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Episode 72 – Mastering AI as a Professional Designer with Robin Johnson from Florida Girl Design

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This week on Brave New Bookshelf, we’re exploring the visual side of publishing with Robin Johnson, a veteran graphic designer who has successfully integrated AI into her 20-year career. If you’ve ever wondered how professional designers are using these tools to level up—rather than step back—this conversation sheds light on every aspect of the business.

Meet Robin Johnson: From Traditional Design to AI Expert

Robin Johnson is the creative force behind Florida Girl Design (and Go Book Cover Design). With over two decades of experience in photo retouching, restoration, and advertising, she entered the world of book cover design in 2010. Since then, she has worked with everyone from indie debut authors to New York Times bestsellers.

Three years ago, Robin faced the same “knee-jerk” fear many creatives feel: that AI might take her job. However, after an author friend encouraged her to experiment with the tools, she realized that AI wasn’t a replacement, but a massive innovation for an industry that hadn’t seen a major shift since the early days of Photoshop. Today, she is certified in AI for work and life through the University of North Florida and views herself as an “AI-augmented” creator.

Augmented Intelligence: The “Intern” in the Design Room

One of the most powerful concepts Robin shared was the shift from “Artificial” to “Augmented” Intelligence. She views AI not as a magic button, but as a highly capable intern.

“Humans should not use AI to be more stupid,” Robin noted, quoting one of her professors. The professional—the designer—remains the head of the studio, while the AI handles the menial, redundant, and time-consuming tasks. This allows the designer to focus on high-level creativity, intention, and direction.

Robin uses the “Hammer and Carpenter” analogy: Anyone can buy a hammer, but that doesn’t make them a carpenter. Similarly, anyone can prompt an AI, but a professional designer brings the knowledge of color theory, composition, and genre expectations to make the output truly spectacular.

The “Digital Design Rescue” and Problem Solving

Robin has found a unique niche for AI in what she calls “Digital Design Rescue.” Because she understands the technical side of design, she uses AI to help authors who are in a bind. This includes:

  • Upscaling and Cleaning: Taking low-resolution AI images and turning them into high-resolution, print-ready files.
  • Asset Recovery: Using AI to identify and recreate fonts or logos from old covers when the original designer is no longer available.
  • Character Consistency: Using tools like Nano Banana to take a character from one scene and place them in another, maintaining a consistent brand across a series.
  • Fixing “Flyaways”: Using AI within Photoshop to fix minor details, like stray hairs or clothing wrinkles, in seconds rather than hours.

Overcoming the Limitations of Stock Photography

For years, designers were limited by what was available on stock photo sites. Robin highlighted how AI has solved two major pain points for authors:

  • Representation: Finding specific ethnicities or disabilities in stock photography is notoriously difficult. AI allows Robin to create diverse, representative characters that perfectly match the author’s vision without the “copy-paste” look of overused stock models.
  • Model Rights: AI-generated characters don’t have the same licensing restrictions or “moral clauses” that human stock models might have, giving authors more freedom in how they portray their characters.

A New Workflow for Cover Design

Robin’s process has evolved to be more collaborative and faster. Instead of spending hours searching for the “perfect” stock photo only to have the author dislike it, she can now:

  • Visual Brainstorm: Send 20–30 concepts to an author to find the right “vibe” or “mood.”
  • Iterative Refinement: Once a concept is chosen, she uses a suite of tools (up to eight different AI platforms) to refine the image, add custom text, and polish the final product.
  • Pushing the AI: Robin enjoys “pushing” the models to go beyond their default “pretty” settings—forcing the AI to create gritty, dark, or dirty scenes that it might otherwise try to “beautify.”

Favorite Tools & Recommendations

Robin uses a “best tool for the job” approach, often moving a single project through multiple platforms:

  1. Midjourney: Her top choice for initial image generation and conceptualizing styles.
  2. Nano Banana (via Google Gemini): Excellent for editing, character consistency, and placing characters in specific poses or scenes.
  3. Ideogram: Highly recommended for its ability to handle text and create initial “mood” designs.
  4. Adobe Photoshop: Still the industry standard for final compositing, retouching, and “rescuing” designs.
  5. Wacom Tablet: While she uses AI, Robin remains “old school” in her hardware, preferring a physical tablet for precision work.

Key Takeaways from This Episode

  1. Embrace the Pivot: Don’t fear the tool; learn how to use it to make your process more efficient.
  2. Intention is Everything: AI requires a professional “director” to produce high-quality, commercially viable results.
  3. Solve Problems, Don’t Just Create: Use AI to rescue old brands, fix technical issues, and overcome the limitations of traditional stock media.
  4. Diversity Matters: Use AI to create more inclusive and representative covers that aren’t limited by stock photo databases.
  5. Play to Learn: Spend time “pushing” the AI for fun to discover new techniques you can later use for professional projects.

Resources Mentioned

Here are the key links and tools referenced in this episode:

Transcript

Speaker: Welcome to Brave New Bookshelf, a podcast that explores the fascinating intersection of AI and authorship. Join hosts Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite as they dive into thought provoking discussions, debunk myths, and highlight the transformative role of AI in the publishing industry.

Steph Pajonas: Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Brave New Bookshelf. I’m one of your co-hosts Steph Pajonas, CTO of Future Fiction Academy and Future Fiction Press, where we teach authors how to use AI in any part of their process.

And we are publishing AI forward books on the press. Just today I was making covers for those books on the press. We’re actually recovering two series, which we felt like we missed the mark on. They were a little bit more cozy than spicy. And that’s fine. Sometimes you go through this process as an author where you realize you didn’t get it right the first time.

