my side hustle is making websites. It gives me a practical excuse to use AI and I've used it increasingly - for example, I no longer as clients for copy. But it was one of the first surfaces to experiment with AI so its now mature enough to build an entire site (I'm trying SeedProd for my latest) and for graphics I'm increasingly using AI features in Canva. They were early out of the gate and it was rough going initially but now ... whoa
yesterday I had a bunch of product/store images that I needed resized and prettied up. I started with my bestie ChatGPT just to make some complimentary backgrounds. I got frustrated so I took it over to Canva and it has a 'magic background' feature that creates the background based on what it thinks the object is, giving you 4 options to choose from. You can also nudge it with prompts to add or change. heres's a draft link of a future post showing this with a bunch of my old gadgets.
The other thing I've been playing around with is ChatGPT 3rd party app integration via @Canva that they announced at DevDay. It's still pretty clunky. You brainstorm in the chat and then invoke the app and in theory it creates a design. The handoff is not clean and that's when I first started paying more attention to Canva AI. Canva nailed the design i was after versus ChatGPT
Pretty solid Canva endorsement. I don't do much hands-on design work beyond asking AI for featured images here and there, but Canva definitely shows up as the frontrunner in almost any context.
Super fun. Thanks Daniel.
It's a blast from the past. My first-ever post on this newsletter.
your first line is also me. I have things in my head that I could never draw, until ...
There you go - and now most ideas are trivial to at least prototype, either in image, video, or 3d form. Crazy times!
my first post; looking back at that image makes me laugh
https://newsletter.wirepine.com/p/first
my side hustle is making websites. It gives me a practical excuse to use AI and I've used it increasingly - for example, I no longer as clients for copy. But it was one of the first surfaces to experiment with AI so its now mature enough to build an entire site (I'm trying SeedProd for my latest) and for graphics I'm increasingly using AI features in Canva. They were early out of the gate and it was rough going initially but now ... whoa
Ah, the nostalgia of the first-ever post!
I actually haven't toyed much with Canva and its AI features, if I'm honest. What are your most used Canva features then?
yesterday I had a bunch of product/store images that I needed resized and prettied up. I started with my bestie ChatGPT just to make some complimentary backgrounds. I got frustrated so I took it over to Canva and it has a 'magic background' feature that creates the background based on what it thinks the object is, giving you 4 options to choose from. You can also nudge it with prompts to add or change. heres's a draft link of a future post showing this with a bunch of my old gadgets.
https://newsletter.wirepine.com/p/1a3293b9-5ffd-4542-bd9a-b6ecad1e4cb3?postPreview=paid&updated=2025-10-30T16%3A48%3A17.073Z&audience=everyone&free_preview=false&freemail=true
The other thing I've been playing around with is ChatGPT 3rd party app integration via @Canva that they announced at DevDay. It's still pretty clunky. You brainstorm in the chat and then invoke the app and in theory it creates a design. The handoff is not clean and that's when I first started paying more attention to Canva AI. Canva nailed the design i was after versus ChatGPT
Pretty solid Canva endorsement. I don't do much hands-on design work beyond asking AI for featured images here and there, but Canva definitely shows up as the frontrunner in almost any context.