How we used neural networks to develop packaging for our products and launch them on marketplaces. Step-by-step instruction

— Good afternoon, we would like to order a design for the packaging of our products on marketplaces.
– Oh, well, in short, we need a budget.
– What about the timing?
– Let’s first draw up the technical specifications, and then we’ll get a sense of the deadlines.

This is approximately how the beginning of communication with most design studios occurs when searching without acquaintances, just on the Internet.

What is the problem?

So it’s not like drawing pictures on the Internet, here you need to look for containers (just bottles, yes), communicate with suppliers so that the minimum batch of 10,000 bottles is not charged wholesale, measure the dimensions for this container, come up with a design, enter the design, find a printing house, print a color proof (- Wow, the pictures are not in the browser, but you can hold them in your hands!), make edits in the layout, print again and when it’s ready, present the final project.

Now imagine how many people are involved in this, everyone is on a salary, even when there is no work, and in the end you pay for all this. You can hire a freelancer, but the chances of getting high-quality work on time without the classic “the Internet is turned off, I’ll send it tomorrow morning” are at best 50:50, and if you don’t get lucky, then you can’t rewind time, this is not TENET.

As they say, don't try to understand, feel.

Although in terms of the degree of brain removal, both processes are approximately the same.

So, what should we do?

Depends on the situation. Our company currently works with large enterprises in industrial volumes: we supply tonne Eurocubes and 10-liter canisters. Convenient for agricultural holdings, inconvenient for home use. We need to come up with packaging for marketplaces, but I don’t want to overpay at the start for an experiment, and I don’t have the time or desire to listen to the whining of designers “I’m an artist, as I see it, here’s 3 more edits and we’re done.”

What about neural networks?

There is so much buzz about them, every six months something new appears. Maybe try to generate a design with their help and get by with little expense?

What about other companies? Maybe someone has already done it?
Well, yes. Just now.

Having seen enough of the abstract landscapes and still lifes that large companies sculpt onto their products and immediately write “the packaging is made by neural networks,” it somehow becomes quite depressing to realize how sparingly the potential of neural networks is being revealed. With the same success, one could shoot photographs of paintings by a couple of local street artists on Old Arbat and put them into production.

The neural network is your personal design studio, they said.

So we decided to check how juicy the packaging could be offered by a neural network, without forgetting about the meaning.

Let's begin.

Step number 1: Research your product.

We are a manufacturer of microbiological preparations for plants and biological products for processing organic waste into black soil.

The logical question is: what is it and why is it needed at all? In short, we cultivate strains of natural chernozem-forming beneficial microorganisms that help the plant better absorb nutrients from the soil, increasing productivity, strengthening the immune system and reducing the level of nitrates in fruits, that is, the taste and aroma return.

But first things first.

Ever wondered: how does a plant eat? As expected, it all starts in the soil. This is what the root system of the future plant looks like in the first days of growth.

One revolution of the world is a day.
If desired, you can turn on the sound for musical accompaniment.

In essence, the principle of nutrition for plants and humans is the same: there are nutrients and there are beneficial bacteria. Microorganisms in the microflora break down food into its simplest forms for easy absorption of trace elements through the pores of the roots in plants or the mucous membrane of the gastrointestinal tract in humans. If the microbiota is disrupted, the absorption of nutrients deteriorates, metabolism is disrupted, and as a result we have a sick plant/person, no matter how well fed.

What should a healthy microbiota be like in the soil?

There are many microbiological preparations on the market, but most often these are monocultures. That is, for example, they sold you Azotobacter, which is responsible for nitrogen fixation in the soil. So they brought it onto the field, but didn’t see the result. Why is that?

These complex families of bacteria take three to five days to form the first colonies. The problem is that the soil is full of other microorganisms and pathogens, making it more likely that Azotobacter alone can withstand the army of “bad” bacteria in the soil is small. Therefore, there is often a situation when a farmer spends money on the purchase of a microbiological preparation with a monoculture Azotobacter to improve the digestibility of nitrogen: it pours on the field, the monoculture is crushed by the pathogen in the soil, the agronomist does not see the result and says that it’s all a scam, money down the drain, damn scammers.