And that’s okay, because one of the beautiful parts about being a self-published author is that we have access to these tools and whatnot to allow us to [00:01:00] change our covers. All the major stores let us change our covers, which is fantastic. So I’ve been making them a little bit more cozy and playing around with fonts and colors and whatnot, and doing most of it in Ideogram, which is my tool of choice for covers for books.

And we’re gonna be talking a little bit more about AI images today, which is gonna be fun. But until then, I still have to introduce my lovely co-host, Danika Favorite. How are you doing today?

Danica Favorite: I’m good, thank you. Yeah, so funny thing, I just got back from having lunch with a friend who works in the tech center, one of the big tech firm people.

And we were just talking about this fear of AI taking over our jobs. The point he made, and I agree with obviously is how are you going to learn to pivot? It’s not a matter of when or any of that, that AI is going to take over a part of someone’s process, but it’s a matter of how are you equipped to pivot.

[00:02:00] And so it was just really interesting hearing from someone who works in the tech sector who is, building like software and doing all this kind of stuff that um, he’s like, half the guys in my company are gonna be obsolete in the next couple years, and I don’t wanna be one of them.

And it’s cool listening to all the stuff that he’s learning about that is so far over my head. I’m like, I don’t even know what this is. But I like that there is still a place for everyone who wants to learn and is looking to try something new. And I so appreciated what you’re saying about Ideogram because I think, as we’ve pointed out multiple times, I’m not a graphic designer.

I do not do images very well. I’ve tried. Everything I make is terrible. And that’s something I, you know, I’ve, I’ve played with Ideogram. I didn’t like what I got, and I know it’s ’cause I don’t know how to properly prompt the AI. But we, we’re talking about it before we started recording that six months ago [00:03:00] Ideogram couldn’t do a lot of things that it can do now. And I’m like it’s probably been about six months since I’ve tried it, so I’m also willing to try again. But I’m also willing to hire it out knowing this isn’t a skill that I have. It’s not a skill I really want to develop, and so there’s always gonna be work for, even someone like me who is pro AI, has no problem using AI tools.

There’s gonna be work for someone to help me, because there are just things that I don’t have time to learn, and that may change, but it also may not. And a while back I was talking about, okay, let’s get some more graphic designers here on the show. And my friend Jill Cooper, Jill has been on the podcast before.

She ran a great Kickstarter and some of those designs were actually made by our guest today, Robin Johnson. And I love that Robin is someone who has been a graphic designer for a while now. [00:04:00] And when she saw the AI tools coming up, she was like, cool, how do I learn? Um, it may have been more of a process in that I just totally made that up.

But she is using AI in her process and the things that she makes that I’ve seen on her page are just lovely and delightful. And so I wanna introduce you all to Robin Johnson with Florida Girl Design. Robin, why don’t you tell us about yourself and your journey with AI.

Robin Johnson: Hi. Thank you ladies for having me today.

I’ve been in design for more than 20 years now. I’ve had my own business. I’ve been a graphic designer. I started in photo retouching and restoration. Moved a little bit more into advertising design and was always a prolific reader. So I did a contest as a blogger for an author who loved the design of some business cards and asked me to do a cover design.

I said, if it’s no good, don’t pay me. So [00:05:00] we worked together for 15 years. So I’ve been designing book covers since 2010, primarily for self-published authors, but I’ve also worked with several publishing or publishing companies, usually small but also, bestselling authors as well, New York Times bestselling authors, especially those that are just trying to go more of a hybrid route, um, and be published as well as indie authors. As far as incorporating AI design, it was about three years ago now. I was leery about it. It was a new tool. Everything I was seeing on my feed was very negative.

I wanted to have a knee jerk reaction, like, oh, this is horrible. It’s gonna take my job. It’s, it’s, you know, that was my instinct was this is gonna be awful. But I had that same author started playing around with it and we were talking, and it was actually late at night and she texted me and we were just chatting.

It wasn’t anything about work and, and she’s like, you need to [00:06:00] try this. I did this. She’s I’m not replacing you, but you really need to try this tool. And I did. And it really opened my eyes. There’s so many misconceptions about what AI is, what it can do, how it, you know, integrates work. Um. You know, especially with the large language models, so many people are uncomfortable thinking it’s copying, pasting, it’s stealing designs, and I found myself on this journey of education and actually relearning things that I hadn’t visited in so long, going back and learning more about art history and, and forms of art and different ways to think about color and prompting. And it just really, it really changed the way I design. It made me a much better designer and took away just menial, [00:07:00] redundant tasks. And, you know, I can go on and on about AI.

Obviously I’ve just finished being certified in AI and I’m still taking courses to master AI as a creator. And these, the professionals that are teaching these courses and that are sharing it and it’s being incorporated into all industry, big and small. It’s unavoidable. Graphic design is actually one of the slower ones to catch up. When you think about how revolutionary things like Photoshop and those tools were, it has been a long, long time since the actual graphic design industry had a giant innovation to assist designers. We’re so far actually behind that it was time for something to happen, and I find it incredibly exciting. And, I just like to share that I like to share the journey, and I love to be able to show people what it can do and what it absolutely is not doing.

Danica Favorite: [00:08:00] Yeah. I love that.

Steph Pajonas: Oh, go ahead. I’m just gonna say that I love Photoshop.

I,

Robin Johnson: Yeah.

