Hey, welcome back to the Po-Party, it's Jules. Today we are talking about key art, making
key art. And this is going to be a bit of a workshop going on the vein of branding and
the components of a brand package. We've discussed a lot about brand this past month. That's
your typography, your logo, colors, mood boards, etc. There are other workshops on this podcast
on how to develop the basics of a brand. And I give you a few of my opinions about how
to get started easy, fast, and also find inspiration. So check out those first few episodes of the
Po-Party. They're in the feed. They're in this season 1, 2, and 3. Today we're going
to talk about key art, what it is, how it contributes to a brand package, when you need
it. And I'll go into some examples of what key art can be and how you would make it for
a music festival, for example. Then we'll also touch a little bit on AI because since
we're talking about images and how to make them, it's almost impossible not to talk about
this juicy topic today. I've generated a few AI images myself. I've also photoshopped the
crap out of a ton of them. So I have a few ideas on how to use still generative AI art.
And I'll give you some of my thoughts on what AI is good for, what it's not good for. But
that in itself can be another episode. So we'll touch on it briefly. But today, let's
go ahead and dive into this topic of making key art, what it's for, and we'll get to
know a little bit more about how it fits into your overall brand. Alright, let's go.
So what is key art? Key art is essentially all of the graphics or illustrations, maybe
even photography that you would typically see for a campaign. Now, what is a campaign?
A campaign can be any sort of movement that you make for marketing, whether that's advertising
the Olympics or a new flavor of Doritos or a new album you have coming out. Generally,
we call these branding fleets campaigns because they serve a specific purpose, whether it's
to announce the drop of a new line, you want to tell people that you have something new
coming out. But the idea is that it serves the purpose of getting the information out
to the public and then that campaign is over. You might refer to it in the future, but generally,
the art really matters a ton because while your brand is the key components of what you
look like through your fonts, your logos, your colors, the key art can be seasonal,
it can define the moment. And I think a lot of the times we see key art used during special
seasonal events like the Superbowl, Valentine's Day, name any holiday that you would celebrate.
Lunar New Year, for example. I personally love seeing New Year's campaigns. I think
they're fun and then also many people in the field of astrology, I think could also
benefit from utilizing key art for the season. So think of key art as foundational work that
you would show in a seasonal campaign. And I know a lot of examples, but even if you're
an artist or designer trying to launch your brand and you are offering a new service,
that service might have specific forms of key art that you're using in order to advertise
your product. So another question people might have is, do you need key art? And honestly,
you do not always need key art. I think key art belongs to the illustrators and visual
designers of the world, maybe even the photographers and the presentation designers. I think that
using key art is important when you're trying to create a campaign, but what's even more
important is getting the look and feel of the key art down with the messaging of the
campaign. Let's say there's an illustrator who has a particular style you like and you
think it matches the campaign, you found them on Behance, that's perfect. You can go ahead
and contact them and ask them to work on your campaign and maybe get like three to four
visuals that you could then use on your email marketing, your posters, your mailers, et
cetera. Now key art is important for this specific reason because generally in a campaign,
you might have very many different ways of communicating with people. I mentioned a few,
maybe you're reaching out to them with flyers or you're creating a new landing page. If
you have specific graphics for that campaign, it's going to be easily tied to the moment,
the season, the announcement you're trying to make for that specific campaign. And you
really can just pop those graphics in there and that just ties everything together. That's
one of the best things about key art. Now I touch upon this already, but one of the
key things to know about key art is that it is so important still to get the look and
feel of your brand down with key art. Let's talk about an example. Let's say you're
launching a Superbowl campaign for Doritos during the halftime show and you're trying
to make key art. It might not really make a lot of sense to make key art for Doritos
that feels really pastel and bubbly and lovely because that doesn't really fit with the
brand of Doritos. When I think of Doritos, I think angular, spicy, flavorful, crunchy,
like loud and red. So it would be really important to find someone who's really good at matching