All that was needed was to prepare favorable microflora in advance. This is what happens in nature in chernozem: first, antipathogenic agents begin to work Bacillus mycoides. Notice how in the video below, from an outbreak the size of a drop, in just a day, the colony spreads to an area a thousand times larger than the original one.

Then on the second day it connects Bacillus subtilisa powerful antipathogenic Bacillus subtilis, which, when forming colonies, eats more complex forms of pathogenic microflora and creates a favorable microbiological background.

And now, in this biologically favorable flora, more highly organized cultures of beneficial bacteria begin to grow, which are responsible for the production of natural growth hormones, antioxidants and vitamins, like the same Azotobacter.

This is how nature works: the more complex components a microorganism produces, the more vulnerable it is to pathogens. Take a closer look at the growth rate of antipathogenic colonies Bacillus mycoides, Bacillus subtilis compared with Azotobacter chroococcum.

And these are only the most numerous families of all the diversity. In the center, the general microbiological background of the chernozem microflora is presented, where all microorganisms and metabolites coexist in symbiosis, when the colonies do not suppress, but rather help each other.

It is important to note that these processes have been fine-tuned by nature over billions of years and we are not creating anything new. We only carefully collect the microflora of standard organically pure chernozem, preserve it in a special way with quality control, in order to transfer it in a dormant stable form to a farmer with problem soil to restore its microflora and increase the yield.

And today there is a lot of problematic soil. So many.

If at the dawn of intensive farming in the 1970s, the soil microbiota resource allowed for large yields, then over more than half a century of treatment by aggressive agrochemicals, the soil microbiota has become so depleted that soil degradation is now spontaneous.

Considering the abundance of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, seeds today reveal their yield potential in most cases by only 60-70%. The fact is that the seed has a limited amount of energy stored, which it must direct in the first days of growth to the formation of the rudiments of a strong future root system. But due to the oversaturation of chemistry in the soil and disturbed pH, most of this energy is spent on combating this very negative environment around and recovering from chemical burns.

If the soil is pre-treated with chernozem-forming microorganisms, then the seed, being in comfortable conditions, from the very first days will be able to direct 100% of its energy only to the formation of a strong root system instead of fighting pathogenic flora – and this is the key to a healthy, strong plant in the future.

— Pathogen-pathogen, what kind of pathogen?

Fungus, for example. Spreaders of root rots that can be introduced into crops on the soles of boots? Fusarium from an infected seed?

Scary words for any farmer. And if until recently the only way to combat them was chemicals, today there is an alternative: the systematic formation of immunity in the soil. ⁠Yes, yes,⁠ the soil, as a large organism, is capable of fighting most types of infection on its own: for billions of years there has been a struggle between the kingdom of fungi and microorganisms, like a well-oiled mechanism. The fact that we don’t notice this is purely our problem.

And technology will allow us to take a closer look at this struggle. The example below shows the antagonism of soil microorganisms towards Bipolaris sorokoniana – a causative agent of root rot in grain crops. You can also see how different colonies of beneficial soil microorganisms form at different rates.

For clarity, you can compare how different concentrations of bacteria fight the fungus.

It can be seen that even 1% of rhizosphere microorganisms in the medium can successfully fight the causative agent of root rot, preventing the fungus from spreading to the edge of the medium.

We recommend making at least a 2% solution with water to systematically build immunity in the soil.

Let's expand the example to the 3 most popular pathogens in our latitudes:
1. Bipolaris sorokiniana – causative agent of root rot in grain crops.
2. Fusarium oxysporum – fusarium wilt of grain crops.
3. Alternaria alternata – causative agent of rot in salads and vegetables.

Fungus, drought, frost – these factors most often appear out of nowhere, and these days the farmer is especially worried about the plants. After all, by losing a harvest, people most often lose the only truly valuable resource – time.

In such cases, a strong and deep root system with healthy microflora plays an important role in the plant’s ability to withstand shock factors for as long as possible and quickly recover from critical levels of hibernation.

