I keep craft notes tight and grounded in lived practice.
I illustrate each newsletter cover with AI in minutes. That cadence would have been impossible before: light art direction, one or two iterations, ship. The point isn’t novelty; it’s sustained publishing with consistent tone and evolving visual language.
OpenAI’s 4o image generation changed my baseline expectations. Image‑to‑image coherence and style transfer feel markedly better than diffusion alone. It expands what a small team can do quickly—composited scenes, hybrid styles, believable variations—while watermarking pushes provenance forward.
For visuals, repeat a good prompt a few times. Variation across generations is often more useful than micro‑tweaks within one.
Before a series, I define the style in words—tone, color, composition, intention. Shared language keeps collaborators and tools aligned.
I uploaded my own newsletter intros to NotebookLM and generated a short podcast. Hearing my voice modeled from my corpus surfaced recurring themes and gaps. Remixing your archive is a fast way to audit tone and evolve style.