that style. Also, it really depends on what the flavor is and if there's something particularly
new about this Dorito. Let's say for example, that this Dorito was a puff chip. Maybe you
would get someone who is really good at a 3D art style that is puffy. There's lots
of different types of key art you can make, but generally speaking, since key art can
be so many different things like 3D art, doodles, photography, AI art, I think it's a good idea
to keep it simple and maybe just choose one to two categories of key art for a campaign
just so it doesn't start getting too busy. Because one of the things I mentioned about
key art is that it's easy to pop in and then just tie back to a campaign. If you start
getting into the territory of way too many different styles, then it becomes harder to
tie it all together. And this is what art directors are for, I believe, just really
making sure that messaging is the same across all campaigns visually and then also working
with the other creators who are on a project. And going on a little bit of a tangent, but
in the same vein, these days, many brands work with content creators. I think one of
the hardest things to nail is actually dignified, but put together look, style, and feel among
all different types of content that creators can contribute to a campaign. One of the other
great things about key art is that sometimes people develop whole experiences around key
art. So I think a really good example of this is with character designs and games. So let's
say for example, Zeltnett. Sometimes this is just an example, but sometimes character
designers might show the designs for a new character and then a game is created entirely
around that look and feel of a character. This is because it's much easier to get one
component, one small piece of a world down rather than creating the world from scratch
first and then creating the small components. So if you're working on a team with lots
of different designers and artists, then maybe someone that an art director creates a piece
of key art, just one of them, and then everyone else nails down that style, that look and
feel and then bases the work off of this initial design. This is great because it can become
a beacon for a team of artists on large sets. Games are a great example because they take
so long to develop and there's a lot of different moving pieces. So we've talked a little bit
about what key art is, what it can do for you and your campaign and how it might help
working on a large team of designers. Now we're going to go into an example of making
key art for a music festival that takes place in the state of Florida. And I'm using this
example from a very particular music festival that I once went to, which was based in Okeechobee.
So I'm back and we're in the backyard, but let's go ahead and work out this exercise
and making key art for a music festival based at a place in Florida called Okeechobee. So
Okeechobee is a place full of swamps and I don't know if you've ever been to the Okeechobee
music festival, doesn't really matter. But when I was there, they had all these little
islands. There were some different stages. I felt like an alligator was going to crawl
out at any moment. But if we're going back to this idea of making key art for a poster,
one of the ways that I would brainstorm essentially approaching the task of illustrating for this
festival would be to brainstorm different ideas of visuals that represent the place.
So that could be people who are there, the setting itself, where the event takes place,
and then the types of things you might see there like food, music, activities. And I
love music festivals, especially for illustration exercises, because if you've ever been to
a festival, you know that there are some key things that stay the same every single year,
but then there are usually seasonal elements that change, maybe new vendors or like a really
dramatic piece of art that is just put up somewhere in the middle of the campground.
And so as an artist and an illustrator, I think one of the ways that I would approach
making key art for this type of event is to basically write down the types of things that
I would see at this event, maybe even discuss with the festival organizers what would go
on. And then from basically brainstorming and creating a word cloud of ideas, what we
could then do is do some really quick sketches, set a timer for about 15 minutes and not really
doing complete fleshed out sketches, but just doing little thumbnail designs of what these
images would look like. Now, if you've never heard of a thumbnail before, this is a great
time for me to explain what it is. A thumbnail is essentially a one inch by one inch drawing
typically done on scratch paper in pencil or with pen. I like pencil because you can
erase and you get the idea that these are just previews. And then you try to essentially
get down the drawing. So let's say I'm trying to draw a frog. I'm going to spend two minutes
drawing a frog. And then if I like it, great. If not, then I'm going to spend another two
minutes drawing a different frog. The idea here is not to get these drawings perfect.
