Using AI to Shape Your Website's Style and Mockups with Midjourney

Welcome back to our series on using AI for web design. In this part, we're looking at how artificial intelligence tools, specifically Midjourney, can help with the creative side of building a website. We've already covered finding clients and creating content using AI. Now, let's explore how AI can assist with design elements like mood boards, branding, logos, and mockups for our example deli website project.

Starting with Website Style and Mood Boards

The first step in many design projects is figuring out the overall style. This often involves creating a mood board. Normally, you might gather images from stock photo sites based on client preferences – things like colors, styles, and textures. For our deli project, the client likes a vintage look with black and white images, maybe some blue accents, and textures like butcher paper.

We can use AI to speed this up. Midjourney has a community feed where you can see images others have created and the prompts they used. Searching for terms like "Deli" can give you visual ideas and prompt inspiration. Find images that fit the desired style – like photorealistic deli counters or vintage-looking scenes – and add them to a project board. This helps start building a visual direction the client can react to.

You can also use text-based AI like ChatGPT to help craft prompts for Midjourney. Give the AI keywords describing the style and ask it to write a short, descriptive prompt. Then, take that prompt to Midjourney. For our deli example, prompting for a "classic deli counter" with a "photorealistic scene" captured images with great detail and atmosphere. These AI-generated images can be added to your mood board alongside traditional finds. They serve as starting points to understand the client's vision, capturing the 'vibe' before actual design work begins.

Exploring these visual ideas quickly with AI makes the creative exploration phase faster and more fun.

Trying to Generate a Logo with Midjourney

Next, we explored using Midjourney to create a logo. Midjourney isn't specifically built for logos, and it struggles with text, but it's worth seeing what's possible for inspiration.

We looked at the Midjourney community feed again to see how others prompt for logos. We borrowed some ideas like "vector line illustration" or "flat design."

Prompting Midjourney for a "logo for a deli that is both classic and playful vintage style" resulted in some interesting visual concepts. The AI created images that captured a vintage feel with unique elements. While you wouldn't use the image exactly as is (especially since Midjourney often adds gibberish text), the *visual idea* can be a great starting point. A designer could take the concept – perhaps the overall shape or the graphic style – and recreate it properly in design software, adding the correct business name.

For established businesses with existing logos, you would simply use their logo. But if a client needs a new one or an updated concept, Midjourney can provide quick visual ideas to discuss.

Creating Product Images with AI

Generating product images is another area where AI *could* be used, though it comes with a big caution. For real client projects, you generally want actual photos of their products, taken professionally. This ensures accuracy and builds trust.

However, for conceptual work, placeholders, or generating graphics that represent product *ideas* rather than the specific items, Midjourney can be useful. We used descriptions from our fictional deli's product list (like "spices," "deli apron," "takeaway box") to prompt Midjourney.

The results were images that looked like plausible product photos. While not images of *Tony the deli guy's* actual products, they quickly created visuals for a mockup or initial layout concept. This shows AI's potential for generating illustrative content when specific product photos aren't immediately available or needed for early-stage design.

Manage your Midjourney prompts and output efficiently with the Midjourney Automation Suite by TitanXT. It helps organize your workflow.

Attempting Website Mockups with Midjourney

This was where the experiment hit a road bump. The goal was to see if Midjourney could generate usable website mockup layouts based on visual references or descriptions.

We tried several approaches:

• Looking for website mockups in the community feed.

• Using a screenshot of an existing deli website (Katz's Delicatessen, which the client liked) as a visual prompt alongside text descriptions of the desired style (black and white, blue accents, UX/UI).

• Using simpler text prompts like "deli restaurant website" or "minimal website layout clean."

Unfortunately, the results for website mockups were not good. Midjourney sometimes took the image prompt too literally, just adding text over the original image frame. Other times, it created strange, unusable layouts that looked nothing like functional websites. Even trying basic prompts or adjusting settings didn't produce layouts that a designer could easily use as a starting point in design software like Figma.

The lesson here is that while Midjourney is fantastic for generating images and exploring visual styles, it's currently not reliable for creating structured website layouts or mockups that designers need.

What We Learned and What's Next

Despite the challenge with mockups, using AI, specifically Midjourney, was very helpful for other parts of the creative process:

• Quickly exploring visual styles for mood boards.

• Generating creative concepts for branding and logos (even if needing refinement).

• Creating illustrative product images for conceptual use.

These AI tools speed up generating ideas and visuals to share with clients and shape the creative direction. While AI couldn't deliver a ready-to-use website mockup, the style, branding ideas, and image assets generated are valuable.

In the next part of this series, we'll take all the elements we've gathered – the AI-generated copy, site map, mood board style, logo concept, and product images – and move into a website builder to start creating the actual site layout and design. We'll use a template as a starting point and apply the branding and content we developed, showing how AI-assisted assets fit into a practical web design workflow.

Enhance your Midjourney workflow and manage your creations effectively. Check out the Midjourney Automation Suite by TitanXT to streamline your process.

Stay tuned for the next video to see how we bring it all together!