There Will Be Signs

 ... or rather, sign. The sign will be at the entrance to the driveway of our new Fish River house.

Down there, lots of people name their houses and have signs out front with a cute picture and the name. For us, a sign will be helpful because we're going to rent the house out on VRBO. When a visitor is coming into town, trying to find your place in the dark or in the rain, a sign at the driveway will be helpful and welcoming.

The name of our place will be, of course, Catican Bayou. I've got a sign I designed many, many years ago that I put up at our San Diego house for Southern-themed events such as Mardi Gras. I can't find the image file any more, so I took a photo of the thing.

Aside: MSFT Windows search is pathetic. It takes forever and turns up nothing of any value.

Aside #2: I found the file. No need to take a photo.

Here's the old sign:

Years ago, long before AI, I spent some time learning about the basics of design and found some flaws in my sign, so I made a new logo, one that I use for my Louisiana hot sauce labels.

Note that the cat's tail flows into the C and the crawfish is now dancing on the o instead of just floating around. The crawfish is also scaled to the cat.

I asked ChatGPT to design a sign for our new place and after several tries, I got this.

It doesn't have any motion or playfulness about it at all. AI just placed the objects on the sign in a structured manner and called it a day. I've used AI enough for art to know it was going to drive me nuts trying to get it to do what I wanted, so I uploaded my hot sauce image and told it to mimic that style. It returned a very nice image right off the bat. A little bit of tweaking and I got something I like a lot.

My point to all this jibber jabber is that AI isn't creative nor intelligent. You can't communicate the feel of an image to it and expect it to produce something you like. It's like using a marionette to draw a picture. What it excels at is refining something you've created.

Finding the clip art for the dragonfly and river grass would have taken me forever. With AI, we discussed what was good and bad about its first post-hot-sauce-logo-upload and it gave me 5 alternatives to make the image more playful and fun. I asked it to generate three of those and picked this one as my favorite. 

The dragonfly was not my first choice, I originally wanted a pelican which is totemic around Mobile Bay. The problem with the pelican was that it was out of proportion to the cat and looked like the cat was going to pounce on it, kill it and eat it. Not welcoming. The dragonfly was AI's idea.

I know I'm an outlier because of my age and experience, but for me, AI is making me a ton more productive without threatening to replace me.