If one person in the decorated apparel industry has been leading the charge on innovation, it is Michelle Moxley Hruby. She always seems to be at the forefront of the next big thing.
But where did all of that start? On this episode of Success Stories, we’ll chat with Michelle about her roots and career journey and what she is excited about now.
So, go grab a fresh cup of coffee and sit back and enjoy the show!
If one person in the decorated apparel industry has been leading the charge on innovation, it is Michelle Moxley Hruby. She always seems to be at the forefront of the next big thing.
But where did all of that start? On this episode of Success Stories, we’ll chat with Michelle about her roots and career journey and what she is excited about now.
So, go grab a fresh cup of coffee and sit back and enjoy the show!
Marshall Atkinson
If one person in the decorated apparel industry has been leading the charge on innovation, it is Michelle Moxley-Hruby. Currently she is developing content in the AI space, and consulting with manufacturing partners in digital screen printing and hybrid technologies. Where did all of that start? On this episode of Success Stories, we'll chat with Michelle about her roots and career journey, and what she is excited about now. So grab a fresh cup of coffee and sit back and enjoy the show. So Michelle, welcome to the Success Stories podcast.
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
Hi, Marshall. Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
Marshall Atkinson
I'm excited. You're here. I mean, every time I talk to you, I learned something. And if you know anything about me, you know, I'm always learning stuff. So I can't wait to get in with you. Because I know today. I'm gonna learn something I didn't know five seconds ago.
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
Yeah, that's awesome.
Marshall Atkinson
So I think everybody recognizes you as somebody that's always on the cutting edge. Right. So I want to start the show today with your origin story. So how did you get into this crazy industry, that's always something I'm always fascinated in.
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
So I went to college for computer animation to in 3d animation and computer science and media arts. And during that time, I was screen printing as a job. Prior to that I had done some paper printing. So I worked in offset and wide format, paper printing. And then it transitioned from into digital during that time when I was about 1617 years old in that space. And I went through that transition, it was really interesting to watch, because there was a lot of people that suffered it. And then there was younger people coming up that really embraced it. And I feel like our industry is kind of going through some of those motions now. But when I was in college, I started screen printing as my job. And it was interesting, because at the end of four years of college, I had about two minutes of animation. And I thought, wow, to spend your career doing this. And at the end of it, I'm gonna have about 15 minutes to show for it. It was kind of overwhelming. I love animation. But I found myself drawn to screen printing when I was in school. And so it kind of became this hybrid of wanting to animate on T shirts. My animation in school was always considered really heavily special effects driven. And I was always considered to be the one to join a studio to do lighting and special effects and weird things. So it married really well into my screen printing, which came next.
Marshall Atkinson
So your idea is like I'm working at Pixar or for James Cameron or somebody, right. But yeah, it was actually
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
recommended to kind of go into the MTV route. That's how long it was. And it was really interesting some of the animation that MTV was doing them that was in fact something that I was completely in love with. And when I got out, I came to Portland, Oregon, where Leica was starting and with the intent of working there, but that's when I kind of fell in love with latitudes. And that was kind of my next step in the journey. My original screen printing experience was a small shop manual presses. And we had an embroidery machine and I actually learned digitizing and embroidery there and got really into that I the screen printing I did as well. Mostly I would come in on the weekends and do weird stuff that they couldn't sell. But I liked the art of
Marshall Atkinson
it. So that's great. And where did you go to school?
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
I went to school in Washington DC, the Art Institute in Washington DC,
Marshall Atkinson
like the Art Institute in Washington or like the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale or whatever? Yeah, yeah, great. Yeah, I almost went to the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. They gave me a scholarship for free, because I was an art major also. And Florida State University gave me an artist scholarship also, and they had a better football team. So that's where I went.
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
That wasn't much of an interest of mine.
Marshall Atkinson
It was a long, long, long time ago, I graduated 86. So that was forever ago. So it's interesting that you're still and I think, you know, I didn't really learn a whole lot in college, but the creativity of doing things I still use to this day, right? Yeah. And a lot of the stuff I did in college I'm still using today, because I was kind of an entrepreneur back then and I can't I did some things and I was very interested in teaching. I you know, at one point I was gonna be an art teacher. That's kind of how I saw myself, right? Wow has the kind of your thinking and the career path and whatever from where you started off, you feel that some of those things are still hanging around, deep back into your creative brain.