Steph Pajonas: I started in 1997 or so with Photoshop 2.0 when you couldn’t even reorder layers, you barely could copy and paste in there, right? Because the clipboard couldn’t handle like anything at that time.

Robin Johnson: Yep.

Steph Pajonas: So like I, I’m a big fan of graphic design tools. I have switched from using Adobe products to Apple Pixelmater products in the time since then, just because I have my own beefs with Adobe and the way that they run their business. But,

Robin Johnson: Fair.

Steph Pajonas: Still it’s like knowing the tools, and using them for so long and not really seeing all that much in the way of innovation in them. There was smart layers which came around, which was pretty cool, and we were like, oh, great, now I can just swap out things on these layers, which is great.

Robin Johnson: Yeah.

Steph Pajonas: But there’s really. There was really not that much until AI came along. And now all of a sudden we have so many tools that can help [00:09:00] us to do the kinds of designs that we wanna do. I love it. I love it a lot.

Robin Johnson: Yeah.

Steph Pajonas: I’m a big fan. And I wanna also touch on this idea of it sparking more inside of you to go look at more art, right?

Robin Johnson: Mm-hmm.

Steph Pajonas: Like looking at different styles of photography, looking at different styles of painting and mixed media and like all of these things, like I find that very inspiring. And I did the same thing too when I started playing with Midjourney, and I realized I could put art styles in there, like I want an impressionist look to this piece, or I really want this to be more like a hyperrealistic digital painting, or I want it to be like this, or that, the other thing.

Robin Johnson: Yeah.

Steph Pajonas: And that the only way that you can do that is if you go and you study those art styles, and that was inspiring as well. So I love the, love your journey here because you, it parallels a lot of what I’ve already done. And I really enjoy that process of [00:10:00] learning, and I would love to hear a little bit more about this certification that you did as well.

Robin Johnson: Sure. Yeah. So the University of North Florida had a certification for AI in work and life, and it had different modules that basically touched on AI in different professions. Obviously there was one with very focused on Midjourney and generative AI. But there was also professionals in education, professionals in healthcare, a lawyer.

It was just really cool to hear about some of the morality and ethical sides of AI, how those big corporations are incorporating it, being safe. And you know, we’re all learning this at the same time, so it’s this very unique opportunity where there’s nobody that’s a professional yet.

We’re all working on it together, and the more [00:11:00] that humans are involved, the more that we work on it, the better the AI will be. So the idea of, don’t use it because it’s horrible. You are only gonna perpetuate it being bad. You know, people wanna pick and choose okay, it’s great if it’s used to identify skin cancer.

That’s wonderful. But don’t use it for this. Well, it’s all of us that are on the ground, that are using it for imaging and all these things. That’s what it’s learning from. That’s how it’s developing. That’s how it can go and help in the medical industry. You can’t just isolate and use one thing or not another thing.

That’s not how it’s gonna work. And so many people that are against AI, it, it’s funny because I, I will guarantee that a hundred percent they’re using AI, whether they like it or not. If you’re using GPS, you’re using AI. It’s as simple as that. The minute you talk to Alexa. The minute you shop at Amazon, you’re on Facebook, it’s integrated, [00:12:00] it’s there.

Doesn’t matter if you clicked a button that says you don’t like it, you’re still using it. It’s just becoming more of a core base. And one of the things I liked, it was a professional from a health insurance, a huge health insurance, and she said they don’t call it. AI is artificial intelligence.

They call it augmented intelligence, and it’s a great way to look at it. It’s not a fake intelligence, it’s simply an altered intelligence. And another, this very serious professor said, what he tells everybody is humans should not use AI to be more stupid. And it was literally the best thing I’ve ever heard.

That is not what it is. You need to think of AI as your intern. So you are the professional, but you’re using the AI to do some of those remedial tasks to help you. You’re teaching it, you’re training it, you’re showing it how to work for you, but it’s the professional. It’s that [00:13:00] intention behind it that, that actually makes the AI successful.

Danica Favorite: Yes. I think that is a point that Steph makes all the time, the FFA makes, I make like it. It’s this idea and I really do like the idea of calling it the intern.

Robin Johnson: Yeah, exactly.

Danica Favorite: There are things that only you can do. But if you’re in a professional situation, there are things that, oh my goodness, how many of us as authors, if we had an intern to hand off tasks, to, we would totally do it, unfortunately…

Robin Johnson: Right.

Danica Favorite: My attempts at least to go to the local community college or whatever and say, Hey, can I get some interns? They just laugh because, no one wants to do those jobs.

And so I like that idea and I really love calling it augmented intelligence.

Robin Johnson: Right.

Danica Favorite: Because it really is just augmenting the skills you already have and

Robin Johnson: Exactly.

Danica Favorite: Also looking to deepen the skills, because that was the thing that I noticed, when you and Steph were talking about the art [00:14:00] and digging deeper into that art theory and color theory and all of that is that it’s not just saying, okay, how do I use this AI.

But what do I think about art? What do I think about color theory? What do I need to learn to increase my skills in art in general?

Robin Johnson: Right.

Danica Favorite: Not just AI and art. And so it’s still that augmentation. And like I was talking about my friend who is in the computer industry, that’s also what he’s doing. It’s not just how do I use AI, but it’s how do I expand my skills to become someone who is more valuable in the workforce?

And

Robin Johnson: Yeah.

Danica Favorite: That’s what we’re doing. Like how can we learn and make ourselves better at what we already do?

