GUEST · EP 027 JULIE WIELAND
Julie Wieland
Art director and graphic designer turned AI visual artist
On Fast Hours January 19, 2025
Midjourney From Dall E 2 creative freedom Julie Wieland
ft. Julie Wieland
Episode 27 is a conversation with guest Julie Wieland, an art director and AI visual artist who traces her path from Dall-E 2 to Midjourney and how AI collapsed her multi-day client mood-board process into about half a day. She, Rory and Drew compare tool stacks across Midjourney, LetzAI, Hailuo, Luma and Krea, debate Midjourney's under-used Describe feature, and trade hot takes, including Rory's case that Sora was 2024's worst product launch.
- Julie's biggest early Dall-E 2 win: cutting a client mood-board process from three to four days of Pinterest and Google trawling down to about half a day.
- For client work needing real character or product consistency, Julie relies on LetzAI over Midjourney, which she rates only 'okay-ish' on consistency without it.
- Midjourney's Describe tool still has fans: Julie uses Discord's version constantly on ambiguous client briefs, but had never seen the newer website version or the Editor's Suggest Prompt.
- Office Hours confirms A/B image ranking trains Midjourney's personalization differently than skipping or liking from Explore — skipping reportedly teaches the model nothing.
Julie Wieland, on the record
“creating mood boards for clients takes ages. Like it literally takes a good three to four days if not longer to browse Pinterest to browse Google to browse wherever and to really crunch that time down to maybe half a day.”
“it's a specific community. And it's mostly like deviant art kind of people who draw Sonic the Hedgehog. And I thought it was like, well, that's hypocritical, isn't it? … And I'm like, you're drawing Sonic the Hedgehog.”
“Sora was actually trained on gaming stuff and not actually video stuff because it was very … it felt very gamified and so I thought it had like a real engine kind of background instead of trained on videos.”
“I think they just know that they don't need it, right? People will still rave about them. You don't have to be in a circle to be a fan of them and then everybody pays for it and probably everybody still will.”