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
Yes, it's interesting because we're actually in the midst of a move and I have so many art supplies that I have to rent like a space for them while I figure out what I'm gonna do with them. And it's all across all these different mediums like I was a ceramicist. Before I was an animator and I was into all of these different things. One thing is that printing always gives you this kind of open door to anything, especially screen printing, where you can try anything, which is why I fell in love with it. When I got into my latitudes, we were doing flock and I was like, what is that? That's amazing.
Marshall Atkinson
It's a mess. That's what, yeah, it's a giant
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
mess. But to my mind, directly out of animation, it was like, Oh, wow, like this is a like a living, breathing kind of thing that I can get into. And what school gave me I think was, it was a lot of long hours to get through an animation degree. Like we all gained weight in school, we all worked around the clock, we all were, we came really tight knit to get through it. And I think what it gave you is like creative problem solving, because we had to build our own computers. And when I was in school for animation, like the hands weren't part of the model, yet, they were still in code. So we had to learn how to code to get the hands to move, because there's so many muscles inside the hand. And one of my teachers was doing stitch together quick time. videos where you could like log in and look around, and see all of that front and back kind of visual. And that didn't even exist yet. So for me, it was a really good integration into where we've arrived today. Because there's so much social media and video integration, and all of that tied back to what we print and what we sell. And I've always been able to push the envelope because I'm always kind of trying to bring all these worlds together. And that's what I really liked about school it was it was really just here, you guys figure it out, because we don't actually know but we're gonna give you the degree.
Marshall Atkinson
Okay, so listening to your story. You know, I think maybe one of the reasons why you're always pushing the envelope is because that's breathing for you. You've already been doing that constantly, your whole life, right?
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
Yes, absolutely. And even before I went to college, like it's the kind of artists art was always a space for me to relax and let things out and you know, feel more alive and what art brings as it heals us. So for me, it was like a given that that needed to be where I worked. But then also just finding out new things. If you're, if you're always learning, you don't really have a lot of time for anything to sit on you or weigh you down. One way that you can always get through something that makes you feel in a negative is just to learn something new. And I tell that to anybody that's suffering. I'm like, you know, one thing you can do right now is just go learn something new, even if it's really simple. And it's really like just learning something new will change the chemistry of your brain.
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, right. That's good advice. You know, when I, I know, when I paint, I lose track of time, and I look up and five hours have gone by and I forgot to eat, you know, you get so focused into things. You know,
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
I tell people that I work with that I don't want to learn how to turn off the equipment, because then I'll never go home like someone else has to be responsible for that.
Marshall Atkinson
That's great. That's great. So I want to kind of switch to you mentioned latitudes have ended ago and I know you did some amazing things there for Nike and some different things. Did a bunch of work for Jordan. Right. So let's get into that a little bit. Because I don't know if a lot of people know about that. Right? They just see where you are now. Not all that stuff. Right? So talk about developing stuff for Michael Jordan and how fun that was.