Robin Johnson: Yeah. As a graphic designer. So many people when I started using AI were, were very negative. And, and the book industry seems to be so polarizing with it. It [00:15:00] is, there’s very little gray.

It’s black and white. You either do it or you don’t do it. And you know, I had threats and we’ll never use your design. And I’m like we’ve been friends for 20 years, and you haven’t used it yet. But honestly, my business would’ve stopped without AI. Without that change, without that innovation, without growing as a designer, I would be nowhere.

And I went to a professional Photoshop conference, and they asked, who’s using AI? And these were professional photographers and audio people and filmmakers, and every single hand went up. As a creative, we’re expected to. So, you know, an audience might not like it, but as a creative, if I were to go and put on a resume that I refuse to use the new biggest up and coming technical revolution out there, I’m completely not employable.

It’s, I almost feel like it’s my [00:16:00] responsibility to not only understand the tool, but to know how to use it responsibly.

Danica Favorite: Yeah.

Robin Johnson: And to be able to do that for my clients, to make sure that it is being used commercially to be able to train it. And in doing so, I can do so much more. And, if somebody doesn’t want me to work with AI, that’s fine.

I will tell you, and I’ll be upfront with everybody. It’s going to be in the process in some manner. Even if it’s simply using AI in Photoshop, and I’ll be honest, as of right now, what I’ve seen in Adobe’s AI is it’s pretty weak, but it can take a flyaway hair and fix it for me. So instead of me spending 20 minutes doing an auto mask and making your hair look perfect and natural, or finding another photograph to insert instead that had better hair, now I can use the AI, select that area, say please give this flyaway hair.

And it got to the point where I have a client that she’s don’t use AI, but [00:17:00] let’s make her hair blowing again. So it’s always this small integration. It’s that melding a little bit, changing, you know, we picked stock photography, used the model. I created a dress with Midjourney, used the dress and the motto, uh, the model with Nano Banana and had Nano Banana put that dress on the model, and then I had to create a background and put that model in. No, I didn’t use AI at all, you know, five AI platforms later. But it’s, it’s an amazing process. It’s, it makes me feel like when I have to go find stock photography, and I still use stock photography all the time.

It feels so restricting, because I cannot find exactly what I want or the exact right thing for my client. And with AI I am very used to being, being able to get what I want, even if it takes five hours and 10,000 images, I [00:18:00] will make it do what I want. And I can’t do that. It it’s finite. What you get with stock photography is what you get.

Danica Favorite: Yeah. I think that’s really important too, because we’ve talked about this, it was quite a while ago, but, just the idea of even having representative people where, you know, if you’re representing a particular ethnicity or a disability or something like that, there isn’t enough stock imagery and…

Robin Johnson: Oh, and there’s so little, and then there was, there’s always been controversy, as those are real people, do they wanna be on a cover that is for a BDSM book? And so there was problems where, those people on stock would come back and be like, no, take me off. So when we’re creating characters, when we’re creating models, they don’t have an opinion or, or necessarily rights. They’re not gonna come and say, Hey, you can’t put me on a cover. I’m not comfortable with [00:19:00] that. Because you’re literally creating them for that vision. And, um, yeah, I never put it, or I shouldn’t say never, occasionally the word Caucasian comes in, but I will usually just put exotic human and see what I get, because I love that not everything is one thing, that I can get different ethnicities, and I don’t even ask.

I let the AI kind of work, we work together and unless I need something specific, I typically, I am much more focused on nondescript, so to speak. I wanna worry about the feeling, the lighting, the overall tone. What’s the weather? Are there shadows? Are things in focus? Are they not in focus?

Not so much about, what it is that the camera, so to speak, is taking a picture of, but what is the story behind that picture? And that’s what I’m [00:20:00] doing when I’m prompting it. I don’t need to be exact to get a really good outcome. What I need to do is kinda let the AI do its part and make sure that I am properly directing it to do that.

Steph Pajonas: As you can see from my book covers behind me, I write a lot of Japan inspired books, right? So in the past, I would be on Shutterstock and it’s just Japan, Japanese people in business settings, like…

Robin Johnson: Yeah.

Steph Pajonas: On that, and so in the past my cover designer would have to, you know.

We’d have to find one model who had lots of different poses, different facial expressions, whatever. And then she would basically put their head on other people’s bodies, and that’s what you had to do.

Robin Johnson: Done much of that.

Yes.

Steph Pajonas: I’m sure you’ve done a lot of that, right? That was…

Robin Johnson: Yes, I have.

Steph Pajonas: It was, we had to do that because I have a specific ethnicity that I have to represent. Couldn’t just, couldn’t just call up any kind of character from anywhere.

Robin Johnson: Yeah. Yup.

Steph Pajonas: I had to do something [00:21:00] specific. And now I’m really able to get the kinds of characters that I want out of AI because I can ask for it and I can…

Robin Johnson: Yeah.

Steph Pajonas: I can get it.

And I’m like you as well. I like to start with a concept where I’m just looking for like a mood or a vibe, right?

Robin Johnson: Yeah.

Steph Pajonas: Like a, maybe even a certain color story or something like that. And I start very general in my prompt where I’m just, like it may be less than 10 words long and I just wanna see what I get.

And then from there, a refinement.

Robin Johnson: So adding in and refining it,

Steph Pajonas: it’s a refinement and an iteration process. It is still a lot of work.

Very few of us are putting a prompt into Midjourney or Ideogram or any one of these and getting a publishable cover from it. It’s very rare.

Robin Johnson: It, it. It comes back to you.

