Midjourney Promptcraft: Product Design

Precise prompting to generate high quality product ideas and renders

You may have come across Midjourney recently and been blown away by how creative and beautiful its artwork generation can be. With a simple comma separated list of words you can create new art out of thin air, with a stunning level of detail and composition. For example, in honor of Top Gun: Maverick (one of the greatest movies of all time), check out this piece by RhinoMan:

RhinoMan could easily take this piece of artwork, throw up a Shopify shop with print-on-demand canvas printing, and run Facebook or TikTok ads to it and it would likely do very well. It’s striking, aggressive, detailed and has good lighting/composition. I could easily picture myself buying this for my workspace.

Midjourney is often known for a more artistic and painterly feel, with big sweeping scenes, like this one by adames.design:

But after stalking the Midjourney Discord channels for the past few weeks, I’ve realized that it’s also possible to generate studio-grade product renderings and concepts by using very specific keywords and style prompts. Midjourney can generate incredibly detailed renderings that look very close to fully 3D modeled renderings, and can generate dozens of iterations on a design very quickly with minor keyword adjustments. Check out this robot by Fabian:

It’s symmetrical, has clean parting lines on all hard edges, brilliant lighting composition, and genuinely looks like a physical product. If we look through the Gallery for the words “product photography” and “industrial design” we see some artists are already putting this to good use.

Artist: tsibg

Artist: wadaka

How to Create a New Product from Scratch

So let’s walk through the process of creating a new product design from scratch. Keep in mind Midjourney works best as an ideation tool, not a 3D modeling tool where you already have a design in mind and need to make it real. Midjourney will give you a ton of options and then you can pick and choose a few of them you like to then model off of in your software of choice (I use Fusion360 to model and Keyshot to render the designs).

Let’s pick something that’s fairly easy to manufacture on our own but also has a lot of design freedom, like a lamp.

In honor of Anchorman, let’s design a lamp that would fit in with midcentury style, maybe designed by Eames, with a little additional flair. So we’ll start with the prompt:

/imagine midcentury lamp designed by eames

The first output we get is a little weak, but you can see we’re already in the right era and style, so it’s a good starting point:

It would be nice to have some polished burlwood accents and integrate LEDs since those are easy to buy on Amazon, so let’s try that:

/imagine unique midcentury led lamp designed by eames and made out of burlwood

Still too much mushroom vibes going on with this one, so let’s add in some more clarifying words to get less mushroom vibes.

/imagine unique midcentury bedside led lamp designed by eames and made out of burlwood,shaped like a tower,photorealistic,extremely detailed

The keywords “photorealistic” and “extremely detailed” are very useful modifiers when you want Midjourney to output high quality photo renders.

Now we’re getting somewhere so it’s time to add a little additional flair for more visual interest and detail. Steampunk detailing blends well with midcentury design and is also fairly easy to 3D print, so let’s add that. Let’s also switch to vintage style light bulbs instead of LEDs because that would probably work better with the overall aesthetic.

/imagine unique midcentury bedside lamp designed by eames and made out of burlwood,shaped like a tower,vintage light bulbs,engraved glass,steampunk details,brass hardware,photorealistic,extremely detailed

Number 3 on the bottom left is a great jumping off point. Looks easy to model and manufacture, but still a lot of design opportunity in the overall silhouette and detailing.

Let’s upscale that version by clicking U3 and re-roll for more variations by clicking V3.

From here it’s a free-for-all of upscaling versions you like and re-rolling variations to find more designs. I won’t share all of them but here’s a capture to show how quickly you can come up with dozens of designs.

Here’s my favorite from the bunch:

This post is already too long for the email limit, so I’ll end here but here are a few other keywords you can use to help generate high quality product renders:

Solidworks designed

award winning product photography

symmetrical

industrial design

Octane render

Let me know what cool stuff you create in the comments or on the Twitter thread!