We don't want to get these drawings perfect, but what we do want to do is get a bunch of
ideas down onto paper, warm up our hand and get the brain flowing. If you are an artist,
designer, illustrator, someone who usually works with drawing images, this might be a
little bit easier for you, but I would say still engage with this exercise even if you're
not used to it, because it'll start to get you thinking about images, not being so hard
on yourself. And then just playing with shapes and being a little bit more abstract is important
here. Just try to be super quick with these drawings because then you'll get a sense for
what's actually worth spending your time on once you get to the computer and start making
more fleshed out. Something I sometimes see with newer designers is that they really love
playing with color. Maybe they'll choose like some pastels or crayons and they'll get really
sucked into the weeds and the details and composition of one single drawing. And I think
that's fine for a single piece of artwork, but even before you get to the stage of deciding
you want to flesh out your artwork more, I think it's a great idea to just get all the
ideas out there. And so with this thumb nailing exercise, maybe you even spend an hour, but
you just spend five minutes on every single little idea that you have and you could draw
the squares beforehand. So if we're dividing an hour by five minutes, what does that give
us? That gives us drawings in the end and then you can choose the best ones that you
like and then spend more time on just the best ones. The reason why we want to brainstorm
and get all the ideas out on paper first is that we know that we've given ourselves the
time to explore the possibilities and then we can worry about things like color, style,
how we're going to execute fleshed out art. We're just doing these in pencil and so let's
brainstorm out loud what kind of images we could make for this festival in Florida. I'm
thinking alligators, islands, swamps, stages. What kind of food do you like to eat at festivals?
I like hot dogs, I don't know, smoothies, guitars, dancing. Dancing might be a hard
thing to draw just abstractly so if we narrow it down, maybe we do people, maybe there's
a type of style of person. You can do stick figures if you like, but don't get so caught
up on it. Sun, maybe it's water. We're just trying to make these kind of quick and then
as we explore drawing out these designs, you can see what's really going to be feasible,
but it's important to just let it flow and if it starts taking a little bit too much
time that's a good indicator of moving on to the next idea. Alright, great. So at this
point you should have all your thumbnails laid out. There's probably going to be about
12 of them. What you can do is choose really five to six of the images that speak to you
the most. What we would do with these images is try to make higher fidelity art with just
the sketches. There are a few ways to do this. If you like to draw and use a very physical
pen to paper process with markers, you can do that. You can just outline them in black.
If you are a digital artist, you can take this to your computer. I would recommend from
here actually starting another mood board process just for the illustrations and the
reason why I would do this is because there's so many different ways to approach illustrations
and we want the branding, the look, the feel and the vibe to really match the music festival.
And so for example, while it might make sense to do kind of slings for something that's
a little bit more handmade for a music festival, maybe you want to explore 3D art or you want
to try some AI generated art. It's really up to you to decide as an artist and a designer,
but the possibilities are endless. Now is the time to narrow down the possibilities
and when you create mood boards, you can choose three directions. You can put together three
different mood boards of what you might like to do. And if you're unfamiliar with mood
boards, I highly recommend that you visit the episode on mood boards or finding your
tastes and the episode on where to find design inspiration. And that's on this podcast.
Go ahead and give those a listen and then you're just going to create some mood boards
from websites like Designspiration, Beheath and find some illustrations, at least six
images that have one specific style and then that's going to be one direction. You can
create as many mood boards as you like, but at the end of the day, you need to choose
a one direction that's really strong, really dignified and that's going to be applied to
your illustrations. Don't spend too much time on this because the next thing you want to
do is actually try to execute making your illustrations in the style that you like.
And the thing is, if you try to make it too perfect, picking out mood boards and styles
before you actually even try to execute it, you might find that, well, you wanted your
illustrations in this style, but maybe you lack the execution ability or it's just not
really working in the way you thought it would. It's good to try things really quickly and
then find solutions. As I mentioned before, you can always hire another designer to make
your illustrations in a specific style if you like the style that they have. A lot of
times illustrators and designers can even work out this subnailing process for you,
but I think it's fun to be engaged and even if this is not your main job, you want to
take it to pen and paper first. That's going to be the easiest ways to get your creativity
going and then feel like you had a say in the process. Now, when it comes to developing
key art on a timeline, I feel that depending on the event you have, you want to give at
least one to three months to your artist or designer to get this project done. If you
have more graphics, I would say add on an additional week for every single image above
the number three that you include. And I think that's fair just because genuinely, if you
want the execution to be done correctly, the more you add on, the more time it takes, it's
only fair. And if you ever wanted illustrations and graphics more quickly within a one to
three month timeline, I would say that's when you start looking at images and graphics that
are already made, that are already pre-done, that you can just buy the license to use.
They exist out there and they're on websites like Creative Market. You could even venture
to use icons on the noun project. There are lots of different solutions, but try not to
rush an artist or a designer. Give them time. It takes time. If you're in a rush and you
have this bigger vision, lower your expectations.
