ERIC FILKINS

DREAMSCREEN STYLES

An image is worth a thousands words, but can be generated with only a few.

YouTube’s DreamScreen feature allows users to generate any image they can imagine. However, a blinking cursor is just another blank canvas – crafting a perfect prompt that provides consistent, high quality results is difficult, time consuming, and hard to materialize.

Using nascent generative capabilities, our team created selectable presets that generate consistent, aesthetically pleasing outputs every time.

company—YouTube
launch—November 2024
role—Creative/art direction
UX lead—Nick Matarese
engineering—Priyanka Hubli, Sarah Rosston

creative partner—Anyways
creative direction—Dom Taylor
senior creative producer—Louis Tagliaferro, Thyme Mor
art direction—Jeanne Harignordoquy, Saffron Lee, Noni Braithwaite
illustration—Christina Antoinette Neofotistou, Irmak Semiz, Cécile Despretz, Isago Fukuda

Models that create high quality images, require high quality training data. To create the necessary datasets, we partnered with creative agency Anyways who leveraged their deep network of global creative specialists and led the day-to-day execution.

We commissioned four datasets (Oil pastel, Modern polygon, Anime, and Pixel art) with over 70 bespoke illustrations that spanned a diverse range of people, places, and things.

Our styles have a high visual bar while still being able to generate diverse, text-aligned outputs. The fine tuned styles generate unique outputs that adhere to both style definitions and user prompts, all while generating at low latency.

“a dinosaur riding a bike in san francisco”

Base model

Oil pastel

Modern polygon

Anime

Pixel art

“a sloth playing video games and beating all the high scores”

Base model

Oil pastel

Anime

Modern polygon

Pixel art

behind the scenes
(Cécile Despretz – Sketch style)