I’ll start off with the hard sell.
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INTRODUCTION
The first time I came across FLORA was Weber’s demo at South Park Commons NYC, and I was blown away. But like all things you experience in tech these days, I left the building, was attacked by the onslaught that is X and the streets of downtown New York — and my mind smoothed over as I tried to remember how to get home.
But then the next morning, as I thought back to what stood out the night before, FLORA remained on my mind.
Last week FLORA formally announced their intelligent canvas. They were generous enough to give me early access, and some time to write about my experience. So let’s get into it.
CREATIVE AI AS SPRINGBOARD
Much digital ink has been spilt over the intersection of creativity and AI, and at Eternal we spent a good amount of time banging our heads against the wall of what felt right to us as creatives. At the highest level, we cared most about “human-in-loop” processes. How could we wield models to expand our ideas, and utilize their outputs as both a launchpad and editing tool → so we can spend our time actually refining what we wanted to give to users. FLORA captures this feeling well beyond what we stitched together for our products, and that’s what got me excited.
AT IT’S BEST, FLORA FEELS LIKE CREATIVELY ICE SKATING.
There’s a smoothness to the canvas that’s reminiscent to the first time I used Figma. But instead of wrestling pixels to the ground, it brings me the curiosity I get when I massage Midjourney to my liking. I put my concern over credits to the side, and simply keep at it.
There’s few tools that allow me to feel that sense of flow, where the tool becomes less of my priority, and my intent dominates my course of action. FLORA sits there, Obsidian sits there, and Midjourney sits there. That’s a very specific list.
So what was my course of action for this write up? Creating a fresh identity for Terminal NYC, my community project for builders in New York.
I started with the intent of the project that all of my tasks would then flow out of. I am admittedly not the best prompter, but this initial note was just for me. This is the project, this is the goal, and these are the values.
Then I put an image I sourced from Arena right next to it as a sort of spiritual guide for myself, that I would later generate video and text off of.
FLORA has 3 media categories right now, text/image/video, with a few potential ways to generate each. From simply imputing the exact media you want to exist in the block, to having different models generate the whole thing… even the prompt. The latter is a pretty sneaky way to simply keep momentum up and not overthink.
A lot of times I allowed FLORA to just let it rip, and even if I hated the outcome → it gave me a thing to edit. So often in creative work, momentum is the name of the game, and FLORA really shaped my sense of pace to keep pushing towards an end state rather than getting lost in decision paralysis of how I should prompt what’s going to be a throwaway block anyway.
The magic really starts, like all of life, with the connections.
Allowing a block to feed into the next and into the next, you start to model your thinking process onto the canvas in a way that’s very different than typical mood boarding.
From the initial image, I set it in motion utilizing a video block, and connected a new bock to bring it back to a text description of the scene.
I prompted the next block to detail what values of community were being depicted. Which I then connected ANOTHER BLOCK tasked to create an image that represented those values in a flattened icon.
Now, I hated that tree thing. But it sprung up an effect that allowed me to more clearly define what I was looking for. That’s when I started to go block image crazy. Simply generating image after image until I saw a couple things worth playing with.
Which as you could tell from the image above, started a whole new tree of connections.
Not to get too design boy, but the detailing here when animated (you’ll have to try it to see it) feels like literal synapses shooting off in a brain. It’s this attention to detail that makes all the motions you take in FLORA feel so intimate to YOUR process — it’s a funny dance that occurs, not mimicry of representation, but true honest to goodness metaphor that’s so rare in products today.
TEMPLATES AND THE OBVIOUS FLYWHEEL OCCURRING
I’m not sure who exactly made the initial flows that you could select from… but it already showed the flywheel that’ll soon be on its way within FLORA.
Here’s a story I’m already sure is playing out:
Folks come to FLORA to explore typography styles for their project, but they need something more powerful than just clicking down the font selector.
Do they have to go block by block, prompting and connecting to manipulate a single letter? Of course that shouldn’t be the case, and FLORA already understands that. Like communal architecture, they already support the buildings to explore common creative needs at the drop of a hat. And just from quick scrolling the community section of uploaded templates today, there are already 100s of flows to quick start from.
What’s also key to the templates is the guidance for creatives that might be new to AI. Importing templates onto my canvas, and combing through the blocks, I was able to see what type of prompts were having the output I was trying to approximate for myself.
In gaming there’s a term called FTUE → first time user experience. Some folks in the broader software world compress this into “onboarding”. But I really like FTUE as an idea because it has the presupposition of valuing the experience, not just getting folks onboarded as quickly as possible.
Templates are a really joyful FTUE moment in FLORA that I hope they lean into more. Both as a way to help folks move around the canvas, but also to understand how to get the most from your prompts.
PROCESS VS END RESULT
While I did get to images and ideas that I really liked, like the image above — I didn’t get to anything that I could definitively say was a final version of what I wanted to use.
But this is where we get to discuss, what the earliest readers of the newsletter know I focused on quite a bit, process vs residuals.
FLORA is a process tool. Like I said before, at it’s best it feels like creatively ice skating. And process tools are meant to be a springboard and sifter. Springboard-ing thoughts I didn’t know were laying dormant or around a corner from the idea I was working on. Excavating those ideas, manipulating and sifting through the winners and losers.
Did I get the final singular brand image for Terminal at the end of a couple hours really in the tool? No.
But do I have the exact thing I need to build and know where all the creative traps are set that I need to avoid? 100%
There’s massive value in that, and if this is already being achieved in the product today, and earning this amount of my time and attention. I’m deeply confident that their future updates will fill in the gaps that allow creatives to export end work when appropriate.
A CLOSING NOTE ON FLORA’S MANIFESTO
I am a bigger lover and critic of manifestos. Too often tech people sort of put these outs to signal they believe in something, and their write ups don’t mean much at all.
However… the first two lines of the FLORA MANIFESTO hit really hard.
Current AI creative tools are made by non-creatives for other non-creatives to feel creative.
We’re a team of creatives who founded FLORA to solve our own problem: the lack of creative control in AI.
This first line should feel like a brick to the head for a lot of folks in tech. There is a weird exploitative energy happening with folks that never cared about creative pursuits not directly tied to tech before this AI wave, and now it’s all anyone can talk about.
But 99 times out of 100, the tools they make reinforce the extractive nature they’re trying to achieve. “…non-creatives for other non-creatives to feel creative.”
Attacking this head on, and addressing it without any reservation or fear for whom it might offend is a slam dunk in my book.
I also love how FLORA describes what kind of company it is towards the end of the manifesto.
Founded out of an art & technology graduate program called NYU ITP, FLORA is an applied HCI company with a mission to make it possible to speak your ideas into existence, with a high degree of creative control.
“…an applied HCI company…”
A year or two ago, I wrote a small piece that some folks received where I called AI “our new keyboard”. I viewed it, at it’s purest, not as something to replace our thinking function → but to enhance the way we input and manipulate a computer.
I haven’t seen many folks talk about AI this way in the immediate sense. This maybe isn’t surprising to folks that know AI companies don’t speak about themselves in the best way in general. So to see FLORA describe themselves as an HCI company is deeply encouraging… and dare I say bullish.
I hope you all take some time to sit and play with the FLORA product. I signed up for a full year subscription.
I know it’s only going to get better.
I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.
Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.
Much love.
Live in the light