Creativity Squared: Marie J. Schillgalies Likes a Bold Idea
After almost five years at Jung von Matt and a short stopover at ACNE, Marie J. Schillgalies – creative director art – recently moved over to Scholz & Friends. Working with client partner Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, she leads the team with creating international campaigns. In addition, Marie is a mentor in Scholz & Friends' internal female leadership program ‘Work-of-Women’ and is also wholeheartedly committed to young talent at portfolio checks or recruiting events.
She shares her thoughts with LBB.
Person
As a creative person, I need a good mood as a base first, that's the best start to bring a certain lightness into it.
I always love to explore and see new things to get a lot of inspiration. Then when it comes to ideas, I have many – and I would always prefer the bolder ones. It is probably this characteristic of exploring that sparks my interest in the topic of AI in creation: a new world to discover, and a great chance to get on track to see where it is going. I was curious about it, and I have to say that it’s not a no-brainer. Have you tried it out yet?
Product
As a visual type, the first thing I see is the layout, so I get a first impression of the design. Of course, this is immediately followed by the concept, which should make sense. In terms of content, I prefer simplicity, e.g., Brazilian ads: reduced, but clever.
To judge a layout created by Midjourney, it is always interesting to see what prompt is behind it. Sure, you are looking for great artwork and for that, you can describe in great detail what you would like to see, including foreground and background, camera settings, lighting, proportions, etc. But sometimes a very good result comes only by chance – and here it will be interesting to see which version of Midjourney was used.
Process
Every time I have tried Midjourney, I have noticed more and more that the content of the images is generated in a similar way: as a mirror of our society. The AI – and this is very important to say – is not as intelligent as we expect it to be: keep that in mind. It’s actually Google – with Photoshop capabilities.
The output will always be influenced by the input, depending on markets, language, and history. And your results will only be as specific as your words are – which involves a lot of stereotyping and possibly racism, if prompts are too superficial.
And speaking of languages, yes, you don’t have to write in English, you can prompt in every language you know. But when I look at the results here, it underlines the stereotypes even more, which makes perfect sense to me, because surely every market has its own data, based on its history. You can take advantage of that if you want to see something special or if there is no translation for the words you are searching for.
Press
As a balance to my job, I do sports almost every day. I play handball, so I train and play four times a week anyway. On the other days, I go running, and less often to the gym. And when I get the chance to go to the mountains in winter, you can find me snowboarding.
When I feel more like peace and quiet, I disappear into nature. I'm a hunter and live out of the city to be closer to nature. Four hours without any reception in the high seat in the forest - wonderful.
And if it should be a treat, I do very well with food…
