Midjourney helping to build interactive infographics with Looker Studio
Few months ago, I was wondering how Midjourney could ease the creation of dynamic infographics or illustrate dashboards with very few graphic skills, just basic knowledge of how using Photoshop.
I started recently an experiment using Midjourney for the 1st time to generate visuals for interactive data viz. So, I chose – from Andy Kriebel’s Make over Monday – a data set that makes sense for this test:
Dating and the most popular drinks by gender
After reviewing the data, I asked Midjourney de create 7 pictures of the drinks I need to depict, in a conventional way, what we’ve got in mind when we think about them.
I also forced some colors for the cups for consistency & differentiation of dimension value colors: The cup of coffee must be blue and the cup of tea must be purple.
Then, I prompted to get a realistic photo of daters with the top one drink by gender in their hands. Basically the obvious conclusions of the data.
Impressive realistic result. BUT hard to get what I want: I didn’t succeed to generate a glass of red wine in the hand of the woman.
So I put in the loop the beta version of Photoshop with generative fill to replace the glass. I selected the wrong glass and prompt Photoshop to “replace this glass with a red wine glass”. Boom! Combo! Generating with Midjourney & lazy rework with generative fill from Photoshop beta.
Then, I switched on Looker Studio to integrate the visuals in the interactive Looker Studio report, taking care of all the graphical aspects, and adding a conditional display regarding the selected gender to give even more sense to the photo (putting a blur effect on what is not selected).
I’ve taken advantage of the following components inside Looker Studio:
- A bar chart
- The drink pictures
- 2 boolean parameters for genders filtering
- A chart filter to exclude unselected gender
- A calculated field to display the right daters picture in a 1-cell table chart
It was very funny to go through this process of creation. Not perfect but insightful about how it is fast to use Midjourney for data visualization purposes. Because of this experience, I could confirm that Midjourney, or any picture generating software can be a secondary tool for data viz, for some specific contexts.
Now, it is your turn to play with this shared report!
