Adventures with AI Icon Generation

John Sim

Mar 16, 2023 • 2 min read

I needed to create a simple icon for a new app - usually this involves me getting out my sketchbook and brainstorming some ideas and then replicating in illustrator or photoshop..

... But I thought I'd try something new!

Why don't I let Artificial Intelligence do the brain storming for me..

First - I headed over the OpenAI and asked ChatGPT to come up with some ideas and prompts that I could possibly use to generate an Icon - this immediately threw out ideas I hadn't thought of to help come up with an initial prompt for the text to image conversion.

Next I jumped into Discord and into what has to be my favourite GFX Generator AI - MidJourney.. and asked it to create some magic concepts from my text prompt:

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/imagine IOS icon of a shallow red rounded isometric empty box with a silver paperclip on a white background as flat design vector based

After a bit of back and forth - I found something I liked the initial concept but on zooming in you can see that there were quite a few artifacts and inconsistencies..

So now I had my initial concept to run with...
- I launched photoshop and recreated it from the ground up...

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However;.. I did first try to first cleanup the artifacts but in the end decided it would take longer than using the original as a base sketch and went ahead to create this one..

Overall it worked out pretty well - next time I'm stuck for ideas AI I think is going to be my point of call to help brainstorm quickly with in the future..

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