I ran into Mickey Friedman’s graphics program flair.ai at Noah Brier’s first BrXnd conference and at the time I was intrigued by it because it (like so many things at that conference) seemed to be showing how AI could be used in a practical way to help advertising agencies, or at least the creative departments. And so, following Noah’s admonition to tinker, I did.
Now, to be clear, this is not go ing to be a “review” of flair.ai. On the one hand, my background is as a writer, so I’m hardly qualified to talk about the nuances and challenges of a sophisticated visual design program. And on the other hand, I’m an Executive Creative Director – so I’m not really qualified to talk about anything when you get right down to it.
That said, flair.ai is a platform that uses Artificial Intelligence to create quick and simple product table-top shots digitally. Got a boring photo of the craft beer you’ve been brewing in your basement? Now you can drop that image into flair.ai’s many scenes and – PRESTO – the crummy little photo you took on your kitchen table now looks like it was styled and designed and lit by people who actually knew what they were doing.
Here’s your beer on a snowy mountaintop, here it is in a field, here it is in some other damn place. But not just backgrounds. Flair.ai lets you customize the scene with pedestals, “elements” (leaves, flowers, etc) which you can place in the image for dimension and depth and style, and even humans in various poses (especially handy if your product isn’t so much a CPG as it is a shirt or dress).
And because it uses AI, you can adjust the lighting, shadows, ripples, everything, so that your friends will think that you really did shoot your beer on the banks of an Amazonian lagoon.
It’s fast, simple, and easy to use. When I played around with the demo I took a quick photo with my phone of the hip flask on my desk (yes, I have a hip flask on my desk, doesn’t everyone?) and it masked it and corrected it accordingly when I moved it from scene to scene (On the other hand, the masking was somewhat less accurate when I took a picture of my glasses, but hey, let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth. You want a complicated image like that to be masked, open up your copy of Photoshop, hotshot.)
It seemed to me – a simple ECD – that this could be really useful for someone who was a small entrepreneur and wanted to flog their products online without having to hire outside resources. Outside resources that would take time and money away from all the ten thousand other things that a startup entrepreneur spends her time on – you know, like actually making the stuff she’s selling.
And that was how LevLane CD RJ Cassi saw it too when I showed it to him – a quick way for someone who wasn’t a re-toucher or even a reasonably talented art director to create lots of digital assets for lots of small CPG goods to appear on something like Amazon.com. Assets that were a step above just a blank product shot (and therefore hopefully more compelling and, dare i say it, "brand building”), and yet still straightforward enough for functional usage.
Which Senior Art Director (and master retoucher) Chris Shea agreed with. “I can already do all of these things,” he said, “so why would I need this platform?” And with Photoshop robustly integrating AI technology in to its offerings, “Why” asked CD Jeremy Johnson, “would I need an outside resource if the current software I use is already going in that direction?”
All valid points for agency folks, and all things that this simple agency copywriter would not have thought about.
But like I said, what if this isn’t for agency folks. What if this isn’t for art directors at all? What if it’s about democratizing table top photography? Isn’t that the point of the internet after all? That we can all do everything?
That got me thinking about the days when personal computers initially made their way into agencies. When they were heralded as ushering in an exciting new world of technological advancement – and decried as spelling the end of creativity as we knew it. When they were seen as competitive advantages that would launch companies into the stratosphere – and as harbingers of doom that would destroy agencies too. When the press was filled with stories of how companies – advertising agencies in particular – were incorporating personal computers into their businesses, cheek by jowl with stories of how agencies were discrediting them as fads and flashes in the pan. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, blah blah blah.
Thank God no one is saying anything like that about AI.
At ground zero of all of this was the Apple Macintosh. People complained that it wasn’t a “serious” computer, that it was a “toy”; that it wasn’t for “adults”, it was something for “kids”. And that it certainly wasn’t something that had any business being in an office. Literally.
Which is probably why, if you look at ads for the Mac in the mid-1980s, Apple began explaining how this revolutionary little box was going to – was already – changing what was possible for businesses because it was putting graphics and design and art into the hands of any Tom, Dick or Mary who could operate a floppy disk. Indeed, you literally had TV commercials that compared the Mac’s output and speed to that of graphic designers, typesetters and art departments (you can see some of those ads here).
My friend Lance Thomas, Partner, CD and CEO at Origin Agency had the same thoughts “This is all reminding me of the Photoshop craze when it first came out. Every person with a computer was suddenly an Art Director and artist, because it was so easy to manipulate and explore the tools and effects. Eventually it shook out that it was just another tool for the Art Directors really.”
Lance is right, of course, but especially with that last part. Because even though that’s where all of this started, even though it was all sold in as a sort of “democratization of graphic design” that’s not where we wound up, is it? We wound up making things that we could never have imagined when we first cracked open MacPaint. The tools that were built to let any moron with a power suit and hair product decorate presentations and newsletters turned into sophisticated machinery that created art. Machinery that didn’t replace art directors and illustrators and designers, but made them more valuable by taking them to creative places none of us knew existed.
So maybe i’m wrong when I characterize it as something that sort of democratizes tabletop photography so every entrepreneur, hobbyist and packrat can make cooler images for their Etsy pages. Maybe I shouldn’t be looking at it as a finished thing in and of itself. Maybe, as Churchill said during another era of cataclysmic change, “This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end. This is perhaps, the end of the beginning.”