By the way, these videos are part of RnD for the development of a quality control system, which, using computer vision, 360° frames in the required spectra and machine learning, checks each batch for compliance with the reference one, comparing the vectors and growth form of colonies of microorganisms over time to determine specific strains and their concentrations. For this purpose, special software and equipment were also developed to capture the dynamics of colony growth over several days. But there is material for a separate article.

Total: what is our product?

1. It is definitely worth pointing out that Marvel Organics microflora is completely safe for humans, pets and the environment. The drug has been tested by the Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation and has a state registration certificate. Without this, you don’t even have to start – this is the first thing you should do before going to sell fertilizers.

2. A liquid concentrate that must be diluted in a certain proportion with water before use.

3. Be sure to apply by spraying.
   Oxygen in the droplets awakens beneficial microorganisms.

4. Increases productivity due to the formation of a deeper, stronger root system.

5. Stimulates flowering and improves the taste of fruits by stabilizing metabolism and producing natural growth hormones, vitamins, antioxidants, which also reduces the level of accumulated nitrates.

6. Oh yes, if you increase the concentration of Bacillus subtilis Bacillus sublitisthen you can get a biological product for processing organic waste: bird droppings, cow manure, substandard vegetables – all this can be used to create black soil in just 3 weeks.

7. Increases soil immunity, thereby reducing the likelihood of crop infection by fungus.

8. The structure of colonies of beneficial microorganisms is sticky fractal 🙂

Formation of the concept of the future line

Number of products

3 products for the full cycle of crop production:

1. Biological product for creating organically pure soil from organic waste.

2. Fertilizer for vegetables and fruits in the garden.
   (You can get an organically pure crop without chemicals on the soil from the first point.)

3. Fertilizer for flowers.

Container volume

With recommended dosages, the white 500 ml bottle is the best choice. – this is enough for one season for a typical summer cottage. Moreover, we managed to find a very good supplier who supplies in batches of multiples of 100 pieces. (You won’t believe it, but it’s really a great success to find a nice, neat bottle sold in small batches).

Design

All that's left is to do it beautifully.
To work, we will use two top neural networks:

1. Midjourney – to generate visualizations.

2. ChatGPT — to edit the text of the sticker.

Well, basic knowledge of Photoshop on moving layers of text and pictures. We won’t focus on the technical details of registering and starting to work with neural networks; the Internet is full of instructions for every taste and budget. In our case, the standard Midjourney plan cost $30, and ChatGPT is already free.

– Well, let's try to make a design worth a million dollars for 3,000 rubles?

We will organize the work according to the following scheme:

1. Let's decide on the design code of the bottles (location of the logo, instructions, technical information).

2. Let’s formulate technical specifications for ourselves based on visual images for each bottle and generate images.

3. Using ChatGPT, let's cram a bunch of text into the limited label space.

I specifically recommend starting with the most abstract intuitive stages so as not to get bogged down in details from the very start and lose interest. This is especially true when you have blank slate syndrome and don't know where to even start.

Step 1 – Design code for bottles.

Everything is simple here. We open Midjourney and start with the dumbest request, as they say: what I see in my head is what I write.

microbial fertilizer bottle design

Attention: All image generation is done in Midjourney version 5.2. At the time the design was developed, version 6 did not yet exist, and even now it is still better to use version 5.2, since the excessive photorealism of version 6 only gets in the way.

To do this, first open the settings by writing the command in the Discord chat:

/settings

Set the settings as in the example below:

As a result, after each of your requests, Midjourney will add a suffix indicating the version –v 5.2

microbial fertilizer bottle design --v 5.2

Let's see what happened:

We see that the bottles are sometimes transparent, sometimes multi-colored. We have a white bottle, so we add white color to the prompt:

microbial plants fertilizer white bottle design --v 5.2

It’s futuristic, what can I say, we won’t see such bottles any time soon. But in general, we are interested in testing out the general concept of the design code for the arrangement of elements. We continue our search.

The logic is simple: we look at what is missing and add it to the next iteration of the prompt.

