Get Lucky in the Year of the Rabbit.
Do you want to win in career, stack cash like a boss, or find true love? Ditch the resolutions and Get Lucky.
Seven Days.
That's how long we had—despite our client workload—to create Get Lucky. A progressive web app (PWA) using generative art and an NFT collection to celebrate the Year of the Rabbit.
As we approached the Lunar New Year, we thought, "what can we do to bring a little extra-coolness to people's lives in the Year of the Rabbit?"
Something fun, beautiful, and share-worthy. So, we challenged ourselves to come up with a fresh idea to create, develop, and launch a fun product to celebrate the Year of the Rabbit.
The Inspiration.
After a couple of short meetings and some sketchy sketched-out ideas, we arrived at our direction. Looking back at the previous year, we were blown away by the advancements in AI and technology. Not only that, everyone was talking about it.
Inspired by the buzz around web3, generative images, NFT, Midjourney, and chatGPT, we decided to make something that leveraged and represented the technologies to tell the story of the Year of the Rabbit.
Creating the artwork.
A different approach from the hand-drawn illustrations of our Funky Year of the Tiger project from the previous year, we experimented with Midjourney to create the art, trying out different prompts and visual styles to create multiple variations of each Zodiac Animal.
Although we leveraged AI to generate the images, that didn’t mean we weren’t focused on the design and craft of the artwork. We meticulously refined the images and designed many variations of backgrounds, visual effects, storytelling, and positive wishes for the new year.
The Midjourney prompt.
Our work in Midjourney started with a simple starter prompt, which we refined for each Zodiac Animal. We added some unexpected elements to our prompt to make the variations of the Zodiac Animals energetic and vibrant.
Want to try it yourself? Head on over to Midjourney and enter this prompt to see what you get.
Pretty cool, right?
Using Python to Create a Hundred-Thousand Generative Images.
Michael wrote up a little Python program to compile the image assets, visual effects, and other elements to process the generative art to create the collections and generate the JSON metadata for publishing the NFTs. The results were impressive and a bit overwhelming, with over 100,000 variations of images created. Yeah, we spent a little time filtering that down to the most badass 100 images for each Zodiac Animal.
We didn't have much time to launch the app, so we went with React, Gatsby.js, Python, and FastAPI as our tech stack for data modeling, media and SEO optimization, and the API endpoint.
That decision worked in our favor because the high-resolution generated images added up to over 3GB. With a little coding sorcery, the app loads pretty damn fast, and Google's Lighthouse metrics agree.
Results that matter.
We're pretty happy with how this project turned out. Seriously, look at it. Who wouldn't be proud of the effort?
- We had a lot of fun (and late nights) making this. The Get Lucky progressive web app and NFT collection are all about style and substance, which shows in the results.
- Leaning into cutting-edge technologies like generative art, web3, Python, React, Gatsby.js, and chatGPT, we created a product unlike anything people had seen before.
- We made the art and code open source. Have fun with it, make cool products, and give us a lot of props for the effort.
— But wait, there's more