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
So I like I said, I went to Portland, Oregon, kind of in pursuit of like, it was kind of like an open ended thing. And I ended up having an interview at latitudes. And I met Jamie McRae there. And I, I remember they were flocking manually at the time because they hadn't even gotten into automatic application like a on an auto yet. They were just making sampling. And I was like, What is that like? It was really something I had never seen before. And so I did get a job there. And I was doing separation. I was learning indexing. And I remember the very first one that I did, I didn't understand, like, I mean, it was so advanced anything that I had done before, and I didn't understand like When I send out the order of the film, it should be matching to what they were at lining up on press. So what I sent out, like, had all the wrong colors, and it was backwards. And they showed it to me. And I was like, Oh, I get it now. And I went and fixed it all. And so you know, that was one cool thing is like every mistake that you were able to make Gru you up a little bit, and you could just keep going further and further and further. And it was like never ending. And during that process, I was working with Bryce Hyder, who was kind of a developer. And I was like, what is that? I don't, I didn't even know that was a job. And he had just started doing samples with Nike. So he started bringing me along. And then I realized, like, they like creative innovation they like when you show them something that never existed before. And I was like, I can do that. And so I just started playing on press all the time working all the time, I would switch my schedule sometimes would be during the day, sometimes it would be at night, my dog started coming with me and he was like a total screenprint dog. And it was great experience. I ended up working with latitudes and mainly the Jordan Brand for about 10 years. Jordan is a very innovative brand. When I joined the team, they were doing a lot of flock. So we did flock for a couple of years. I remember the first time that we had a production job we had it was blue flock. And we all look like Smurfs. Like we were covered in blue was a horrible, you're gonna help me take a shower. There's there's like, what coming out of your ears. And it was just a mess. It's like the
Marshall Atkinson
same with glitter. Right? Yeah. Yeah, it looks like Where's all this glitter?
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
Glitter. So first aspect when flog Yeah, that's true. So, but we learned and we built and we adapted and we built equipment to contain it and we got really good at it. And then we could have like a really clean environment and run production on every press with flock. Then we got into all over printing and all over printing with flock. That was an experience like going through that process and learning like how to control the mores that would come out from the different angles of the fabric and how to introduce, like dithering from the indexing that I had learned to kind of compensate for that. And then and pushing the envelope in that space was was really amazing. I think with Jordan, my experience of just being able to play and in all of the special effects that were available, gave them a fresh perspective and gave me just like a playground that I thrived in. And then went so we ended up doing like all of the Eastern Hemisphere t shirt work for Jordan for a few years. So it was a lot of heavy Jordan work. They're really big shirts. And they they had a sizing thing where like a small was actually a medium and a double x was actually a triple X. So all over printing all the way up to 5x, which is actually a 6x. So it was really exciting all the time. I was going through some of my T shirt stash the other day and and Casey, my husband was saying, Wow, that would have been such a fun brand to work with. And I'm like yeah, it was it was it was really cool. And every one and then going out to Nike. And every once in awhile hearing that Michael was there, I never got to meet him. But he did look at a lot of the shirts that we made and signed off on them. And so it was a it was
Marshall Atkinson
a great experience in when was that period.
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
So that would have been up to about well, I did end up working with them for about nine years. But I lived in Portland up until about 2008. Yeah. So then I kept working with them. So after that, I kept working with them remotely. And that was one of the cool things that I did learn is like innovation, in fact, because Laurie Thomas was the owner of latitudes. And she taught me this because she kind of let me go from there out into the world. And I kept working with them through innovation, but I was like located in other places. And she said that she really liked that because the exposure that I was getting was kind of like that playground got bigger, and I got to go out and see how other printers were doing things or experience other art forms or start exploring into that whole digital world and bring that back and kind of keep expanding and keep showing Nike new things and really help. Yeah, I think that's really important. And I think a lot of times people kind of get in their little bubble which is great. Like it's it's it's beautiful, but then you got to force yourself outside of it.
Marshall Atkinson
Right and there's a phrase I use all the time it's you have to be present to win, right so you have to go like to the game like you you can watch a game On TV, but it's a better experience. If you're at the game, it's a better experience. If you're at the lecture instead of watching the video, or you're a better experience, if you go to a shop that runs different equipment than you do. Right, it's to see what's their what is their price? And how do they do that? And, and I think one of the greatest things about this industry is not everybody, but a good chunk of the industry will share how they make the
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
cake. Yes, don't you think? Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's important because a lot of our industry in being cyclical, when it even when it comes around again, it's slightly, it's, it's a variation on on what we did in the past, it's not the same. So sharing means that if you didn't, if you weren't there, the first time you get to add to that layer. But if you if you don't share, you're going to struggle trying to learn and it's overwhelming, and it's too difficult. It's really important for us to constantly be sharing, because we're all kind of growing up together and the generations change. And so when they come in, we're doing the same things that we were doing in the past, with this added level of complexity that they know that maybe we don't or vice versa. Yeah, I really appreciate the sharing. I've always been a little bit too sharing maybe where I'm always like, yeah, come over. I'll show you how it all works. And I'm like, Oh, well, you know, but it only
Marshall Atkinson
that I signed. Yeah.
