I led the art direction and content strategy for the imagery used in Shopify’s theme generation system, where images played a critical role in establishing first-impression quality.

Because the system needed to deliver cohesive, launch-ready storefronts at scale, traditional photography was not a viable option. We needed a way to generate large volumes of imagery quickly while maintaining stylistic coherence across themes and avoiding generic or repetitive results.

I defined three visual style buckets that aligned with the broader theme system, and developed a set of custom visual references and prompts for each. Using Midjourney, I generated the majority of the imagery, iterating on prompts and references to ensure consistency, tone, and suitability for commercial use.

Rather than treating image generation as an open-ended creative exercise, I approached it as a system. Each style bucket had clear visual boundaries, allowing images to feel expressive while remaining interchangeable and predictable within a theme. This made it possible to pair generated imagery with pre-designed layouts, typography, and color systems without introducing visual noise or mismatch.

The resulting image libraries were art-directed to read as intentional and authored, supporting the overall quality bar of the theme system. By integrating image generation directly into the design framework, we were able to scale visual richness without relying on bespoke photography, while preserving coherence across onboarding and migration flows.