It’s a professionalism behind the tool, and it really is just a tool. Anybody can use a hammer. Doesn’t make us all carpenters. Some people use that tool way better and then [00:22:00] there’s different hammers for different instances. And that’s exactly what AI is. There’s different AI tools for different creative outlets. So I probably use at least probably eight AI tools regularly. And for design itself, there are things that Midjourney can do that is amazing, but I have to do editing and refining in Nano Banana. Or if I wanna do text, I don’t ever create the design with the text on it with AI, but that doesn’t mean I won’t use AI to create the text.

I will do it separately, black text on an isolated white background, and then I can take that text and using Adobe Photoshop, I can actually bring it into Illustrator and vectorize it and, people are like It’s not a real font. How do you stay consistency? You can actually tell Ideogram to do multiple [00:23:00] titles at one time, or just embrace the fact that your font’s gonna be unique for every single book in the series.

And that is your consistency. It’s so fun to work with the tools and, um, just experiment. And every one of ’em shines in their own way for real.

Danica Favorite: I think what’s really important about this is, I just was like, so geeking out over your, anyone can use a hammer, but not everyone’s a carpenter.

Robin Johnson: Right?

Danica Favorite: And like everything you have talked about is, to me, your skill as a graphic designer is, when you were going through your description of all the things you’re looking for in a good image.

I’m like, that’s all skill as somebody who understands the principles of graphic design. And then you’re taking that, you’re using, as you said, up to eight tools to get that design really what it needs to be. And here’s what I think is interesting about it, is it’s still the [00:24:00] idea of how much of your labor is it saving? Sure. You could fix that flyaway hair manually.

Robin Johnson: Yeah.

Danica Favorite: With AI, you can do it just like that. And how much time is that saving you so that you can work with more clients and help more people?

And if you were someone, which I know you’re not, but if you said, okay, I charge X amount of dollars per hour that I work on your cover that also makes it so you’re spending less time and that passes cost savings on to the client, because you’re not putting that manual work in, and you probably would have to charge more if you were doing all of that manually.

Robin Johnson: One of the amazing things that I’ve actually been able to incorporate is now that I can do things a little bit faster, in the past when everything was manual, I would say I will work with one design. That’s it. We’ll, we’ll get to where I know you wanna be and we’re gonna work with one creation, because that’s all my cost is [00:25:00] covering. Now, sometimes not to the best ending, but I can send somebody 30 concepts and we can work through it, and I don’t have to spend all the time to find the stock and lay it out and do a rough draft. I can literally kind of nail that concept and send a bunch of iterations. And, um, that’s what makes it really fun is to be able to offer my clients, it’s, it’s a value add. It’s not just one thing anymore. I can show you a dozen different options and you can pick what you want. And no, did I refine a dozen things? No. We worked through that after you picked the one or the two that you like the best. But the idea is that it really allows me to visually brainstorm that much better than I would’ve been able to in the past when I couldn’t justify putting in hours of manual work just to have somebody say it’s not really for me.

Because I don’t ask for [00:26:00] upfront payment. I don’t get a deposit. So I have to have that confidence that I, I know what you want, so that I can follow through and get you a product. And AI now allows me to offer more options to my clients, which is amazing. So it takes a little bit more time on that end and a little bit less time refining flyaway hairs.

But I think that my clients are getting a much better end product that way.

Steph Pajonas: This is a great segue into learning a little bit about your workflow using AI. Because it sounds like you do have a process that you go through with a client. So I’d love to hear a little bit more about that.

Robin Johnson: Sure. So I get a general concept. Now with AI, I don’t need it to be quite as thorough because I can play around a little bit more and, and get those real base ideas faster. So I get a general concept. I’ll go in, create some images, send you, you know, basically a [00:27:00] contact sheet saying, here’s 20 examples of this character. Did I hit any of ’em? Which ones do you like? What don’t you like? And just work through it beyond that. For clients that I’ve worked with for a long time, I already know what they’re looking for. We have a base to start with. Again. I can go and say, all right, here’s your model in four different situations. What’s gonna work for this particular story? So I need less description. I actually used to have a entire fill in the answer sheet, so to speak, on my website for cover design that I would ask people to do.

And I’ve actually gotten rid of it, because there’s no need for somebody to go through all that work. I just need a general idea. If you’ve ever worked with ChatGPT, think about me as that person, but I’m doing the design for you. So I’m gonna ask you what’s the age of the character?

What’s the ethnicity? What are they wearing? What is the setting? What is their mood? Is there any [00:28:00] descriptors? Is there a scene that you really love that you wanted to pick? Just give me something real basic, and I’ll work through the AI and a lot of times it works out great.

Sometimes we gotta start over. But there’s always this, um, a disconnect between what you see in your head and what’s actually physically available to put on screen, what conveys. And AI is a really good tool for being able to not just tell somebody that’s not gonna work, but to be able to show them why it doesn’t work and what might work better.

So it’s a fun process now. It’s a little bit more casual and I just, like I said, I love being able to give more options to, to my clients.

So, yeah, as far as the process, I, I just send them a bunch of ideas and we go from there.

Danica Favorite: Yeah I like that because I think that’s what makes it so much easier on both sides. I’ve said this a lot giving [00:29:00] talks for Publish Drive about my own journey with getting covers from cover artists and Publish Drive has a AI cover generator tool that isn’t going to get the kind of results that you do.

But what I love about our tool is that I used to be a cover designer’s worst nightmare. Because I would just say, I don’t really care what’s on the cover as long as it’s pretty.

