Sunday 18th August 2024

Topics:

• I missed last week due to a holiday.
• This week, I decided it was time to give greppr.org a fresh look.
• To recap, greppr is my web search engine that I have been building since last year.
• It is a generic search engine with about 6 million web pages indexed so far.
• The logo I was using was pretty ugly, and was only meant as temporary place-holder.
• Recently the AI engine in X, named Grok, was updated to include the ability to generate images from a text prompt.
• I thought it would be interesting to use it to generate a new logo for my greppr service, as frankly I am no good at graphic design.
• I already have a premium account on X, so I already had access to Grok.
• If you are watching the video version of this episode on X or YouTube, you will see some of the results from Grok which I think you will agree look great!
• The prompts I used to generate these images were:
  • "Draw a greppr logo in white and blue with a white background and cyberpunk style"
  • "Draw the previous image again, but time using the color #264e86 instead of blue" - here I found Grok did not copy forward the previous image as requested, but generated a whole new one. It also failed to use the hexadecimal colours I provided.
  • "Draw the previous image again, but this time use #e9ecef as the background color" - again it gave a new image.
  • "Draw logo for web search engine "greppr" in cyberpunk style with white background" - here it consistently generated images with white backgrounds, and gave me the results I was hoping for. Perhaps it is better at parsing named colours?
• In addition to logo generation, I can also see a compelling use case for content creators like me: using tools like Grok to generate images to use in podcast videos.
• Right now I use free stock photography websites, but I think I will switch to Grok for still images from now on, and only use stock for video.
• If I was a graphic designer, I would be extremely worried.
• What I am working on this week:
  • I revamped the logo and style sheets of greppr.org - see the video for some before and after screen-shots.
• Media I am enjoying this week:
  • Maelstrom by Peter Watts, which is part 2 of his Rifter series.

Download

techleaderpro-2024-week-33.mp3

File details: 13.8 MB MP3, 9 mins 32 secs duration.

Title music is "Hidden Beyond" by Aiyo, licensed via www.epidemicsound.com

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