R&D Product

Midjourney Stacks

Date

2023

Client/Agency

Fake-Up

Role

Creative Direction, Concept, Design & Development

Product Walkthrough - 1:18

Stacks was a self-initiated concept I built in 2023 out of a simple frustration: at the time, every AI image generation tool was entirely text based. Midjourney, like everything else, required you to write prompts and memorize parameter strings to get any real control over your output. I thought there was a better way, something more visual, more intuitive, more like how creative people actually think. So I designed it.

Stacks is a web app that replaces text prompting with a layer-based system. Users build a stack of visual controls, things like text prompt, color, blend, style, chaos, zoom, image weight, and more, and stack and reorder them to shape the output. Changing the order of layers changes the image, in near real time. A rollback slider lets you scrub back through previous iterations of the stack to see how each layer contributed. The whole thing was designed to feel like a creative tool, not a command line.

I concepted, designed, and prototyped the full experience in Figma and ProtoPie, building a high fidelity interactive prototype you could actually tap through and feel, not just look at.

Layers

Why It Mattered

This was well before node-based creation tools entered the space. The idea of giving users visual, layered control over AI generation was genuinely new at the time, and the thinking behind it was grounded in how designers and creative directors actually work, not how engineers build APIs.
I posted it to my social channels and it became my most shared and engaged post to date. Several companies reached out directly off the back of it, and it led to real project work.

UI Designs

The Outcome

Stacks never became a product, it was a concept and a proof of thinking. But it demonstrated something that the industry caught up to not long after: that the future of AI creative tools isn't a text box, it's a visual system that gives people real control over what they're making.

Jeff Levine

Fake-Up

Creative Director, Designer & Artist