Unlock Your Creativity: How Microsoft Digital Uses AI to Generate Stunning Visuals
Are you looking to create eye-catching visuals quickly and easily? At Microsoft Digital, Microsoft’s internal IT organization, they’ve discovered how AI can help. Sarah Lundy and Eva Etchells, Senior Content Program Managers on the Microsoft Digital IT Communications team, are leading the charge. Their mission: to equip and inspire Microsoft’s vast workforce of 336,000 employees and vendors to embrace and effectively use new technologies.
“As a comms team, we don’t typically have a graphic designer at our disposal,” says Lundy. “Before AI, we were cobbling together visuals using brand assets, stock imagery, and templates, doing the best we could.” Then came Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and Microsoft Designer.
Copilot Chat is the company’s AI-powered tool designed to integrate with your work data and applications. It helps users manage tasks, find information, and create content by drawing on data from emails, files, meetings, and more. Accessible through the Microsoft 365 app, Teams, Outlook, and the web, Copilot Chat offers a conversational interface for data interaction. Microsoft Designer, another AI-driven tool, is used for graphic design, enabling users to create, design, and edit images based on written descriptions.
Lundy and Etchells and their team have been leveraging both Copilot Chat and Designer for AI-driven image creation. “Copilot Chat and Designer have been absolutely game-changers for us,” Etchells shares. “They’ve given us the tools we need to create compelling visuals for our communications. The images look great, they’re consistent, and we can quickly create assets that support the stories we’re trying to tell.”
Making the Most of AI Image Creation
Want to learn how to create your own amazing visuals using AI? Here’s how the Microsoft Digital IT Communications team does it.
Learn as you Go
The team started by creating images using the conversational engine within Copilot Chat. As Designer matured after its release in 2022, the team began to favor its more expansive and detailed image creation capabilities.
“Designer provided a combination of flexibility and inspiration that changed the way we approached AI image creation,” Lundy explains. The team found that Designer’s ability to generate various assets that retained a cohesive look and feel was especially helpful, particularly for campaign work. The ability to create many assets in different formats helped their campaigns.
By providing detailed prompts, they could describe the desired style, colors, and subjects, ensuring images were aligned with their brand. Example images, along with their generating prompts, proved popular, as did Designer’s editing tools and ease of use.
Use Examples for Inspiration
Microsoft Designer offers example images complete with the prompts used to generate them. To get started, users can select an image they like and then customize the prompt to generate a similar custom image. “Starting with a blank canvas is one of the most difficult things for me,” Etchells admits. “I love the way Designer provides multiple ways to get started with an image.”
You can draw inspiration from the example content in any of Designer’s image categories. Hovering over an example image will reveal the prompt used to create it. Studying these example prompts can open up innovative ways to describe colors, shapes, framing, and art styles for your own visuals.
“I can take bits and pieces from the prompt and create my own,” Etchells explains. “That’s where it started to get really powerful, because it was difficult to start with nothing. Seeing the prompts used to create other images I liked unlocked a new level of effectiveness. Seeing how the prompt was written and then being able to change it to suit our needs was a game-changer for me.”
Designer’s extensive library of image types, including clip art, emojis, icons, monograms, avatars, stickers, and wallpapers, offers a multitude of approaches for crafting visuals in various use cases.
Reuse Prompts for Themed Results
“Reusing the elements of a prompt to create another image with a similar theme or look is a great way to create consistency,” Lundy advises. “We take a prompt that we’ve had success with and adjust the subject to get a bunch of assets that look like they’re part of the same design family.”
Prompts can be reused to create consistent themes with Copilot Chat or Designer. For a recent Copilot Agent campaign, the team utilized a secret agent theme. The prompt below was used to create the left image:
In the style of a chunky block print vintage spy movie poster that is a bit kitschy, a silhouette of a friendly, likeable basset hound as a secret agent in a fedora and trench coat looking out from one side of the image. There is a city skyline in the background. Pastel theme blues, purples, pink colors, with rich layers.
Here’s another, based on the same theme, but with some changes, producing the image on the right:
In the style of a simple chunky block print vintage spy movie poster that is a bit kitschy, a silhouette of a striped, friendly cat holding an envelope as a secret agent in a fedora and trench coat looking out from one side of the image. There is a city skyline in the background. Pastel theme blues, purples, pink colors, with rich layers.
The result: two images tailored for the same campaign, sharing a common theme.
Lean into Your Strengths
Sarah Lundy (left) and Eva Etchells are part of the internal IT Communications team at Microsoft that’s using AI to generate images for their internal marketing campaigns.
To get the most out of Copilot Chat and Designer, start with what you know best. “AI does some aspects of image creation so well, but it does have limitations,” Lundy reminds us.
