AI images for your brand, from first prompt to finished set

You need images for your landing page, a few social posts and a mockup of your product, but no budget for a designer and no appetite for stock-photo plastic. That's exactly what the current AI image models have gotten good enough for. I'm not going to show you "type a prompt and marvel" here, but the way to a set of matching images that look like your brand and not like chance. Ten steps, and at the end you have a repeatable workflow.

Important up front: AI images are a tool, not a replacement for taste. The models hand you material in seconds; the selection and the consistency you have to steer. That's the actual work, and that's exactly what we go through here.

Step 1, Choosing a tool without spreading yourself thin

You don't need five subscriptions. Pick one. You can get started for free with Nano Banana 2 (that's Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash Image), right in the Gemini app, no credit card. That's enough for the first weeks and for anything quick. If you want more detail and better text rendering in the image, Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image) is the next step; as of June 2026 the model is the strongest all-round model. Anyone looking for their own, very stylized look does well with Midjourney v7, which has the most distinct artistic character of its own. Flux 2 Pro is the choice when you need photorealistic scenes with a lot of control.

My advice for the start: Nano Banana 2 to practice, because it's free, and once you know what you need, add a paid tool. Not the other way around.

Step 2, Nailing down your brand in three sentences

Before you generate anything, write down three things. First the mood in five adjectives, for example "calm, bright, technical, warm, reduced". Second two or three brand colors as hex code, so something like #1a1a2e and #f5f5f5. Third a list of no-gos, what must never appear, for example no stock-photo smiles, no crystal balls, no neon gradients.

These three lines are your anchor. You paste them into every prompt. Without it you produce a hundred pretty images that have nothing to do with each other, and your site shows it immediately.

Step 3, The prompt scaffold

A good image prompt has four parts in a fixed order. Subject, style, composition, technical specs. Example: "A tidy desk with laptop and coffee cup photographed from above, soft daylight from the left, in the style of bright minimalist product photography, color palette warm white and deep navy blue, plenty of free space top right for text, 3:2 landscape."

The last half-sentence with the free space is worth gold if you want to use the image later as a banner with a headline. Tell the model directly where space should remain.

Step 4, Consistency across several images

This is the step that separates beginners from pros. Never generate every image completely fresh; instead keep the style part of your prompt word-for-word identical and only change the subject. If in image one you wrote "soft daylight, warm white and navy blue, minimalist product photography", copy this block exactly into image two and three. Most tools also let you upload a reference image and say "do it in the style of this one". Use that as soon as you have an image that lands.

With Nano Banana and ChatGPT you can also stay in the dialogue and say "same scene, same colors, but now from the side". That keeps the look more stable than a fresh prompt.

Step 5, Logo and icons, with caution

An honest heads-up: for a real logo, image models are only conditionally suited. They don't produce clean vectors for you, and trademark law is a topic of its own. What does work is finding ideas. Have twenty directions shown to you, pick the best and then give it to a human or a vector tool to clean up. For simple app icons or favicons the AI is often already enough; there you just make sure it's still recognizable at 32 pixels. So generate it thinking small from the start, one symbol, not a busy picture.

Step 6, Product mockups that look real

If you sell a digital product, you need mockups. AI does that well. Describe the device and the context, not the screen content. So "a laptop on a wooden table in a bright café, screen slightly angled, room for a screenshot" and then you insert your real screenshot in post-processing. Never let the AI invent your UI, that gets blurry and wrong. The surroundings yes, the content itself never.

Step 7, Thinking in social formats from the start

You often need the same subject in three aspect ratios. Square for Instagram, portrait 9:16 for stories, landscape 16:9 for LinkedIn and the website. Don't generate three times; instead produce a generous landscape and crop it. Or use the outpainting function, where the model extends an existing image at the edges, so you turn a square into a portrait without a new generation dice-roll. Plan the free space from step 3 so that it's preserved in all formats.

Step 8, Post-processing with words

The current models, above all Nano Banana, can edit images in dialogue. Instead of starting over you say "remove the cup on the left", "make the background two steps brighter" or "swap the blue for a warmer gray". That saves an enormous amount of time and keeps the consistency. For final details like inserting the logo, exact cropping or text overlay you then take a normal image tool. The AI brings you to 90 percent, the last 10 you do yourself.

Step 9, Labelling and watermarks

This is often forgotten and isn't a nice-to-have. Google's models mark every image with SynthID, an invisible watermark that flags the AI origin. That stays in, even when you crop. More important for you: from August 2, 2026 the transparency obligations from Article 50 of the EU AI Act take effect; for existing systems there's a transition period until December 2, 2026. In short, whoever publicly shows AI-generated or heavily altered content may under certain circumstances have to make it recognizable. What that concretely means for you is in the playbook on the EU AI Act, linked below. Get used now to treating AI images as such and, when in doubt, labelling them, then you won't have to retrofit anything later.

Step 10, Build yourself a library

The last step makes the difference between chaos and system. Set up a folder with your best prompts, each with the result image next to it. When an image lands, save the exact prompt. Next time you don't start from zero but vary a proven template. After two weeks you have five to ten scaffolds that reliably hit your look, and new images then cost you three minutes instead of half an hour. Exactly this principle, collecting good prompts like tools, is described in detail by the playbook on the prompt library.

What comes next

If you want to collect your prompts systematically, continue to Building a prompt library. For the legal side, meaning when you have to label AI content, read Spotting and labelling AI content and for the full overview EU AI Act and GDPR for the DACH region. And if you want to know in general where AI really saves time in everyday life, start with the lesson AI in everyday life.

Sources

• Google DeepMind, Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image): https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-image/pro
• Gemini image generation overview: https://gemini.google/overview/image-generation
• EU AI Act, transparency rules Article 50: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/transparency-rules-article-50