Robin Johnson: Right.

Danica Favorite: And so what I can do now with the pub publish drive thing is I can have it make me a cover and then send it to a designer and say, I want, this is what I want.

Robin Johnson: Yeah. And, And I created an AI portfolio for that so that somebody could go on there, not necessarily pick that exact image but say, Hey, I love that style.

Danica Favorite: Yeah.

Robin Johnson: Or I love the way you did this. And to just use it as a starting block for design.

Danica Favorite: Exactly. Exactly. And I see in your process this ability for someone like me who really, honestly, I really don’t care what’s on my cover as long as it sells my books, and [00:30:00] works for my book. Someone like me, I can go to you and have, okay, here is like a basic idea of what I want. Or maybe, I see other covers and I’m like, Hey, what about something like this? And it was always something that was really frustrating for me and for my cover designers.

Like I want to give them a lot of love and grace, because I really am just not that person who understands what all should go on the cover. And so like you are able to help people through that process so much better, because now you have the tools where you can say, okay, what about this or this?

Robin Johnson: Yeah.

Danica Favorite: And you didn’t just spend 20 hours making something that I’m gonna look at and say, oh my gosh, I hate it.

Robin Johnson: Yep. Exactly. That’s really hard. I will run into people that, that they know very well what they don’t want, but not what they do want. And as. No matter what your profession is, if all anybody ever tells you is what’s [00:31:00] not gonna work, you don’t go anywhere fast.

So it’s, yeah, I don’t like any of that. What do you want? Don’t know. So that’s hard, and I can’t read minds, but I can come up with concepts and work through it. And, I, and I still tell people the very start is exactly the same as it always was before. Go see what’s popular in your genre.

What are other people doing? What do you think, you know, what strikes you, what best tells your story. What is that mood? What does that look like? So that’s still the same, visually go out and find, because I’ve always said, people are like what’ll sell? And boy, yeah, I’d have a lot more money if I could guarantee that every time, you know, any designer would.

So I always just like to say it, it starts the same, is give me an idea of what you like, what you’ve seen. And people will still send me, half a dozen concepts and I’ll see the patterns [00:32:00] that, that they don’t even realize were there the same colors, the same font type, the same layout, five of the six images will have a woman on it. But, they don’t even realize that, that they’re actually choosing what they do like when they start that process.

Danica Favorite: Yeah, and that’s the gift of, again, using a professional designer and using your talent and your skill and how you apply it, even with the AI, with all of those things, I think more than anything that makes your skill more valuable than ever is you can give them that guidance and that advice.

And…

Robin Johnson: Yeah.

Danica Favorite: I really just love hearing this, because for me it’s yeah, this is really cool. Because it just really demonstrates all these cover designers who are out there getting so upset over AI, I’m thinking, you’re missing the boat here because you could really help people,

Robin Johnson: Right.

Danica Favorite: Because it’s your skill. It’s [00:33:00] your skill that people still need.

Robin Johnson: And the add-ons that I’m, I’m able to give authors now. You had mentioned Jill Cooper. Her design, she came to me with an AI design that was great, but it was low resolution and needed to get cleaned up. And I took it and made it look like a high resolution design.

She could print it on a banner now and it would look as high resolution as anything created organically. So to be able to help people find a font or to match a style, to use AI to extract a logo that you had, that you no longer can get from a previous designer, or a series branding, to fix that up, to make it consistent.

I actually started something on, I redid my website and added digital design rescue, so I can find your fonts. I can find out. You know, I just had somebody wanted me to make coloring book characters for her, but she didn’t have the original stock photography and all she could [00:34:00] provide me with was the old cover, which was highly stylized, and I did not create that cover, so I actually had to take it apart, find the individual character stock, and then recreate it. Basically, I found the character stock, and some of it was ChatGPT. Some of it was using Google image search, but I found it. I was able to give her the links to the original images so she can go get ’em if she ever needs them again.

I was able to take then those two stock images, tell Nano Banana, take these two models, put ’em together in the scene, and then once I had ’em together in the scene, then I could convert it over to a digital coloring page. But it was just a matter of, you know, I’m now able to utilize those tools, not just using what the font to find a font.

But actually recreating a design that somebody wanted where they had a very stylized series number on the spine, and I asked ChatGPT, [00:35:00] Hey, can you isolate this series number with this effect, put it on black, and gimme numbers one through four. And it did it perfect. And I can now take that and use it in Photoshop.

And she has the same type of very specialized, very specific, series design that she had in the past. It is, it’s just a really fun process to be able to rescue those small things so that people don’t have to necessarily start over so they can use what they’ve always had. They can keep their brand and their recognition.

And those tools allow me to do that. Some of the tools I use are simply sharpening or removing noise, upscaling things to make ’em larger. There’s so many, and it just. I love every time I get a request, it’s always an adventure.

Steph Pajonas: It’s an adventure. I love this rescue idea. That’s a great idea for your business. I love it. I just wanna point out that, we talk a lot on this podcast about how [00:36:00] craft is super, super important for authors when they’re using LLM tools to be able to ask for things that they need for their story, whether it’s like an inciting incident or there’s not enough motivations or conflict within your characters, whatever. And you have to have that vocabulary, and you have to have that craft in order to get what you want out of the LLM. And the same applies here. You had a long standing graphic design business career before you ever even touched AI, and now you are using those skills with AI to really level up your business.

