1. Who cares about blog images?
You would be surprised how little people actually care about images within blog posts, so much so we've noticed a range of solutions to it.
- Skip it altogether and just use a default image
- Skip on-page image, and generate an open graph card
- Or just get a stock photo of some-guy-pointing-at-graphs.jpg
So we thought we'd just skip the formalities and settle with our one love in life. Cats.
Okay, technically, two loves... Cats and cats in ridiculous outfits.
2. Sanity Hotspotting is pretty damn good
We used Sanity CMS Crop and Hotspot functionality for the cats. It means that you can crop images using this tool to concentrate on particular details or features... You've probably noticed the giant cat face at the top of the page.
Why this matters? Well before this point, images were served up statically, meaning that an image would have the same central focus wherever it was added. However, this particular functionality means there's far more flexibility than ever before:
- Want to zoom in on a cats face on the main page ✅ Checked!
- Want to highlight two cats together in a close up ✅ Sure!
- Want to show a cats fluffy paw twirling a cane ✅ Of course!
Here's an example of me highlighting the ridiculous cat standing on all fours in whichever screen size the image is distributed in.
3. Learning to let go
We liked the dumb "meme templates" we used for the old blog posts, but let's be real, nobody is going to want to actually trust an agency that's spending their time editing 2fast4u Sanic's rather than actually learning about the technology. So we came to a compromise:
- Ridiculous cats
- AI generation of images
- Utilising hot-spotting, exclusive to Sanity CMS
What's not to like? We can use it as an awesome example of what is achievable in a fraction of the time, using only the latest and greatest AI generation tools.
4. AI has come a long way
Did you say AI?
Artificial Intelligence has come a long way when it comes to image generation. In the not-distant past, the best we could do was a few stick figures and blobs of colour; now, AI can generate images that look almost indistinguishable from the real thing! With advancements in deep learning methods, AI can easily take a few sketches and turn them into photorealistic images. It's truly amazing to see how far AI has come in this area - only horrors await in the future.
Talking of how far AI has come... most of the above paragraph was written by one. Find out how we managed to integrate Chat GPT into Sanity CMS directly.
5. My uncanny valley is back
Despite trying to hide uncanny images in the deepest, darkest, depths of my mind... They're back, with the likes of Polar Express and "I feel fantastic" flooding to the forefront of If you haven't already heard, art is dead, the robots won. With that being said, there's something we can't put our finger on that really unsettles us with artificial intelligence-generated art. Maybe it's the ethics, maybe it's the fact that it's an amalgamation of thousands of compiled artworks, or perhaps it's just the fact that sometimes cats get rendered without eyes.
Go wild, generate a:
Cute cat Eldritch horror in the style of H. R. Geiger, medium is water colour