Midjourney filled everything with white, taking the color of the bottle too literally?
Let’s complement the request with bright colors, and you can link fractality to interest:

microbial plants fertilizer white bottle fractal colorful design --v 5.2

Okay, so far it’s all nonsense, a lot of graphics, little information, we’re complicating the prompt with buzzwords and a focus group:

biobooster fertilizer for home plants and flowers fractal bottle package design --v 5.2

You can also consult ChatGPT: describe in free form what you feel, and it will offer a couple of prompts. This speeds up the process well when you need to brainstorm. This is how we add details about colors and style; sometimes it’s useful to look at variations in the Apple or Dyson style:

eco friendly Organic biobooster fertilizer for home green plants orange red purple blue yellow white wideshot flowers in style of artwall cylindrical bottle bright package fractal design in style of Apple Dyson products --v 5.2

It’s better, in the end we spend half an hour or an hour going through different prompts and luck. Considering that we don’t know what we are looking for, we can stop idealizing and stop when there is an option that at least fits into the paradigm of real production and structuring of information.

In our case, it quickly became clear that with our small initial circulation, relying on a sophisticated label shape and covering the entire white bottle with colors and patterns would be expensive, so we made a compromise on a minimalist design code with the dominance of the main image and listing the main advantages below.

Yes, for the sake of this conclusion, it was worth taking the first step to understand: what you want and what you really can.

It seems obvious, but just an hour ago you didn’t even know where to start.

And here it is, right before your eyes:

Here, by the way, you can observe the bias of the training sample of the neural network on the design of fertilizers. Guess which crop fertilizers have the largest marketing and design budget to most effectively attract the eyes of future buyers?

But this is only better for us, because the neural network has done a great job for us to find the most common and working patterns for our specific task.

Well, that’s it, there’s just a little bit left to do.

Here is the bottle:

Here is a convenient spray bottle to quickly and easily dilute with water:

Here’s a neat stand so you don’t lose everything at home and store it conveniently:

Here's a convenient box so that everything doesn't fall out during transportation.

Now you have a great product on the marketplaces that you wouldn’t even be ashamed to give to a person who is very passionate about house plants and flowers.

Everything is ready, thank you for your attention: like, subscribe, bell.

We will tell you more about creating an exclusive brand ambassador for your products in the next article. There is so much material that, unfortunately, everything will not fit here.

In the meantime, let's return to our main products:

We’ve decided on the design code; it’s time to generate our first meaningful image in Midjourney. In our case, it was best to start with a flower bottle. Here we can quite easily get the first visual image due to the high degree of abstraction of the topic.

I would like to capture the abundance of colors in fractals, as in the generations of bottles above, we have already seen. We write the prompt:

flower pattern macro zoom --v 5.2

Well, so as not to waste time, we will immediately generate several more options to understand the general direction.

Interesting, but too cosmic, we specify that we want a circular composition (combines favorably with the cylindrical geometry of the bottle), specific colors and ask for photorealism, we also clarify the elongated aspect ratio –ar 64:43

a circle of pink and purple red and orange detailed realistic rendering, macro zoom, uhd image, flower patterns --ar 64:43 --v 5.2

The option on the bottom right is not bad, let’s look at the variations and at the same time zoom in to get a better look: to do this, press V4 (Variant, variations of the picture number 4) and U4 (Upscale, enlargement of the picture number 4) in the Discord interface:

We get a larger version of our image and at the same time a couple of variations.

Variations of picture number 4 look more interesting in terms of variety of colors than the previous version, let’s upscale it. Let's look at the result:

Very good. To make sure that it won’t get better, we make more variations just in case, poke different buttons like a cat, and finally, making sure that it definitely won’t get better, press Upscale (4x).

We get a high-resolution image and can already insert it into a file layout in Photoshop (there are a lot of videos on YouTube “how to master basic Photoshop in 10 minutes”).

It looks really good. For 3,000 rubles, a designer will never draw you something like this from scratch.

Now let’s generate visualizations about the main qualities, here we will remain true to the design concept of a circular composition on a cylinder, so we will make a couple of round icons to match the theme.