And I, I really applaud that because, there’s only so much you can do as an amateur. Even if you know a little bit about color theory or design in general. With these tools, you’ll get something out of it that you may like, but it may not be spectacular. So really it’s like you have taken your skills and you’re able to give your clients these spectacular things that they [00:37:00] weren’t able to make themselves.

Robin Johnson: Yeah. Yeah. And I love working with it. I love being able to surprise somebody and give ’em an outcome that they didn’t think was possible.

Danica Favorite: Yeah. I think that’s really cool too, because like Steph was saying about the skill part, some of the stuff you were talking about, I would’ve just assumed wasn’t possible.

And I can say this as someone, so my web designer retired. And I tried to find another web designer, and every web designer I talked to was like, we can’t recreate this. And so if you want me to update your website, we have to make you a whole new website. Please give me $12,000. And I said, no thank you.

I will just stick with this thing and Clunkily update it myself. And what you’ve just told me is I could send it now to somebody who would be more AI forward and say, Hey, here’s what I wanna change and update on my website. Can you do this for me?

And they can, [00:38:00] because now they can figure that out.

And until you said that, I didn’t even know that was possible. And that’s what is cool about AI is it’s expanding the possibilities and…

Robin Johnson: Yeah.

Danica Favorite: Again, like for me, that $12,000 that just save, that saves me $12,000. And the headache of trying to figure this out myself.

Robin Johnson: Yeah. And I love a challenge.

I’ve always considered myself a problem solver, so I love it when somebody sends me something and they’re like, I don’t think this can be done, or I can’t find my designer, I don’t know what the stock or this font. Those are things that I’ve been dealing with for decades, and those are things that AI might not be able to help you with, but I can.

So it takes…the big thing about AI and doing it well is it’s intention and the professionalism behind the product, because it’s not doing anything on its own. There is no self-aware AI yet that anybody knows of. [00:39:00] It’s literally, it was made by a human. It’s used by humans. It’s a tool. I’m polite to it ’cause I don’t know where this is going. So you know, I say thank you and please and I named ChatGPT Alfred ’cause he’s my butler.

The fun thing is working back and forth and when you really see that the technology can understand and incorporate your vision, your creativity, in a way that you were never able to do before. And there’s certainly, you know, when I started, when I was very young, I wanted to be a 3D animator, but I couldn’t move from Minnesota and there was just not a lot of work for that there.

But now I can. When I have a spare moment, I can make these creatures and I can have fun and I can play and I can experiment. And then, along the way with that play, I learn new skills and I’m able to incorporate it for my clients. [00:40:00] And it’s awesome. It’s, it used to be I’d leave my office and I don’t, I work on a, a physical computer. I don’t work on a laptop. I’m a little bit old school, used to have a 12 by 18 tablet that, you know, Wacom tablet. So I was very static. I only worked in one spot. I’ve never worked on a laptop ever. But now I can take my tablet out and create AI for fun at night and experiment with concepts and styles.

And I always like to call it pushing the AI. I try to push it past what it wants to do because it wants to do what it learned. And so to find the runarounds to, to make it stretch, to make it, you’ll have the hardest time. It wants to beautify everything. So to actually force the AI to make this face dirty and running [00:41:00] makeup in a dark environment and torn clothes and, and it fights, it realized, I call, it’s like a toddler, it’s like an errant toddler and, but yeah to be able to really push it and get those unique outcomes is so rewarding and I love being able to share that then and use it for my clients.

Danica Favorite: I love that so much. I am just like, yes, this is amazing because it just shows the possibilities. And I love the excitement in your voice and just how, like you can tell that here you are someone who in an industry where some people are like, oh no, my career’s over. And you’re like, oh my goodness, it’s just getting started.

Robin Johnson: Yeah and, and I’d like to say somebody was like, you know, I’ve, I’ve run into cover models and I’ve never really done design with cover models, because frankly that artwork was too expensive to get exclusive photography, and I’ve always liked to really cater to entry [00:42:00] level.

Not that I haven’t worked with authors that are very successful and prolific, but I’ve always wanted to be able to work with everybody. And I also didn’t like that a lot of co, a lot of cover models have very specific things that can and can’t be done with their images. And it just, I don’t like those blurred lines, rules, those things.

And somebody said, so cover models hate this and they’re all losing their jobs. I’m like you’re all aging out anyways. Let’s be honest. So there’s a finite here. But what they need to do is think, and any industry, any creative needs to think about how they can use this tool to better their own product.

So a cover model could now take their own images, put it into something like Nano Banana and say, Hey, make me a viking, make me a pirate, put me on a ship, put me in Iceland, put me in all the, and they could literally make those images with their own likeness, and then sell ’em. [00:43:00] And instead of just being in a portrait studio with a blank back drop and they can now be on any adventure, any genre, any type of instance that they want, they could expand their portfolio that much more.

And people could choose whether they wanna work with an AI image that they created or, or pay the extra to have the exclusive stock photography. But it isn’t, AI doesn’t have to end any industry at all. Fine artists have been using images for inspiration since beginning.

Andy Warhol cut images up and pasted ’em all together. None of it is… there’s no threat there. There, there’s no, AI is not coming for anybody’s job. It’s just a tool to use and you could, anybody gimme an industry and I can give you a way that you could incorporate AI to make your [00:44:00] job better.

They’re saying what about, for example, medical transcriptionist? When they would get those calls and transcribe, they’re so far backlogged, the human transcriptionists that there was only like, and don’t quote me exactly, and this is an example I’ve, I did hear the real numbers, but I don’t remember ’em.

