A tale of two trophies.

One of my favorite things about running a small agency is the wide variety of projects we get to work on for our clients. While our primary bread and butter is websites, over the past 16 years we've made food trucks and physical kiosks and custom software to drive exterior LED installations, in addition to more straight forward assignments like branding and advertising.

Recently, a SaSS client reached out for help with an advertising campaign that would be running in the trades during award season. We wanted to highlight the app's involvement with the dozens of nominated productions, and a phone-based statuette was the obvious visual that came to mind in a quick brainstorm. 30 seconds into midjourney later, we had a quick comp visual, and after a snappy approval and jumping through a few discord-based hoops, had licensed, full res art ready to submit to publication. Cool.

As I watched this quickly unfold, I thought back to an assignment we had a few years back. While in the middle rebranding a trade association, Mess was asked for ideas on how to honor their recently deceased founder's legacy. We envisioned a trophy- a real physical thing, and after selling in the rough idea, worked with an actual artist, Joshua Diedrich to bring it into reality. Starting from our drafts, Joshua worked from pencil sketches and 3D models, 3D printed froms to make molds, to have things forged at a foundry. Really cool stuff, and the client was ultimately so moved that the design of the trophy actually filted back up and informed/reshaped the entire visual rebrand of the organization. Very, very cool.

Anyhow, back to the visual prop we got from MidJourney. While there is no denying the convenience of going from spittball'ed idea to final artifact with a few keystrokes, it is definitely a lower-case a artifact. It will serve it's purpose as a string of bits and then be done, and that's ok. Not every project has the time or budget to hire a working artist to craft an Artifact (capital A) that will both guide their brand and literally stand the test of time, and as a creative studio it's on us to pick and choose both our battles and our tools.

I did wonder though, where does the MidJourney money go? Obviously a large chunk of it goes to some giant data center full of nvidia chips in some far flung location with cheap power. But who is the dude? Surely there is also someone behind this operation, that so quickly has become such a hot, contested topic. What is he about, and what are his values? A bit of cursory poking revealed it's David Holz, and I dunno... it's kind of about what you'd expect? Half "changing the world through imagination" and half "move fast and break things" (aka: lol @ ethics and/or the regulatory environment).

There's no shortage of discourse and discussion about AI, in flavors ranging from pedantic to philosophical, with lots of people feeling lots of things, and even more people trying to sell you something AI-related on this very website. Whatever the issues may be, the industry as made it crystal clear it's foot is remaining firmly on the gas.

Will AI make us better at our jobs? Or put us out of work? Will it create opportunity or take it? My hunch is probably a little of column A and a little of column B, with the dudes who control these tools making fairly vast fortunes either way.

When my team asked me to post on linked in more, I'm sure they were expecting "thought leadership" style musings, but, as I sit here staring at this hoodied captain of the generative imagery industry, i have more questions than answers.

Stay tuned for my next installment, in which I talk about Elon Musk's stupid robot. Oh yeah, we also build sweet websites and do branding and stuff.

Drop me a line if you need any of that, or a custom trophy or whatever.