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
It's always worked well for me. So I kind of stick with that.
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah. So you left latitudes? And where do you go after that.
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
So after that, I was in Northern California. And I worked with a company called fifth sun. And now they're part of Mad engine. So I was doing, I was really interested in digital, and I wanted to get into digital, one of the things that always kind of held me back was wanting to have special effects. And knowing that like that was kind of giving that up. But I was interested because I wanted to know if I could like elevate that game a little bit. I my experience with digital at that time was mainly through coordinate. And then there were some other players, but like the quality was pretty bad. And the washability was pretty bad. But when I joined fifth son, it was to do manual separation for some of their licensed accounts. And they had just gotten angry birds at that time, which was kind of exciting to work on. And I was still doing development with Nike. But they got a corneal Atlas, pretty much the same day that I started. And with licensed characters, like they didn't really have a lot of experience doing the color management to be able to print on a digital press and have it matched to the character. So I developed the color management system for them against the corny in that first year, so that all of their licensing would match. And then at the same time, I got into augmented reality, T shirts. So it just kind of come up in France, there was a guy doing it, it was like a television. And you could point a device at it. And it would play a little movie on the TV. And then there was a magazine that had come out from MIT and in the whole magazine was augmented so you could put your device at it and all this stuff would happen. And MIT was spending a lot of time in the space. And that was really the very beginning. So this was about 2010 As far as it on textile, and then that magazine was the innovation that MIT had done. And then there was a couple of apps. I remember there was one it was like a basketball hoop and you could print out a piece of paper and point your phone at it and a little hoop would appear and you could throw the ball at the hoop and try to make points. So I created augmented reality T shirts for some other licensed characters like Domo it was the little games you would get at the grocery store that you would move the little tiles around, and it would make a picture. So I made those on T shirts. So you would point your device at your T shirt and it would trigger the game and you can move things around and then the t shirt would look like a picture. But then that was kind of interesting, but it was kind of not because it was really just a game on your phone. And then fifth son was doing a presentation to Lucas Films for Star Wars. So I did an augmented reality T shirt where Darth Vader's head would appear over top of your head. So the t shirt was printed on a digital press and it was a his outfit. So it was Darth Vader's robe. And then in the front was the Imperial code in a little black and white square, and then you point your device at it and his helmet would appear over your head. So you look like and we're wearing the full Darth Vader outfit. And they got Star Wars as a license. It's, and it was cool because Star Wars and angry birds made a game right after that because of that merge. But it was it was really fun because for me it was like, hey, special effects in digital, but I was doing it digitally instead of like with, you know, a practical application. Yeah. And then I took that back to Nike and and Jordan and showed them augmented reality where they had like player bodies, and then you would put the face over your face when you were wearing the t shirt. So that was a lot of fun. And then, yeah, so I only was there for about a year and a half, they ended up creating a program for the color management so that they could automate it, it was outside of a rip, and it would print color matching. And it was based in like Photoshop and swatch palettes where you would have colors assigned to characters, and then they would output with the right colors.
Marshall Atkinson
So did you get like your g7 certification or any of that stuff? Did you go down? Oh,
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
no, not at that time. Actually, what came up was high solid water race. And I got interested in that. And it was a bit of like, an add I've ever seen up with the dog and squirrel squirrel. That's me. Like, what's that?
Marshall Atkinson
I feel the same way. You know, I know. I know so much about process stuff. But I've got my like, what a yellow belt in Lean Six Sigma. But as far as I went, because I was always too busy doing other things,
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
right? Yeah. But I've worked with some of the experts in g7, like Mike rough and, um, and, uh, but ya know, I didn't get the certification. I got distracted, as
Marshall Atkinson
you know who to call, I think it's great. So, so how did you end up helping develop equipment, I think that's really kind of fascinating.