But they’re literally like 30% of messages were ever able to get transcribed, but now they can have AI do a hundred percent of those messages. And the AI will flag ones that they feel needs human, a human to read it, because they don’t understand the language or they don’t understand the colloquialisms or the slang that might have been used.

And so those messages get moved to the human side. And so instead of only some people getting their messages heard, now everybody’s getting their messages heard and the image or the messages that needed the most attention are getting it [00:45:00] now. They’re not getting missed. So again, it’s just a way to take those redundant tasks out of human hands and let those professionals work at a professional level on what they’re really good at doing.

Danica Favorite: Yeah. That is what I think is really the beauty of AI that I think people miss. So I’m glad you pointed that out. I’m so glad you took that class. I’m like, yeah, this is cool. I wanna take all these classes now.

Robin Johnson: It’s an eyeopener.

Danica Favorite: Yeah. So for our final question as we start to wrap things up, we talked about a lot of tools.

Is there any that you’re like, yes, this is like the best, or are you like, nope, all of these are really great.

Robin Johnson: They all have their own uses for somebody just starting, Midjourney is great because you can make a lot of images. I mentioned Nano Banana is amazing at editing, but every single image costs 20 credits. And for myself, I might get 6,000 credits a month and [00:46:00] still find myself having to buy more credits, sometimes even at 20 credits an image I have run that out within weeks.

So Midjourney, their subscription levels actually give a lot of options. So you don’t run out. You might not have fast hours, you might have to wait a little bit more for your imaging to happen, but there’s no limit. Now one thing that Midjourney can’t do is it’s not great at editing.

You really need to go to Nano Banana for that. Or one of the other tools. But that’s where that shines amazingly. I think one of the things with Midjourney is, it’s actually the concept of Midjourney is that it should never copy anything ever. And so when you tell Midjourney to make something look like something else it usually fails completely.

Even with their new omni references, kidding characters, to have consistencies can be very problematic. Something like, so I might create a character in Midjourney and then take it into Nano [00:47:00] Banana and say, all right, take these two characters, put ’em in different positions, and it’ll do that flawlessly.

Midjourney’s great to start on. It’s great to play on. It’s great for what it does and I use it every day, but it doesn’t edit well. And then, Ideogram you’ve mentioned that’s also a really good platform. Little bit less expensive, does text amazing. Nano Banana does text really good as well.

Midjourney, not at all. Horrible. Absolutely horrible. It can’t, it cannot do text. So again, it’s just using different tools and playing around, but Midjourney is a good start for anybody, I think. And then…

Steph Pajonas: Midjourney is a lot of fun. Midjourney is a lot of fun. I like the, I like their style of references.

Some days I’ll just sit down with a prompt that I put together and just try it with different styles, like, that’s like a fun night in front of the television while my husband’s playing video games.

Robin Johnson: I do it all the time.

Steph Pajonas: [00:48:00] Yeah, it’s a great one. And I love Nana Banana as well. It’s a great tool for anybody who’s listening.

If you don’t know Nana Banana, it’s from Google. So…

Robin Johnson: Google Gemini.

Steph Pajonas: You can try it out in Gemini. Exactly. So go check it out there. Definitely. Alright, so this was a fantastic discussion. I loved talking about all of these parts of AI, art and graphics and graphic design. It was really cool to hear about your business and how it’s been evolving over the years.

I would love to be able to send people to you. So can you give us some URLs to send people to?

Robin Johnson: Sure. You can find me at gobookcoverdesign.com or flgirldesign.com. Everything’s under F L Girl. Otherwise you’ll find me online under Go book cover design, too.

Steph Pajonas: Fantastic. Okay. I’m gonna make sure that all of those links show up in the show notes that we put together.

So anybody who wants to come by and learn a little bit more about Robin and her [00:49:00] business, which is Florida Girl Designs, uh, you’ll wanna come by bravenewbookshelf.com and check out the show notes. We will get them up there at the same time that this goes live. And once again, I wanna remind people to come and subscribe to the newsletter so you can just get those show notes in your inbox the next day after they after the podcast publishes. There we go. Danika, how would you like to wrap things up here?

Danica Favorite: Yeah, I’m just sitting here going, oh, this was so fun. I’m gonna do more. Uh, you have me excited to play with AI art, I tell you. Yeah.

Robin Johnson: You should. It is fun. It is fun. There’s no wrong way to do it.

Danica Favorite: I love this idea of just sitting in front of the TV and like making images. I’m like, oh, that’s a fun idea. So I might play with that.

Robin Johnson: It is. I love watching creative shows, so watch a fashion show and then even seeing like, oh, I love that they bought these glass balls on everything, and I’ll just start imaging things with those concepts.

And it’s just fun. It’s just, it’s really fun creative [00:50:00] outlet.

Danica Favorite: I love that. And yeah go and be creative with the AI art and just play with it, even if maybe that’s not your thing, but again, like maybe it is and maybe you put it over to someone like Robin who is that expert and can really help you make it shine.

Also remember that we want you to like and subscribe to Brave New Bookshelf on YouTube and Facebook, also Future Fiction Academy, Future Fiction Press and Publish Drive. Go and find us on all of our socials. Like and subscribe. And we will talk to you again next week.

Steph Pajonas: We will. We’re looking forward to seeing you guys all next week on the next episode. So from us here, bye-bye.

Danica Favorite: Bye.

Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us on The Brave New Bookshelf. Be sure to like and subscribe to us on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. You can also visit us@bravenewbookshelf.com. Sign up for our newsletter and get all the show [00:51:00] notes.

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