How To Write Effective Prompts for Midjourney (2024)

Imagine you own a small ecommerce company selling travel-sized electric guitars. Your new model works underwater and stays in tune in –40°F weather. You want to design a campaign to showcase these key features, but you don’t have the budget to stage a deep sea photo shoot, and stock imagery doesn’t suit your rock ’n’ roll aesthetic. You need a way to create custom imagery that reflects your product and adheres to your brand guidelines.

Generative AI might be the solution. Platforms like Midjourney AI are a low-cost way to produce images of all types. Learn how to use this tool to create stunning visuals for your brand’s needs.

What is Midjourney?

Midjourney is an AI tool with image generation and image analysis capabilities. Using machine learning and diffusion technology, the platform can interpret and describe uploaded photos or create custom digital art based on a user’s text prompts.

Midjourney operates within Discord, a social platform with instant messaging channels and voice calling. Creating a Discord account is free, but using Midjourney requires a paid subscription. Subscribers can generate images in public channels or private chats with the Midjourney bot.

Midjourney prompt structure

You can give Midjourney image prompts that are relatively short and simple or long and complex—the maximum input is about 60 words. But when it comes to Midjourney prompting, longer isn’t always better. A simple prompt can be effective if it addresses all the necessary elements. Follow this basic prompt structure to start creating amazing images with Midjourney:

• Command. Use the “/imagine” command at the beginning of your instructions to generate an image.

• Reference images. Including a link to a set of reference images after the command is optional, but it can guide the tone and art style of the output.

• Image description. Next, write a detailed description of the image you’d like to see, including information about the subject, setting, and any actions.

• Parameters. Provide any parameters at the end of your prompt—for example, cues for controlling image details like the aspect ratio, resolution, or art style.

Tips for writing Midjourney prompts

1. Be specific
2. Use visual language
3. Adjust your language
4. Consider the prompt weight
5. Experiment with art style cues

The best prompts are packed with detail. Try these tips to sharpen your prompt writing skills:

1. Be specific

Write a descriptive prompt to explain your creative vision. Try using detailed character design to depict the subject and describe their appearance and any key features. Include details about the environment and any background elements. If the image is set outdoors, for example, you could specify the time of day, quality of light, season, and surrounding plants or buildings. Consider adding descriptors like “moody,” “cheerful,” or “dramatic,” to guide the overall tone.

2. Use visual language

Referencing specific art styles, artists, or photography techniques can get your point across with just a few words. For example, instead of writing, “Generate a smiling cartoon purple dolphin jumping over a psychedelic sea with sparkles, bright colors, a school of friendly fish, and cute animals,” you could use a cultural reference by writing, “Generate a jumping dolphin and a school of fish in the style of a Lisa Frank illustration.” Even though the second prompt is much shorter, it provides more visual information.

3. Adjust your language

If the final image doesn’t match your expectations, try editing your description and resubmitting the prompt. Add adjectives to introduce different colors or textures, or try replacing keywords with synonyms. Practice making one small change at a time and observing how each new detail affects the generated image.

4. Consider prompt weight

Advanced prompts may provide information about prompt weight. Essentially, prompt weight communicates to Midjourney the relative importance of each element in the instructions. For example, if the prompt “a surreal landscape, floating islands, balloons” yields balloons that are too tiny, you could increase the prominence of the balloons by tweaking the prompt weight.

To use this technique, start by placing two colons between the components of your prompt. Using the above example, the resulting text would look like this: “a surreal landscape::floating islands::balloons::.” This instructs Midjourney to consider each element separately.

Next, add a number directly after the closing set of colons to adjust the weight. The higher the number, the more important the element. To increase the prominence of the balloons, you would write: “surreal landscape::2 floating islands::1 balloons::2.” Advanced prompts like these tell the model the balloons are twice as important as the floating islands.

The double colon separation technique, known as multi-prompting, can also help control how Midjourney interprets keywords. For example, the prompt “sandbox” would likely return images of a playground. However, if you apply the markup “sand:: box::,” the model will interpret the terms individually and generate a beach scene with various boxes. If you don’t specify a prompt weight, the model applies a default weight of 1.

5. Experiment with art style cues

Midjourney is programmed to respond to a set of specific aesthetic parameters, including creative, stylize, style, chaos, and weird. Creating prompts with one of these tags will adjust the model’s animation style. Include these parameters at the end of an image prompt, encoding each one as follows:

• Creative. To use the creative tag, add the text “– test –creative” after your description. This instructs the model to generate unconventional, imaginative outputs.

• Stylize. The “stylize” cue controls Midjourney’s default style, which is broadly artistic and cinematic. You write this one as “–stylize” or “–s” followed by a number between 0 and 1,000.

• Style. The style parameter replaces Midjourney’s default art style. Use the tag “–style raw” to switch between standard and raw mode.

• Chaos. Write the chaos parameter as “–chaos” or “–c” followed by a number between 1 and 100. Applying a high chaos value instructs the model to include more variation between images in the initial grid output.

• Weird. Write the weird cue as “–weird” or “–w” followed by a number between 0 and 3,000. Use this tag to explore quirky, unexpected interpretations of your prompt.

Midjourney prompts for ecommerce

Stunning images can make your digital content stand out. These prompt examples demonstrate how ecommerce businesses can use AI-generated images to support their marketing and communication efforts:

Ad campaigns

Midjourney can help your brand generate amazing images that would be difficult to produce with traditional methods. Instead of staging a photo shoot or using generic stock pictures, consider using AI to create beautiful imagery that reflects your brand identity. Here are two examples:

• /imagine a hyper-realistic portrait of a smiling young man standing in a field holding a vanilla soft-serve cone with sprinkles, warm sunshine, summer day, 1:1

• /imagine a mermaid with long curly brown hair swimming through a surreal underwater world, dramatic lighting, moody, surreal art

Social media and blog images

Try using AI art creation to add custom imagery to your blog posts and social media feeds. Add an aspect ratio parameter to size your image according to each platform’s specifications. Here are three examples:

• /imagine a futuristic cityscape, urban landscape, in the style of a pop art illustration, 16:9

• /imagine an art piece showcasing a massive lego cityscape, futuristic city, digital illustration, 9:16

• /image a team of superhero kids eating colorful cereal wearing capes and tiaras, background of cartoon shooting stars, superhero action scene, retro comic book scene

Mock-ups

Mock-ups can give your potential customers a sense of what using your product is like. Mock-ups and renderings are common in the fashion, architecture, and art industries. Here are two examples:

• /imagine a sleek modern office, white minimalist furniture, employees drinking coffee and working on computers, abstract art on the walls

• /image a mock-up of a gallery wall with a variety of art pieces in different sizes including watercolor sketches, Frank Frazetta’s paintings, landscape photography, oil paintings,dramatic lighting

Internal design assets

AI image generation can help build or enhance your internal art style guide. Try writing prompts to find design inspiration, create templates, or generate example images to populate your brand guidelines. Here are two examples:

• /imagine the design for a brand mood board for a modern tech company with geometric shapes and cohesive vibrant colors, bold, exciting

• /imagine a template for a clean, minimalist PowerPoint presentation, use colors 3be8b0 and 1aafd0