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
Well, so after that's done, I went and did high solid waterbase. With virus for few years. And that was a really interesting experience. Because with the background in the special effects for Jordan, that was so heavy. When we got into that I was like, you know, this is a lot like just printing special effects and every screen like it's, it takes more time. It takes more attention than what we had been previously doing with plastisols. And it so it was like a really easy transition for me. And it was a really easy fit. Plus, they have like, you know, 100 new special effects. And I was like, Oh, I knew playbooks. And so I started doing that. And then it was really where I started traveling the world and learning how other people print and other countries and on other equipment and was able to just kind of expand into all of these different areas that I hadn't really experienced before. And then through that I was introduced to new buffalo t-shirt factory and Gil Weiss. And that's an I joined Gil down and then i was running the factory in Honduras and doing a lot of doing the development there and all of the sampling and you know, pricing and everything. So that factory, we went into some different equipment. And I had we had two factories, one in New York and one in Honduras. So we were running both of those for a while. And then just Honduras, and I was going to Honduras. And that was about two years ago, I was back and forth to Honduras and working in that factory. And through that experience, I gained a lot of contacts all over the world. But I had basically we had different equipment in all of the factories that had worked in and then all of the factors that had gone to I had learned and trained against different equipment. So when I was in Honduras, rich came rich Hoffman came and a lot of the equipment was older, and he had come to like, help us revamp some of it and kind of make it better. And he ended up offering me a an office in Roselle at m&r to work for Gildan so that I could be US based, which is something that I really wanted to be. And also because I was interested in the digital squeegee. And so I got an office in Chicago and then was working with Gildan and still working on the factory and doing a lot of support for Gildan in terms of like print issues that customers would have on different fabrics and things like that because I had so much experience so it was a I'm easy for me to tell them what was wrong and how to correct it. And then the digital squeegee being there, I started to do development on the digital squeegee and kind of play around with that and, and that's what turned into Danny Suim offering me a job.
Marshall Atkinson
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Marshall Atkinson
Let's talk about your work and color management and the technical aspects of that because I think for a lot of people, their head down churning things out. Right? You don't I mean, there's just like, we got 20 orders to print today. And a lot of times they skip over the technical best practices of how to do stuff, how to manage color, how important is screen tension? Right? How important is vom? Right? And you're very versed in that. Right. So I think kind of having, of course, you know, out of that whole Honduras experience was your whole Moneyball series of talks about game, right? So we're looking at the reasons why we're having some challenges. So I kind of touch on that a little bit. So if the listeners listening right now, kind of maybe in your perspective, what is something that they could maybe immediately focus on, that's gonna give them a better result? Because of you know, how you've done things or what you see when you travel around?
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
So yeah, absolutely. Like one of the biggest things was incorporating data when I started going into Honduras, and whatever you can do in whatever aspect you can do to record things. Having procedures and following procedures is really the key to all of it. I find that a lot of shops are they have a way of doing things that somebody knows that maybe somebody else doesn't fully know. And it's not written down and recorded, and it's not in a procedure. And that causes things to fluctuate. And then those fluctuations get misidentified. It's, it's some, it's the ink, it's the, it's the dryer, it's the this or that. And what it really is, is the procedure is missing. So what I learned through those experiences was to record everything and create the simplest method for procedures to exist. So what's it easy to reference? Is it easy to perform? Is it easy for everybody to understand? Is it repeatable? Is it predictable? And can you check it? And and that's where really where the whole Moneyball idea came from. And we started doing that. And one of the biggest contributors to that was measuring waste. Anything that you threw away, having a record for it, and measuring where it came from, gave you this insight into how to adjust your procedures. Is it necessary? Is it excessive? Is it something you can reduce or reduce the cost of is it reusable? If you targeted what your waist was, you were able to kind of adjust your workflow from that point. And at one point, when that started, it was not accepted. Like it was really not anything anybody wanted to participate in. And this was high solid water base. So there was an excessive amount of waste. So we created a system for people to dispose of inks that weren't reusable, we created a place for inks that were able to be reused or rejuvenated. And we took away all the trash cans. So basically, the employee, the the team was forced to use these receptacles. And then we measured them and then we went back and we did training and we said, okay, the target is to have this one be lower than than this one. So the one that has more unusable, it should be lower than the one that has usable. And over time, we saw that shift and we just made those adjustments and they were really slight things it was just like taking the ink out before you go to lunch, or if you are going to flood the screen like making sure the pallets aren't underneath the To the screen so that the ink doesn't dry as much. But by doing the measuring the employees and the team was able to understand their own improvements. And then we did everything on incentive. So if they were able to achieve targets across certain periods of time, they received an incentive, they never failed, this incentives were really simple to achieve. But each time they up, we upped the game just a little bit. And they always felt that sense of accomplishment. And they were always able to achieve it, and they were able to meet the targets.
