Art Styles

We added an Art Style menu to the new ad form today. It's a small feature (ten presets, including Claymation, Watercolor, and Pixel Art), but it gets at something that makes directing image models more complicated than it initially seems.

You could already type "make it claymation" into the creative direction and get something that looked like clay. The complication is that changing the style can also change things you didn't ask to change: the subject, the layout, even the product itself. If you're making an image for fun this might be fine, but an ad has some fairly specific obligations. You still need to recognize what you're selling, and the message still needs to make sense.

The presets give the model a rendering instruction with those constraints attached. Your creative direction takes priority if the two conflict. Of course, an instruction isn't a guarantee that an image model will follow it, but it lets us be explicit about what we're asking for without making you write the same qualifications every time you want a different look.

Here's the same brief, a potter at a workbench, with Claymation and Watercolor. The preset was the only thing I changed. The person, the bowl, and the window light carry through, which is what I was interested in here; whether either version makes a better ad is a separate question.

The full list is:

• Inked Illustration
• Claymation
• Anime
• Photoreal
• 3D Animated
• Watercolor
• Retro Print
• Pixel Art
• Storybook
• Cinematic

You can use these on stills and videos. The style is saved with the ad, and when you remix it, "keep Art Style" is checked by default (uncheck it if you want to try something else). Adding motion to a styled still keeps the style too.

What I'm curious about is how much the same idea changes when you change its visual treatment. Does clay make a product feel more approachable? Does it make it harder to take seriously? Presumably that depends on the product and who's looking at it, which is why I wouldn't read much into these two examples beyond what they show. They give us a way to try the question.

If there's a style you'd like to use that isn't here, let me know. You can try the presets here.