the postcards are below.
Conclusion#
I won’t call it a great job. But for the effort involved, it’s a great project. It demonstrates a lot, and it teaches a great deal either.
It’s probably not ethical, since large-language models are trained on some illustrators work, but that’s another topic.
At least, having it with another — more picky — client, I think it’s a great way of iterating, of learning the desired style and come closer to what is expected, before involving a professional illustrator to do the job. Otherwise, there’s just too much of effort wasted.
- And it’s not only the sitatuation where the client is ‘bad’ or a designer is not professional. There could be situations in which these LL-models could be of a great help.
- Also, I would surely use this for some background imaging. For games, motion pictures, for other projects too. I see no point in not-generating the backgrounds for when they’re just for decoration.
I’m looking forward towards the development of this artificial intelligence technology.
We need to find what’s etical for it, and what’s not. That’s for sure. Yet, the technology is very impressive.
I wrote about AI one year later, while making this annual Christmas project again: My Stance Towards AI. You may find it interesting too, as this time we made video with the help of AI.
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