Marshall Atkinson
That's great. It and I learned a term last week that I'm gonna lay on you, and you're going to be using it the rest of your career, you're ready. Yeah. It's being data informed.
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
Yes, that is right. And we're
Marshall Atkinson
informed about the data. Those are two words I think I'm gonna be using for the rest of my life. And I know you're a data nerd like me, right? And there are data informed, that allows us to make better decisions is really about understanding our data and how we're using it cuz that can achieve stuff. And
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
yes, and it's true in any of the disciplines. I mean, you can do that in digital as well, like, how much waste do you have coming out of the machine? How much waste do you have when you're interacting with the machine? How much downtime? Is it? Is it is it scheduled downtime is an unscheduled, all of those things will let you kind of drive your production workflow so that you're doing it in the least, the path of least resistance is what I call it, and that's gonna give you the most profitability. But if you don't have visibility on that, and you're just accepting what happens, a lot of times you have excessive cost kind of bleeding out, and you don't know where it's coming from. So yeah, being data informed. That's perfect.
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, great. Awesome. All right. So let's wrap it up. And I want to talk about the future. So we're, you know, you're developing a lot of new ideas, and new things, right. So, and this is where the totality of your experience, I think, is really paying off. And if you think of your career, my career, anybody's career is everything we've done, every mistake we've made, every success we've had, is a stepping stone for the next thing, right? So give us a glimpse of the future. And Michelle, what are you? What are you excited about? What are you working on? That? A year or two from now? We're gonna go Dang it, how come I didn't think of that?
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
Oh, so right now, it's, it's interesting, because like, the AI space is really exploding and there is so much to digest in that space. And it's, it's, it's interesting, because I wonder how much of it will actually hang on and how much of it it will drop off. But kind of anything that I interact with on a daily basis, and kind of in the art world, or, or data or anything that I'm interested in, I start looking for AI tools to see what I can utilize and what is out there and what's being developed or what I might think should be developed. Recently, I worked on some AI marketing videos, where it was the Mona Lisa, and she's speaking, and she's explaining the history of screen printing around the time that she was painted. And it was mainly in Asia. So she's showing examples of her portrait that would reflect those time periods and how it was made. And it's her. The portrait itself is doing the talking through the AI facial mapping. And then that I didn't do the actual voiceovers. But there are VoiceOver so you write the script, and I use chat GPT to help write the script. And then I tailored it to be in an Ernest Hemingway style, because I want it to be short and kind of direct. And then she has this voice and you can check that out through the kitchen. And then I started doing stereo graphs a few days ago. So if you remember magic I you can develop the mask through I was developing the masks through mid journey. So the shapes and I've been playing with because it does really well with simple shapes. But I've been playing with trying to create more complex shapes. And then you create the stereograph. So you get this 3d image to come out but it's all AI generated. And then I'm trying to put them inside of like silhouette so that you could print them on a t shirt and see if you get the magic guy so it could be kind of a rien revitalization of something like magic guy. So I'm trying to take the AI platform and push it is as much as I am able to in these different spaces and then kind of share with the industry. This is where we're at right now. On, how can you make money with it. And it's really interesting because you have a new newsletter coming up, and we can put all of that kind of exploratory process in that newsletter. What's coming next for AI for our industry is really where I'm targeting my energy. Right now, I'm doing a lot of hybrid consulting and work with different people in the industry on digital and screen printing. But incorporating that whole AI aspect is really where I'm driven right now, because it's such an interesting space. And it's like a whole new playground. I'm,
Marshall Atkinson