Why come up with it ourselves, let ChatGPT think for us; we tell it our task in simple written form:

We get a scattering of icons, choose the most attractive ones:

We drop it into the layout and start working with the text content:

Let's start with the instructions

Do you know what's great about ChatGPT? You can feed him some stuffy technical text and ask him to humanize it and fit it into the required number of characters.

Do you have only 4 lines allocated for text?

1. Fill the text box with Lorem Ipsum and copy the resulting set of characters.

2. Then use Word or any online service to count the number of characters.

3. And just ask ChatGPT to fit the text you need into the required number of characters.

That’s what we did: all the material about soil microorganisms and their functions from the text above was fed to ChatGPT and asked to be put into 297 characters as a description of the product on the bottle. And so on with all the text lines that don’t fit, and there’s no human editor at hand.

Since this is essentially technical literature, we are not concerned about copywriters’ objections that this is a machine-made, soulless text that destroys literature and the organic development of language.

We draw up step-by-step instructions, polish the arrangement of elements along the grid, draw the outline of the cutting boundary and voila. The layout for printing is ready.

We print a color proof, twirl it in our hands, and look for flaws.

As you can see, the main thing is to just start. The logic of working with neural networks is not very different from working with a live designer:

1. You tell him your wishes.

2. It shows you an option.

3. Adjust your wishes.

4. See the result again.

5. ???

6. Profit!

Okay, what if you want something more meaningful?

In the world of plants, the idea of ​​the transition of energy in nature from a living form to the soil, then back and so on in a circle is clearly visible. This has its own Yin-Yang. Oops, here comes the key word, generate.

Okay, of course, the idea of ​​Yin-Yang was proposed by a neural network. It would have taken too much time to come up with this visual image on my own.

Sometimes, to search for global ideas and concepts, it is better to use older versions; they are more abstract, which allows you to see collective images without being distracted by details.

We write a prompt:

cycle of manure transforming into soil --v 4

Such luck, almost immediately there is material to work with. In the fourth version we see the image: it also looks stylish. We dig deeper, press V4, at the same time we also generate a couple of prompts with an explicit indication of Yin-Yang and look at the scattering of options full of philosophical images.

fractal Yin and yang cycle of manure transforming into soil --v 4

We have a white bottle and a minimalist design code, the option on the bottom right looks quite good, taking into account the contrast of the background, which will add emphasis and be visually memorable.

Generate variations and choose the one you like:

Conceptually okay, but the details need to be worked on with a clear indication of the transition of organic waste into a new life and mowing the lawn. And here we are presented with an incredibly useful feature of Midjourney – Variey (Region).

For this feature to work, double check that you have the following settings. To do this write:

/settings

We’ve set it up, now click Vary (Region) and in the window that opens, select the area that we want to edit and write below what we want to put there:

For example, pineapples with flamingos:

Because why not.

This happens when you break down already at the 30th generation of soil with an apple core, which looks fine, but it seems you can do it even better:

At some point, you begin to feel the serenity of existence and plunge into the image of a very picky customer.

Thank God, the neural network will endure everything. The same cannot be said about the leather bag between the mouse and Photoshop.

We do the same with the lower part of the symbol so that the transition from black soil to green plants is dynamically traced and looks neat.

Using the already proven scheme with ChatGPT, we generate a scattering of icons to demonstrate the characteristics of the biological product

We throw everything into the layout and prepare for printing

We do a color test, twirl it in our hands, look for flaws.

We print copies, take a couple of photos for marketplaces.

We make banners for the main page of the product card:

And you can put it on marketplaces

As you can see, the secret is simple – you just need to start 🙂

This is a good start for the first iteration of a new product launch to get a feel for the overall concept and then develop it further by listening to your customers.

Of course, I wanted to write in much more detail and more, but the article turned out to be huge already, so we will talk about the process of creating compositionally more complex graphics for a bottle of fertilizers for the garden, vegetables and fruits in the next article.

Also, based on the discussions in the comments, we will choose which topic to delve into in parallel: creating a brand ambassador for the company or developing a product quality control system with neural networks in the fourth dimension.

We'll tell you how to determine the growth phases of microorganism colonies using daily rings, when you literally have time in the palm of your hand 🙂

Thank you for your attention.