So I have to be honest with you. I feel like I've said pretty much everything I can tell
you about Key Art just by doing a voice audio workshop, but I did promise you that I was
going to talk a little bit about AI art and generative AI today. And why do I have any
authority to talk about this? I did work at an AI startup for about six months until it
went defunct. At the time we were building a generative AI product, it was essentially
what Adobe Firefly looks like right now. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, generative
AI is essentially a text to visual AI product. It uses large language models to match words
like dripping pink gooey rug on the beach to visual images from a visual library. And
just from a string of words like that, you can generate images that take inspiration
from the library AI has. You can add in your own image references and style references.
There's actually a really good product available on the market called Adobe Firefly. It's currently
free to use. And another reason why I have authority to talk on this topic is because
I've used it quite a few times, especially working with my current agency, the Creative
Exchange. Now I'm going to tell you what I think generative AI is good for, what it's
not good for. And I truly believe this could be a longer episode. So I'm going to give
you the TRDR, the too long don't read, or basically the cliff notes. Genit, I feel,
especially for talking about Adobe Firefly, this is basically like a website that you
can use. It will generate images for you. I think that the website itself still takes
a lot of fine tuning to use. There are pretty good tutorials online. I'd say on TikTok,
I found one by Pink Pony Creative that someone at my agency sent over to me. And I think
what it's really good for is if you want to put in like a word, let's say that word is
giveaway, and that is the structure that you want to generate, like a really cool dripping
pink gooey style. You can put in your own vector arts and then change the style pretty easily,
pretty quickly. You do have to tweak with the settings. And I've had a few experiences
where maybe I put in a word that I wanted to change into a different style. Maybe it's
like chromatic, fuzzy, whatever. But if you don't get the structure style down correctly,
it can end up changing just entirely the word that you wrote out. So this work is not good
on its own. I think it still needs a lot of massaging, as one of my design friends said.
And the other thing too is I just think that you still need to have good design sensibilities
to use these products. You still need to know different image types, like PNGs versus JPEGs,
and what ratio of images are good to use. I think sometimes AI can actually generate
some cool textures that, or like elements of like stylized words, for example, that
are cool to cut out in Photoshop and then add to other designs because I'm a big Photoshop
user. I love it. I love collage style. I think it's good for that, but I think on its own,
it still looks AI generated to me. And I think that can be its own use. It's like going into
a clip art folder or in like just, you know, it gives me more variety and ways of playing
around with ideas, especially if you're not like a Photoshop user, you don't have the
patience for Canva. But frankly, I'm not even going to tell you that this is a tool that's
super easy to use. It takes some time. It takes some learning, but I do like it when
visual tools are a little bit more accessible for people. But yeah, I think standalone as
a product in itself, it's almost like a new category of visuals that I just don't think
anyone can confidently say can stand on its own legs without some sort of experience,
not even design experience, but like time with the product, I would say it takes 10
hours to really get used to it, which isn't a super high investment. I would say Photoshop
takes anywhere from 50 to a hundred hours just to get some usable range of actually
creating some good outputs. Now, if you are a Photoshop or Adobe Suite user, you know
that AI is really integrated into a lot of these products as well. So Illustrator, Photoshop,
their generative fill backgrounds on Photoshop. I don't think these are as good as using
Adobe Firefly. And the reason that is has to do a lot with basically how AI works. And
I find like the best AI products actually has to do with some technical like CPU, computer,
graphics card synergy that I fully even can't explain. Again, even at the AI startup, I
was a product designer and I was designing the interface and I have like limited knowledge
of the backend. So what I can say on a separate but related note is that a lot of companies
are integrating AI into their features these days. Even Figma recently at config demonstrated
some really cool uses of AI generating user flows of user interfaces. And they did say
though, I will say this like very clearly that what they demonstrated on stage is like
a private beta that they tested with some permission using other people's interfaces
and whatnot. And the thing is what I know about AI and generative AI is it's actually
extremely expensive. The computing cost of it is not cheap. So the reason why I feel
like a lot of these big companies are coming out with like some like good products is because
they can actually afford the cost of generating. But that's almost like barely. I think one
thing that I learned from the AI startup fail is that the big players in the tech industry
now are the ones that have the money and the resources to really do anything with generative
