AI as your junior designer: a practical guide to midjourney and chatGPT for brainstorming

You’re staring at an empty drawing area. The assignment is clear, but the path to a brilliant concept is not. We’ve all been there. Traditionally you could crack your knuckles, dive into a dive Pinterest rabbit hole, or scribble on a whiteboard until the marker dries.

But what if you had a tireless, instantly creative junior designer to develop your ideas with? One that never sleeps, doesn’t get creative blocks and can generate a hundred concepts before your coffee goes cold?

Welcome to the new reality. Tools such as Halfway through the journey And ChatGPT are not here to replace you; they’re here to boost your most valuable skill: your creativity. Don’t think of them as oracles, but as the most overqualified junior designers you’ve ever hired.

Let’s see how you can integrate them into your brainstorming workflow.

Meet your new team

First understand their roles:

• ChatGPT: the strategic copywriter and idea bouncer. It is your verbal and conceptual powerhouse. Use it to define the problem, generate word maps, explore user personas, and write compelling copy.
• Midjourney: The Visual Wizard’s Apprentice. It’s your instant mood board generator. It can visualize styles, color palettes, layouts and concepts at breakneck speed, but that’s necessary terribly clear direction.

The magic happens when you use them together.

The brainstorming workflow: a practical example

Let’s say you’ve been tasked with designing the branding and main landing page for a new premium eco-friendly coffee subscription service called “Terroir Brew.”

Phase 1: Strategy and verbal ideas with ChatGPT

Don’t jump into Midjourney yet. Garbage in, garbage out. Start building a solid conceptual foundation with ChatGPT.

Question 1: Define the core concept

“Take action as a brand strategist. We’re launching a premium, eco-friendly coffee subscription called ‘Terroir Brew.’ The name emphasizes the unique ‘flavor of the place’ of specific farms. Generate five key messages for brand positioning and a list of key brand values.”

• Why it works: This gives you a strategic language to build on. ChatGPT can provide values ​​such as ‘Transparency’, ‘Regenerative Agriculture’, ‘Artisan Quality’ and ‘Earth Conscious Community’.

Question 2: Brainstorm visual and verbal keywords

“Based on the values ​​’Transparency’, ‘Artisan Quality’ and ‘Earth-Conscious’, generate a word bank for visual design inspiration. Add words related to color, texture, materials and aesthetic styles.”

• Why it works: You get a rich list of keywords such as: ‘organic textures’, ‘handmade paper’, ‘earthy tones’, ‘minimalist typography’, ‘forest green’, ‘clay beige’, ‘photographic shadows’, ‘Scandinavian simplicity’, ‘modern rustic’. This is now your quick fuel.

Question 3: User persona and messaging

“Create a user persona for a likely Terroir Brew subscriber. Include their demographics, motivations, and what message would resonate with them. Then create three possible headline options for the landing page.”

• Why it works: This puts your visual ideas in a real human context. The headings it generates can directly inform your layout and hierarchy.

Phase 2: Visual exploration with Midjourney

Now take those rich verbal concepts and give them to your visual learner. The key to Midjourney is specificity. Don’t just say ‘eco-friendly design’. Build a scene.

Question 1: Explore logo and brand concepts

A minimalist logo mark for a premium eco-friendly coffee brand called "Terroir Brew". The logo should incorporate a coffee bean and a topographical map line, symbolizing 'taste of place'. Style: clean, elegant, single color, on a white background. --style raw --v 6.0

• Why it works: You combine a concrete concept (topographic map + bean) with a clear style direction. The --style raw and version flag provide a more photographic/less idiosyncratic output, allowing you to work with a cleaner slate.

Question 2: Generate a mood board in seconds

A mood board for "Terroir Brew" branding. Featuring: organic linen textures, recycled paper packaging, forest green and warm beige color palette, close-up shots of coffee beans and soil, minimalist typography on a craft paper label. Flat lay, professional styling. --ar 16:9

• Why it works: Instead of spending an hour on Pinterest, get a cohesive visual overview of your brand’s direction in 60 seconds. This is perfect for coordination with clients or your team before you start designing.

Question 3: Brainstorm landing page layouts

A hero section for a landing page for a premium coffee subscription service. The layout features a high-quality bag of coffee beans on the left, with elegant typography on the right. The headline says "Taste the Place." The style is clean, modern, and warm, with a soft natural light. Website mockup, UI/UX design. --ar 3:2

• Why it works: You don’t ask Midjourney to create your design final page. You use it to quickly test composition ideas: image on the left, text on the right? Full bleed photo with overlay text? The AI ​​gives you multiple composition designs to react to and refine.

Best practices for managing your “Junior Designer”

1. You are the art director. Never accept the first output. Use the Vary buttons in Midjourney and “regenerate response” in ChatGPT. Iterate, refine and push back. “Make the colors more muted,” or “Give me three more alternatives that are more playful.”
2. Combine and manage. The best idea might be the color palette from Image 2, the layout from Image 3, and the typographic style from Image 4. Your job is to be the curator and put the best AI-generated parts together into a coherent, human-led vision.
3. Ethical remix, don’t plagiarize. You would never copy another designer’s work directly. The same goes for AI. Use it for inspiration, for elements, for starting points. Then make it your own in Figma, Illustrator or Webflow. The final design must go through your creative intentions and skillful hands.
4. Feed it Good reference. Just like a junior designer, AI works better with clear references. Usage --iw (image weight) in Midjourney to reference a specific color palette or style you love. In ChatGPT, you can paste excerpts from the creative brief for context.

The bottom line

AI won’t replace designers, but designers who use AI will replace those who don’t. By offloading the hard work of initial ideas and visual exploration to ChatGPT and Midjourney, you free up your most precious resource: time for deep thinking, refinement and strategic decision making.

Stop thinking of them as AI tools. Treat them like your new, hyper-productive junior design team. Your empty artboard doesn’t stand a chance.