Telegram Mini App AI-Generated Visual Identity Tap-to-Earn
Everyone uses AI to generate moodboards. We used it to ship an entire product. Every visual element in Roketo — from navigation icons to character illustrations to background textures to UI decorations — came from Midjourney. Not as a concepting layer, not as inspiration. As the actual production pipeline for a shipped product with 250,000 users in month one and roughly $5,000 in marketing spend.
The constraint was specific: we needed a visual identity built entirely on illustration, we can't illustrate (I'm genuinely terrible at it), the timeline ruled out hiring someone, and stock was out because it would chain every creative decision to someone else's asset library. Two weeks to build the first version. I'd been running hundreds of Midjourney generations a week at that point, learning the tool's quirks, its stubbornness, where it surprises you and where it completely falls apart. Generated a few astronaut characters on a hunch — little goofy cosmonauts — and they came out with exactly the kind of naive charm the product needed, something between children's book illustration and indie game art. The client said yes immediately.
No style browser, no fine-tuned style weights, no sref controls in early 2024. The tool was powerful enough to generate beautiful individual images and too dumb to maintain any consistency between them, which is the single most important requirement for a product's visual identity. My solution was brute force — a set of five or six reference images attached to every single generation, like showing up to work every morning with the same stack of printouts to re-explain the project to a brilliant artist who has amnesia. Over a thousand generations across the project. The pickaxe alone — one cartoon pickaxe for a tap-to-mine mechanic — took hundreds of attempts over several hours. A junior illustrator would sketch it in fifteen minutes. But when everything comes from the same imperfect source, the imperfections themselves become the style. The tool's limitations became the product's visual signature.
Helping founders👨🏻💼think through design 🦸🏼♂️.
And build fast.
Available for strategy, audit, and product design.
14+ years in branding, UX/UI, and digital products.
Building with clarity, working with care.