Meet Midjourney — what it is and who makes it

The concept

Midjourney is a image generation engine with a strong house style and fine-grained controls made by Midjourney. The models behind it are the Midjourney image models, versioned, with style references, character references and region controls. None of that matters on its own — what matters is that you know what kind of worker you have hired. At a striking, finished image with a strong visual identity, straight out of one prompt is the job you hand it. At precision: exact text, exact layout and exact anatomy still need work after the fact is the job you keep.

Most people come to a course like this expecting a list of magic words. There is no such list. What there is, is a tool that produces a set of four candidate images per prompt, which you then vary, upscale, edit or throw away, and produces it at a speed no human matches — which means the skill is not in writing the prompt, it is in knowing what a good answer looks like so you can tell the difference.

Here is the first thing to try, worded the way you will word things for the rest of the course:

Read the answer twice. The first read is for the content; the second is for the shape — did it answer the question you asked, or the question it found easiest? That second read is the habit this whole course is built on.

A plain white desk with a notebook and a pen, soft daylight from a window on the left, subject low and left with empty space upper right for a heading, photograph, 4:5, no text.