How custom AI image models scale brand creative
The monotony of scrolling through hundreds of uninspiring stock photos—only to find an image that sort of works. Planning a photoshoot and finding out later there’s a shot you missed. There has to be a better way. With Custom AI Image Models, there is.
Most off-the-shelf generative AI image and illustration tools are trained on generic datasets. This means everyone’s starting with the same flour, sugar and salt and experimenting to get the right recipe—or at least somewhat close.
Imagine if you could train these tools—teaching them to read from your personal cookbooks and infusing them with all the knowledge and expertise you've baked into your brand.
Like upgrading a wooden spoon to a top-of-the-line power mixer, custom AI image models make this dream a reality—letting you whip up quality, on-brand photographs, illustrations, icons, characters and more.
Learn more about custom AI image models and how they can help you focus more on scaling the kind of irresistible creativity that wins hearts and minds.
What are custom AI image models?
Custom AI image models are programs trained on your special blend of ingredients. So when you ask for a photograph with the lighting, tone and style you need—you get fresh content with the signature flavors of your brand.
As early as 2022, when applications like Stable Diffusion helped democratize access to high-quality AI image generation, experts began working to fine-tune their approach to customizing these outputs.
Fast forward to today and you can now use proprietary AI brand models to create highly personalized and context-specific images with ease.
How custom AI image models help brands scale
A brand accelerant, Custom AI Image Models take you from generic outcomes to distinctive, high-quality results—10 times faster and 85% more cost-effectively.
At Superside, as we’ve built Custom AI Image Models for our customers as well as our in-house creative teams, we’ve found that these tools result in:
- 10X faster asset creation.
- 75% less time spent per asset.
- 85% lower cost per asset.
In addition to efficiency gains, Custom AI Image Models provide greater:
- Consistency. When the AI is trained on your brand, the results reflect the level of detail and quality you expect and require.
- Freedom. Not only can you iterate more quickly, you can do so with less risk of wasted resources (even on tight timelines) or the overhead of cost and resource-intensive photoshoots.
- Scalability. Grow your asset libraries and get to market faster than ever. Generate unlimited new design-ready images, time and time again using simple prompts.
- Creativity. Spend more time exploring where you can use the images, instead of endless hours creating them.
What kinds of custom AI image models are there?
AI-powered brand image models are commonly named according to their primary use case. Here are just a few examples of the kinds of custom AI models a brand can build:
- Custom photography models. These models are built to produce brand-specific lifestyle or product images.
- Custom Illustration models. Allow for rapid iteration of illustrated images, icons and like components.
- Product visual and rendering generators. Produce multiple versions of a product either as an illustration or photograph.
- Character and people models. It’s not just products that can show their personalities, you can replicate the faces of your brand as well.
How do custom AI image models work
What can you create with custom AI image models?
Creative teams are harnessing the power of trained AI image models to produce photography, abstract images, product visuals, characters and icons at scale—for a fully varied menu of use cases from product marketing and brand storytelling to multi-channel marketing and advertising campaigns. They’re moving from concept to campaign faster and hitting the mark with their audiences at the same time.
How are Custom AI Image Models made?
To ensure quality and consistency, creating a custom AI image model starts with clearly defining your brand standards for the assets you want to create.
Once you’ve set your brand criteria, you choose a range of 10 to 15 representative examples. The key at this stage is the quality of the dataset—the more consistent the input, the more on-brand the output. If you’re working with AI experts, like the pros at Superside, they’ll assist you with this stage to ensure optimal outcomes.
From there, the model is further trained and tested before being deployed. Then, once the desired levels of quality and consistency are achieved, the model can be deployed within a brand’s design software.
For instance, at Superside we’re able to add custom image models to Figma through a custom plug-in that we’ve also developed.
Hand-in-hand with deployment, our experts will set you up for success. We’ll show your team members how to use the model and provide an easy-to-follow guide with prompting tips.
A not-so-secret ingredient: Human oversight and ongoing improvement
No matter how sophisticated a custom AI model is, human expertise makes all the difference, ensuring that brand guidelines are followed and checklists are used to make quality systematic so that everything looks and feels right.
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Michelle is a SaaS expert who loves digging into the technical side of creativity. She’s worn many hats during her decade in agencies, from project manager to brand strategist, copywriter and social media strategist, and worked across a wide variety of clients (though tech is her jam!). She loves to put the sass into SaaS content… and now CaaS. Connect with her on LinkedIn and send her a pic of your dog (really, she’ll love it).
Jan leads Superside's AI Consulting Team, leveraging industry experience gained during his doctoral studies and tenures McKinsey and a venture capital fund specializing in generative AI. Connect with Jan to talk more about AI and what the weather's like in Helsinki.
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