I am so fascinated. It's like crack, I can't stop. Okay, and what's what's really not that I've ever done crack, but you know, like, but it's like this amazing thing. And what's really frustrating is that I'm an artist, and I know what I want, and I put the prompts in, and you never get what you want, right? And so every time I that fails, right? The Rolling Stones come to mind, it's like you something, you know, you're not you don't get what you want. But sometimes you get what you need, right? So these things that happen on accident, and that's the Holy Jesus moment where you're like, oh, that's way cooler than I would have thought of right? And how are we taking that? And using it in print? Or, you know, what are we doing, and every time I do something, I'm thinking about how I would print it, you know, with, you know, I'm going to put some puff under that, or I'm going to add some high density, you're going to be really cool, is to do a clear gel over that part. You know, that's what I'm thinking about? Yeah, of course, it doesn't do type yet. And like, it's like, coming, it's certainly coming, it's gonna just blow people away. We're at as the day we're recording this, we're on version five. So if you're listening to this three years from now, maybe they're on version eight, right? And we've totally been replaced. And that's what everybody's here is. And let me tell you, I went to this amazing event last week, it was a content creators conference. And, of course, this podcast has come out once after that. But we're sitting around with a bunch of people to create content. And this one person was really frustrated with AI. And they said that they were scared about being replaced. And I think a lot of designers and artists and stuff, fear that this AI stuff, whether you're a writer, you're an artist, you're a graphic designer is going to replace you. And this other person, put their beer down on the table, I looked at this person squarely in the eye and said, If it scares you, then it's meant for you. Right. And I thought that was just genius. And I've written about that recently. But it's like one of these things where as a graphic designer, as an expert director, the reason why I can't stop playing with this, is because I want to mold it and shape it and figure out a workflow that makes sense. Because I know there's there is a bag of money at the end of that.
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
Right. That's what we're all trying to figure out. And, and I've heard like the same kinds of things being said, and, and it is really kind of it can be scary, I guess, if you think and you kind of let it unfold in that way. But that makes me want to be in the space that makes me want to know what's going on and understand what's happening. What I've heard is, it's not going to replace you, but someone that uses it in my and it's just knowing what is happening and constantly being kind of on the top of it. And knowing that there's so much of it out there. It's not like it's not going away anytime soon. But just keeping keeping up to date on it learning as much joining things like your newsletter, getting industry relevant information about it. And just being aware and trying to play around with it. One of the things that I've been focusing on is kind of experimenting with a lot of the different API's in the aspects where they're free, so that I can get an idea of like, what they do and whether or not they're worth it, and then kind of I catalogue them and I keep an eye on them to see how they change before I start putting money into them. Mid journey has been a really, really good one as far as the quality of art that it creates. But there's also things like blue Willow that does a good job, maybe not as good, but it's a free one. So you learn to how to use both of them and you can kind of save yourself some money, but you need to get to a point where you're making money with them and you're right and that's the other reason why I kind of keep an eye on the legality of them and what's happening with the lawsuits and things because you don't want to get into trouble at some point either.
Marshall Atkinson
Like I'm standing in line for Adobe Firefly right now. Let me into their sandbox yet. Yeah. Are you in that yet?
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
Oh, not yet. No. Okay, so
Marshall Atkinson
we're both in the same. We're both sitting here waiting patiently or impatiently waiting to get in and cuz we want to play around because the fact that we can use artificial intelligence to make vector art to do stuff. And you know, as with Adobe, there's all the fonts, there's all the stuff, there's all these tools that we always we've been using these tools for our whole careers. Absolutely, totally get them out to get in, come on Adobe help us.