AI. It's very resource expensive and yet no one's really figured out the monetization
or revenue aspect. And I think even there's been jokes that they're just hoping that AI
can figure out the cost revenue model. For this reason, I am highly skeptical and even
wary of highly relying on generative AI and a design and visual process because what companies
are essentially doing right now is giving us these products to use for free. They're
doing the old excuse my metaphor drug dealer technique where like the first few times are
free and then once you're hooked on it, they're going to start charging you like a $50 a month
subscription. And you can see this even with a lot of really good tools that exist out
there for like architects that may be leveraging some sort of AI like they're really charging
$60 a month. And I think if you are in an industry where you need this, I wouldn't mind
paying for that. You just include it in your cost. But I also think right now like I see
designers using these free products and not really charging enough. Like generative AI
is not supposed to be a cheap solution. Essentially what companies are doing right now is they're
making it free, they're eating the cost. And once they find the market for it, they're
going to start charging. So I think that's something to consider. I think it's funny
because I see sometimes people like freelancing out generative AI services for work saying,
oh, this is like a cheap and easy fast way of producing work. But genuinely, I think
it actually is more work for designers sometimes to figure out how to make AI look good, especially
with like things like Adobe Firefly. And then the second thing is no, it's absolutely not
going to be free and cheap forever. This is just a way of getting people using the product
and then maybe finding a way to rely on it before they start charging a lot for it. So
that's a little bit of my cynical but like business perspective of generative AI. The
other thing too is yeah, absolutely. I think it's a horrible idea to use other people's
artwork in generative AI and rip on their style without any permission. I still think
that is like copying and a lazy way of creating visuals that requires no sort of like talents
or trust relationship, which as you've probably heard on this podcast, like I care about quite
a lot. So I would say be careful how you use generative AI. And it's all fun in games to
add in a vector word group of something like, oh, giveaway, because I want to do like a
fun giveaway for a brand and just make the words giveaway look fun and match their style.
But it's totally different. I think totally not cool in my opinion to take someone's illustrations,
like copy their style, make a bunch of work that tries to replicate like basically knock
off their work and like the years of expertise. I think that's foul play. And I also think
people need to do research on how generative AI takes information, your information to
learn human expectations based upon the info you give it. So if you give generative AI
information that needs to be private, or you don't really want to share, that's too bad.
You gave up the goods. So I think that's the gist of what I can offer on generative AI
at the moment. But if you have any questions, if you think I said something like slightly
inaccurate, you can go ahead and correct me. I don't mind. But these are my thoughts, my
take. And I think after six months of being at a crypto startup that turned AI, I realized
that the team I was working with just had very many issues and no product market fit
to begin with. And that's one of the largest reasons that I was inspired to create this
podcast because I truly feel that brands and founders need to have their product mission
and their values down before they start hiring people. I think it's lazy and cheap moral
character to just hire people to make things for you on the fly and chase trends. I think
those types of ways of operating create products that have no backbone. And why should I want
to stay and continue to work with you if you don't have any sort of strong moral character
or work ethic or background just because you have money to pay me for a service that I
could charge to literally anyone else and market on my own? It is my skills and expertise
after all, is it not? So designers, I think you should think about using AI in a very
similar sense. And that is not what I expected to say at the end of this podcast, but those
are truly my thoughts and feelings and I will stand on that rock. All right. So this has
been my episode on key art. My name is Jules. I am building out a lot of my websites this
month. We're going to keep on talking about generating AI tools and resources for designers,
brand and our education. I have some strong opinions, but like I think those are good
to have, especially in the world where you could essentially do anything you want, do
something you love, decide what you want to do and don't let other people choose for you.
So this has been the pool party. Go ahead and visit my website, take a look at my services.
I have a new illustration package out, send it for my newsletter on my website. That's
J U L I A E S P E R O dot me and Julia Sparrow dot me. Maybe even add me on LinkedIn. And
if you listen to this podcast episode, go ahead and give this episode a five stars,
follow and listen wherever you listen to podcasts, maybe even share it with a friend. All right,
folks, have a nice day and I'll talk to you next week.