AI-assisted Poster Art

A poster for the 2024 eclipse. The background image is modified from something I made with Google’s AI-powered image generation tool.  A note on the AI aspect of this: for the last few months I've used a set of similar prompts as a sort of homemade benchmark for the tools from Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI.  This is one of the resulting images that I especially liked.

Family History Graphic

I put this together for my extended family.  We grew up hearing about how Grandpa Don built airplanes during the war, and this shows exactly where it happened and some of what it looked like.  It started when I tried looking up "Weeks Ave." after I came across the photo of the house; it turns out that the street no longer exists.  So instead I found a map of San Diego from just before the war (the map is from 1940), and the rest came together from there.  

Postscript: Consolidated merged with Vultee in 1943 and became Convair, which was bough by General Dynamics in the 1950s, which was bought in turn by McDonnell Douglas in the early 1990s.  McDonnell Douglas closed all manufacturing operations in San Diego by the mid-1990s, and Lindbergh Field is now the San Diego International Airport.  All the old buildings are long gone, but you can still see artifacts from the 1940s on display at the San Diego Air & Space Museum in Balboa Park, including a fully restored PBY.