While my journey with AI coding assistants has been documented in previous articles, this piece focuses specifically on how Midjourney has revolutionized my design process. As visual communication becomes increasingly important in modern development, I've found that AI image generation provides unique opportunities to bridge the gap between concept and implementation.
Over the past few months, I've integrated Midjourney deeply into my UX and design workflow, using it for everything from rapid prototyping to finalized visual assets. This targeted approach to AI-assisted design has allowed me to overcome creative blocks, explore design directions more efficiently, and produce high-quality visual components that would have previously required significantly more time or specialized design expertise.
In this article, I'm going over my experience with Midjourney to accelerate my design and UX process.
Disclaimer
I want to stress from the beginning that I believe there is an ethical and legal aspect to this topic. Midjourney, like many other tools, was trained by scraping the web for images, including copyrighted ones.
Ethics
Ethically speaking, I do not directly use the designs 1-1 in my projects. I gather 'inspiration' from these generated images or use them to create 'Mood Boards' to get a feeling and direction for the project.
I complement this with sites such as: Site Inspire Dribble Awwwards
Among other sources, such as competitors of the project and Pinterest.
Legal
There are ongoing legal discussions and lawsuits currently directed at services like Midjourney. This is important to consider when potentially using it internally, as we do not know how these services will be treated legally in the future.
Copyright
This is also a gray area. My understanding is that no one owns the copyright to the generated images, and they're part of the public domain. Anything you generate and create can be reused by someone else, especially considering Midjourney publicly shows all images generated by its users.
If you simply use a generated design or image 1-1, there's nothing preventing someone else from doing the same.
My Experience with Midjourney
There are plenty of online articles that go into detail about using prompts to create better images for your goals, so we will not be going into that in this article.
Instead, I will focus more on using Midjourney ethically to speed up the process and how it can be used internally as part of your design and development process.
The only detail I will add prompt-wise is that I personally use the --v 5.2 flag. This flag reduces additional 'noise' in the image, such as a screen on the desk at an odd angle. However, this also limits the potential creativity of the design. Later flags can give more creative results, but you may need to prompt and retry to get enough of the image to be about the actual design.
Creating the Initial Mood Board
The first thing we typically get as designers is a breakdown of what the project needs visually, the type of design language, colors, and general features specific pages need to support.
Let's break this down into some important sub-aspects:
- Theme: Light or Dark theme, or can it switch based on the browser/PC settings.
- Color Palette: Does the customer have a predefined color palette that needs to be used?
- Industry: What industry is the customer or project about? Cars, Holiday Rentals, or something else?
With this information, I already begin writing some initial prompts, almost entirely ignoring the other functionality requests for the time being:
/imagine Dark website design, based on selling high-market cars such as Rolls Royce, luxury brand, colors: gold, yellows, dark grays, and blacks --v 5.2 --ar 16:9 --style raw
The initial idea is to get an overall style feeling, getting an idea of color combinations, aesthetics, and what Midjourney has been trained on. The latter part is important because it will typically render common practices, layouts, and functionality, which can be useful to also demo to the customer as part of the mood board.
I'll run this a few times to get some variety and create a mood board based on 'theme'.
Illustrating Initial Functionality
Now that I've gotten some design inspiration on layout, colors, and potential uses of typography, I can begin looking at using Midjourney to design some examples of how the specific functionality could look and feel.
Let's list some criteria:
- Search: The customer wants a strong search on the homepage hero section.
- Car List: Screen for showing the cars, with filtering and sorting.
/imagine a shopping website, search page, filter options sidebar, search bar, dark theme
It's important to note that I'm purposely removing the --v flag and also trying not to add too many options and details to the prompt. I've noticed I get increasingly bad results as you try to demonstrate website functionality with a specific theme or product in mind.
Because we're not looking to use a design 1-1, but instead get inspiration on layout and visually presenting functionality, prompting simply will give you better results.
Interactions and Animations
This is especially where the external sources come in handy:
Here I can screengrab certain animations, effects, and visuals that I can use to demo to the customer.
The End Result - Now I Begin to Design and Draw
Within a morning, I now have a mood board that shows colors, styles, typography, iconography, as well as some example layouts for functionality and example user feedback via animations and visualizations.
This is where I jump in and begin wireframing the specific functionality, page types, and combine all this information and visualizations into a single digital whiteboard that I can share with the client and team.
Whiteboard
I personally use Figma for the whiteboard and design process, as it allows multiple designers and team members to make real-time feedback and input in this process.
In Ending
Ethically and Legally
In this process, we've approached this as ethically as we could. We're not directly using anything from Midjourney, but instead use it to help present visualizations and illustrate ideas to the customers and the internal team.
Cheaper, Faster Design Process
The design process can then be streamlined, with the initial whiteboard serving as the foundation for customer conversations. By using Midjourney, we've achieved this more efficiently and cost-effectively. With customer feedback in hand, we can then begin designing something more closely aligned to their specific needs and requirements.
This Finishes This Initial Series
This finishes the initial series, but there will be more articles coming weekly that dive more into this and other topics.
