Perfecting Midjourney for our marketing assets

The backgrounds on our blog hero images come out of Midjourney and all of them are seeded from a single prompt template. Creating that template took months of scrapped generations and one museum visit.

The first attempts

My first prompts tried to take Fern's identity literal. We're a dev tool with a plant for a logo, so I tried prompts that fused the organic with the digital and generated a pile of what I started calling technobotanicals:

VELVET-MATTED FERN LEAVES WITH CHROME VEINING, IMPOSSIBLY QUIET, ECHOES OF
ELECTRONIC LIFE, SOFT VIOLET AND PALE GREEN PALETTE, STILLNESS AT THE EDGE
OF A DIGITAL FOREST --exp 100 --profile c6so3sz --sref 2082925974 --raw
--stylize 1000 --sw 200 --v 7.0
 
MYCELIUM NETWORKS WOVEN THROUGH HAZY SYNTHETIC MIST, SLOW BREATHING LIGHT
PULSES, GREY-GREEN ORGANIC WEBBING MERGING WITH NANOSTRUCTURES, DREAMLIKE
DATA FOREST --exp 100 --profile c6so3sz --sref 2082925974 --raw
--stylize 1000 --sw 200 --v 7.0

Six moody indigo Midjourney generations of ferns, mycelium, and mountains fused with circuitry and light

Iridescent ferns, glowing spores, a mountain range with an a luminescent grid draped over. Ethereal but ultimately unusable.

The problem was that every image demanded too much attention. Most of our blog posts have overlayed product visuals so the backgrounds needed to recede.

I detoured through more surreal humanist visuals as well:

people standing on top of a mountain, walking towards the sky with clouds
and a moon. A large, vertical rectangle floats in front of them. The scene
evokes a sense of minimalism, surrealism, and a dreamy color palette,
characteristic of a digital art style. high definition --exp 100 --v 7.0
--ar 4:5 --chaos 5 --p <your-profile-id> --raw

A line of tiny figures climbing a snowy ridge above the clouds toward a glowing vertical monolith, a crescent moon overhead

Beautiful, but it read more like an album cover than a developer blog.

We had even been here once before: during the site redesign we tried woodblock-style graphics and shelved them because the magic of the original work was lost.

So I swung the other way and tried plain woodblock landscapes: a fern forest, springtime meadows, Iguazu Falls.

Three woodblock-style landscape generations: a misty fern forest with hydrangeas, a wildflower meadow with bees, and Iguazu Falls

I also re-ran the old technobotanical scenes through a new personalization profile:

A Japanese woodblock print of cherry blossoms in full bloom at the temple,
with people enjoying their time near a pond and pagoda tower in the
background. The sky is a clear blue, and there's an array of green trees
around the scene. This artwork uses vibrant pastel colors to capture the
serene beauty of springtime nature. --sref 2826299952 --v 7.0 --p <your-profile-id>
--sv 4 --exp 100 --raw

Three square generations: cherry blossoms and a pagoda in deep blue, a luminescent grid over misty mountains, and glowing hydrangea-like tidal flora

The circuitry faded into various mountain ranges and weather patterns. These felt much closer but still felt too vibrant.

Being inspired

When I'm in a creative rut, I frequent proximal art museums. On a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I came across Hiroshi Yoshida, and it clicked. He spent the 1920s applying Japanese woodblock printmaking to landscapes, including American ones: El Capitan, the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls.

A photo of a catalog page at the Philadelphia Museum of Art showing Yoshida Hiroshi's woodblock print El Capitan, Yosemite (1925): a sunlit granite monolith above a still reflecting pool and dark pines.

A photo of a catalog spread showing two woodblock prints: Kawase Hasui's Rain at Soshu Maekawa, a rainy village at night, and Yoshida's Morning at Mt. Tsurugi, a pink dawn-lit alpine peak.

El Capitan, Yosemite (1925) and Morning at Mt. Tsurugi (1926)

Hiroshi's prints had the serenity I was looking for. The palettes are muted, the weather is subtle, and there are no faces, hands, or typography, which was exactly the list of things image models fumbled on back then. I took that inspiration, stripped out the intricacy, and added motion blur so the human eye won't trip up on the details.

The final prompt template

I took what worked from all of it, the muted palette, the natural patterns, the grain, and smoothing motion:

house-prompt.txt

[scene description in Hiroshi Yoshida landscape style], atmospheric [weather],
long-exposure smoothing motion, muted earthy colors, tactile analog grain
--v 7.0 --p <your-profile-id> --raw --exp 100 --ar 9:16

Then I added the --p <your-profile-id>, which is a Midjourney personalization code. Personalization lets you train your own mini Midjourney models by ranking image pairs and generating an ID corresponding to it. Utilize that ID that and every generation inherits the same vibe.

I append that ID to a scene that's typically inspired natural scenery or flora/fauna uniquely inspired by the marketing content. Everything else is the same, so a background generated last September and one from this month visually feel the same.

The outputs

The Rust SDK generator launch: a dusk tide flat scattered with tiny orange crabs.

The Swift SDK generator launch: a flock of tiny swifts scattering across a blue sky above a Japanese temple.

A pale path winding rose-gold through snow-dappled evergreen scrub at dusk.

A moon gate framing raked sand and a gnarled pine in a twilight garden.

Rice terraces reflecting a sky of golden clouds.

The Fern autorelease launch card over a misty waterfall.

A misty blue-green forest of tall conifers at dusk.

The Making Fern faster hero over a deep blue wave.

The Fern Replay commit list over a golden sunlit hillside.

The Rust SDK generator sits on a low tide beach crawling with tiny orange "Ferris" crabs. The Swift launch has swifts flying out from a Japanese temple. The rest are scenery chosen to match the mood of each post.

We're still iterating, and every launch is an excuse to go looking for the next scene.

Hope you find them as beautiful as we do.