AI Art (Premium)

Like many of you, I'm experimenting to see where it makes the most sense to introduce AI into my workflows. But I have little interest in using AI for writing, and so I have started, instead, with AI-based graphics for logos and other brand assets, and for "hero" images on this website.

It started, sort of, one year ago, when my wife and I started a YouTube channel called Eternal Spring, triggering evaluations of apps and services with which I was unfamiliar. Key among these, of course, was a video editor, and I eventually settled on Adobe Premiere Elements, which has worked out well. But perhaps less obviously, there was also a need for a solution that I could use to create logos and other graphical assets.

And here, I was less successful, though I did eventually find two decent services, Canva, and Adobe Express, the latter of which was first announced in December 2021. Most of my early work on the channel graphics involved coming up with some form of large format logo as well as a smaller logo that I hoped to eventually put in the corner of videos like a watermark. Frustrated by some combination of my inexperience and the tools themselves, I created the initial graphics much as I do with everything else graphics-related, with some combination of Microsoft Paint and Adobe Photoshop Elements. (I create my family's Christmas card this way each year, for example. And I wrote about my frustration with Microsoft making Paint work more poorly in Windows 11.)

But where to start?

I like minimalist designs, and I was inspired by the titles for Killing Eve, which wrapped up its fourth and final season just as I was working up my own graphics. The title sequence for the show involves a tall, stretched font, a different color background each week that complements the color of the text, an animated blood trail that appears in one of a few different places each week, and different music each week. I didn't want the animation bit, but I liked the stretched font and the color variations and so I worked up something like that. At the time, I was using Affinity Photo, not Photoshop Elements, so the logo, which became the video title sequence, was worked up with that app.

The Microsoft fans in the audience will be delighted to know that the 14 background colors I chose are among the 20 stock colors provided in the Colors section of the Microsoft Paint ribbon. And I went with white for the text/logo, instead of a different color as with Killing Eve, though I'd still like to change that. I also moved the text/logo to the bottom of the image, which I prefer, from the middle, and I chose a different font, which I then stretched vertically to get the effect I was looking for.

I also created a version of this logo with an image mask in the background of each letter, initially a photo I took of the Mexico City skyline. I used this for the website for the channel, which we barely update, and for the channel's page on YouTube.

But I sti...