Finn McKenty

Finn McKenty, a former Abercrombie & Fitch designer and fractional CMO, tells Drew Brucker and Rory Flynn why he skips prompting for most of his process: he sketches by hand, hand-recolors Midjourney line art, and references physical, out-of-distribution objects (like a scanned 1968 flea-market jersey font) that no model has ever seen. He argues subject-matter expertise, reading model documentation directly, and material-specific prompting beat speed, and calls fake AI UGC 'cancer' for brand trust.

• Finn's rule: prompting is maybe 5% of the work. Sketch your idea by hand first, then use that drawing as a structural reference for the model.
• He references genuinely 'out of distribution' objects, like a scanned 1968 flea-market jersey font, since no model has ever trained on something that rare.
• Name the actual physical process in a prompt — 'chenille with a felt layer,' not 'embroidered' — because those specific material words carry real semantic weight.
• Finn reads model documentation himself instead of asking an LLM to summarize it, and keeps a months-long chat thread just for learning how image models actually work.