The prompt-based image creation process allows for highly detailed descriptions. The team discovered that the details they include, and how they prompt the AI, are crucial. They found that treating AI as a graphic designer is more effective than viewing it as just a graphic design tool.
“We try to explain the image like you would to a person,” Etchells says. “Providing a descriptive, informative, and thematic prompt can produce amazing and creative results. However, trying to be too precise and telling the AI exactly how you want the image created in terms of shapes, positioning, and measured dimensions is typically less effective.”
Here’s a list of tips to help you leverage the strengths of AI image creation and avoid its weaknesses:
- Use AI to generate ideas, concepts, and inspiration for your final work. AI results offer creativity and new approaches to visuals.
- Use AI to create specific scenes or images that are easy to describe. Use descriptions of style and subject matter.
- You can get specific about the elements you want in the image, but you can’t dictate how Designer brings them together.
- Use other tools, like PowerPoint, to add and manipulate text. AI isn’t great at complex text in images. It will often misspell words!
Hone Your Prompting Skills
Like all your interactions with AI and Copilot, success comes down to how you formulate your requests. “The skill to develop in all this is prompting,” says Etchells. “It’s all about knowing what to tell the AI and how to phrase your prompt to get the results you’re looking for.”
Prompting skills are essential when working with AI tools to create images because they serve as the foundation for generating high-quality and relevant visuals. With a detailed and well-thought-out prompt, the AI can better understand your vision and produce images that closely match your expectations.
“You really start to learn how to guide the AI in terms of style, color, and composition,” Lundy summarizes. “By specifying these details, you can ensure that the generated images align with your brand and requirements. For example, if you need an image with a specific color palette or a particular artistic style, including these details in your prompt will help the AI create something that fits your needs.”
Hone your prompting skills for image creation with these tips:
- Clearly describe the style, colors, and subjects you want in your image. The more descriptive your prompt, the better the AI will understand and generate the desired result.
- Be patient and refine your prompt through multiple iterations to achieve the desired result.
- Focus on what you want in the image. Negative prompts or telling AI what you don’t want can sometimes lead to unwanted elements being included.
- Maintain a list of images and styles you like, including the prompts that you used to generate them. This can serve as inspiration or thematic basis for future prompts.
“Be brilliant today”
The IT Communications team recently launched the “Be brilliant today” campaign to encourage daily use of Microsoft 365 Copilot internally at Microsoft. “Our research shows that saving 11 minutes a day is the sweet spot where you start to see Copilot becoming a habit, a part of your daily workflow,” Etchells explains. The team created a blog post and developed a series of promotions featuring images like the one below.
The IT Communications created this image in support of an internal campaign letting employees know that they could save at 11 minutes per day using Copilot. The team added animation elements (not shown here) using Microsoft PowerPoint.
Here’s the prompt used for that scene:
Create an image using dimensional felt craft, side flat view, of a mountain lake scene at sunrise a chair and table with an open laptop and a cup of steaming coffee on it, surrounded by evergreen trees, ferns, mushrooms, rocks, and a canoe on the shore, with fluffy clouds, a rainbow-colored hot air balloon, and birds in the sky. Create the image in a children’s book style, light pastel theme, blues, purples, pink colors, with rich layers, high detail, 8k, high quality.
And for the “11” icon image:
Create an image using dimensional felt craft, side flat view, of a tablet with the number 11 and evergreen trees, ferns, mushrooms. Create the image in a children’s book style, pastel blues, pastel purples, pastel oranges, and pinks, with rich layers, high detail, 8k, high quality.
The team then animated the image in Microsoft PowerPoint. These were the steps for that:
- Create all the visual elements in Copilot using a consistent prompt for style, colors, etc.
- Insert them into PowerPoint: Remove backgrounds and add drop shadows in PowerPoint
- Add text in PowerPoint
- Add animations in PowerPoint
- Save the slides as a GIF.
Here are some final tips to get you started with creating images in Copilot Chat and Designer at your company:
- Use examples for inspiration. A library of existing images can provide fresh ideas and templates.
- Reuse prompts for themed results. Consistency in prompts keeps the style and theme consistent.
- Lean into the strengths of AI image generation. Use the advanced capabilities of AI to create complex and detailed visuals that might otherwise be difficult to achieve manually.
- Hone your prompting skills. Continuously refine your ability to craft precise and effective prompts to enhance the quality and accuracy of generated images.
- Get started with Microsoft Designer at your company.
Learn more about Microsoft Designer.
Go here to get answers on commonly asked questions about Microsoft Designer.
Check out our Top 10 tips for using Microsoft 365 Copilot every day.
Find out how we’re getting more out of Microsoft 365 Copilot with purposeful prompts.
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