The use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in design is becoming more and more commonplace. And for good reason: AI can help with aspects of the design process, from brainstorming and prototyping to creating high-fidelity visuals and user interfaces faster and more efficiently.

I have been using Midjourney to create images for a while now. Recently, after some playing around, I found that the AI also works reliably for generating design visuals such as logos, posters and user interfaces.

Midjourney is a research lab that has an AI program under the same name that allows users to generate any type of image from a text prompt.

Below is a step-by-step example of how I used Midjourney to create a landing page design for a fictional project in just one hour.

Do you already have an idea of a design you would like to create? Awesome! If not, don’t stress, head over to ChatGPT and ask the AI to create a fictional company for you. I am going to make a landing page for a sustainable company that sells the best bananas in the world.

So, sign up for Midjourney and go to Discord and write your first prompt. You can give extra parameters and keywords to nudge the AI in a specific direction. This was my prompt:

Beautiful landing page for a banana website, design, ux/ui, ux, ui --ar 3:2 --v 4 --q 2

It will generate 4 variants for each prompt. Try a few different prompts, with various keywords and styles. After a few tries you will have a wide selection of possible ideas. This was the result it generated from my initial prompt.

The prompt results were better than expected! I liked all of them, but as I had to choose one I picked the first variant. It had the most vibrant colours and was a bit playful. I used this variant for the landing page design.

I upscaled the image. Sadly, I lost some fun colours and shapes in the process. The bananas were less saturated, I lost a few pieces of fruit, and suddenly I had a bowl of corn on the left!

I really liked generating the images using Midjourney, so I tried to ask it for some other design visuals such as small fruit characters and a fun scene featuring a bunch of bananas. Below are the results, they are amazing!

Tip: You can use Photoshop, Gimp or Paint.net to edit the images or cut out some specific elements. You can also use online tools like Upscale.media or Img.upscaler to upscale the images.

Without Midjourney it would have been impossible for me to get this many “high-quality” assets to work with. These examples above were generated in only 5 minutes! Imagine what you can create with some more finetuning and editing work.

Now that I had all the assets I went over to Figma and started fiddling around. You can view the designs in Figma using this link.

First I needed a good font that looked like the one in my variant, so I went to Google Fonts and found Gentium Book Basic. I used this font to create a very basic logo. I also created a button component and edited the text that ChatGPT created for me.

I cleaned up the initial variant and removed the unreadable text Midjourney generated. Now it was time to add all the elements; the logo, the text, and my button. With just that the landing page was done!

I had just enough time (and inspiration) left to create a fun card using one of the images. I made a few versions using the primary colour tones of the image.

Using Midjourney definitely speeds up the design process. Prototyping and ideation just got 10 times faster. You can create 20 different prototypes to let a client choose from within just a few minutes. Manually that would take ages!

Within a few minutes, I was able to generate some unique visuals. Without Midjourney I wouldn’t have been able to and would have just picked a free illustration from Google. In just an hour I created a basic logo, a landing page with a unique visual and a card design in consistent brand colours.

Midjourney is not perfect though. There are still cases where you can’t seem to get your desired result from the prompt. Also, AI-generated designs often follow a trend or a generic colour pattern. For example, a tech company has blue colours, a construction company gets orange colours, and a bulldozer or a handyman.

Midjourney has only been publicly available for a few months. I’m sure the tech will improve drastically in the coming years.