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
Well, and that's kind of the thing is like, I tried to sign up for not as many as I can, but as many recommended ones, but I'm on a lot of Facebook groups, I'm following a lot of social media groups where they're talking about it. One of the interesting things I just learned, because I'm doing some work, some volunteer work with the with death and the dying. And the mid journey is actually helping people, it creates a kind of a dopamine effect, like you said, it's like crack. It helps people with the grieving process and in therapy and through things they might be suffering with. Because you are kind of in control of a creation, right? So you're making something new, and it's responding to your inputs, and it creates for a short lived period, it's kind of an art therapy, I find that incredibly interesting how you can incorporate AI into just helping people. There's a lot of positives that could come out of it, too. It's not just scary, like, it depends on how you look at it. I don't know what the long game is, I don't even think the creators know what the long game is. And that's kind of the scary part.
Marshall Atkinson
Nobody knows, nobody knows. And I think you need to, to me, you need to play with it, you need to goof around with it, you need to make your share of mistakes, because that's where the learning comes in. Especially anything that's texture, prompt base. And of course, you can use artists AI to do your prompts for you. What I found is that I get more traction for me taking like two or three things, and then I change the prompts at the end to see what the result is. And then I just make 300 of the same thing with different in prompts.
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
Yeah, that
Marshall Atkinson
is it feeding my learning more than anything that I can just copy and paste because I'm not getting I'm not learning that. Like if this was a math class, I'm not learning the math formula when I copy and paste. Yeah,
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
so what I've been doing is training the chat about my journey. So I teach it all of the changes and all the things that I go out and learn from the different YouTubers. And I have a track, I have two different chats, I have one trained for five, which will be 5.1. Now and I have one chain trained for three, I think. And then when I want to do something like the stereo gram, I go into that chat, and I train it about stereo gram masking. And then I use the so I'll pop back and forth. So I used like the describe and mid journey to understand what it saw. And then I taught that to the chat. And it's getting me closer and closer to a target for creating a mask for stereo Graham. So I'm just utilizing each one as as needed, and kind of picking the brain of the AI, if you could call it that.
Marshall Atkinson
Sure. I don't think there's any one right way of using I was I was reading this article from this artist. And he was getting a lot of flack because he was like, Oh, you're an artist you using using the journey? And he was like, yes, it's the most exciting. It's like giving me a new paintbrush were you talking about and so what he was saying is he creates something and then he prints it right? He gets the file, right? And then he does something to it. And then he uploads it as the image. And then he does something to it. And then he blends three things together. And then he downloads it again. And he does something to it. And that's the iteration of that is creating the final result. It isn't he's just sitting there clicking a button being lazy.
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
No, yeah, yeah. And it's so exciting when you do it in that way, like you can. I mean, it kind of generates all these new ideas like I was looking at it and thinking, you know, it'd be really cool to make mosaics out of some, because you could have it create a mosaic and then print it out and then make one physically, there's so many ways it's a multi dimensional paintbrush, like, what you want to use it for is entirely up to you. If you want to take images and have it generate descriptions so that you could use them in a story like it, it's doing all of this and I think chat is gonna start to be able to see soon, which will be really interesting to add a dimension of its understanding and perception to that. If you look at it, like another paintbrush that you've never had before it should open an artist. Really
Marshall Atkinson
that's how I see it. I think that's how I think that's the reason why I'm so excited about it. Right and and I can't stop playing with it. And
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
I mean really excited because I'm going to start doing. They have some ais that are doing 3d models. So I want to start 3d printing with AI generated models. So I should be writing about that soon, too. So that's something I started playing with just last night, but most
Marshall Atkinson
of your stuff that you're writing, you're creating for kitchen, right? Yeah,
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
the AI. There's biweekly AI articles coming out on in kitchen. And then I just learned about your newsletter today. So I hope to be a contributor there. And those
Marshall Atkinson
just getting started. So by the time this podcast comes out, it's already gonna be launched so you can sign up. So it's all about creating community and learning and
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
Alright, well, hey, thank you can help us in our industry and what we can do with it together? Yeah.
Marshall Atkinson
So thank you so much for sharing your story today. Michelle, what's the best way to contact you as someone wants to learn more about what you do? Or maybe how you can help them?
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
I think the best way is on Instagram, and it's @notoriousrand. And that is the best way.
Marshall Atkinson
Well, thanks, Michelle. You're a rock star. I always love talking with you. It's always fun. So appreciate you.
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
Thanks, Marshall. This is a good time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai