Trendprints

Designs powered by cultural intelligence

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Inspiration

I wanted to help my wife kickstart her print-on-demand business. She often has a concept or theme in mind, but struggles to come up with specific design ideas. Finding out "what's popular" based on a certain concept is difficult and time consuming. She often spends hours scrolling through Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook to see what people liked. I wanted to build her something to inspire her ideas.

What it does

Trendprints is a tool that helps creators generate design ideas based on their taste and interests in a few seconds. With the help of Qloo, Trendprints is able to automatically create designs based on relevant concepts that are popular.

The user simply just have to type some ideas they had in mind and the tool will automatically figure out designs related to those ideas for them.

Under the hood, the process is split into multiple steps:

  1. After the user types in the inspiration, LLM extracts the entity type, filters, signals and output from their enquiry.
  2. Keywords from entities and tags are extracted from the output of Step 1 so that IDs can be retrieved using Qloo's Entity Search and Tag Search APIs using keywords.
  3. IDs for entity and tags are combined with the analysis output of Step 1. This replaces the keywords for entities and tags with IDs.
  4. The combined result from Step 3 is mapped to real parameters of Insights API
  5. Insights API is called using the parameters
  6. The insights from Qloo and the original user input are combined to create image generation prompts
  7. Images are generated from the prompts

How we built it

This app was built using the following core technologies:

Qloo API:

  • Provides insights on related data based on user "taste".

Gemini:

  • Analyses text and translate the information the something that Qloo API can understand.
  • Transforms outputs to generate prompts to create designs.
  • Generates images based on automatically generated prompts

Supabase:

  • Used to store generates images and data. (Side Note: Firebase can also be used to support this but they've recently removed storage options in the free-tier)

Firebase:

  • Provides a secure backend to integrate with Gemini and keep API keys safe.
  • App Check is used to protect against spam and API misuse. This ensures that I do not exceed their free quota.

Challenges we ran into

  • Qloo API was difficult to understand due to the quality of their documentation. It required a lot of trial and error to figure out what endpoints to use for the solution.
  • Due to the unpredictable nature of LLMs, you sometimes get parsing errors on some steps. This happens when the LLM produces an output that is not a JSON object.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Created a tool for my wife to create AI prints for her print-on-demand business selling posters.
  • Integrated with image generative AI for the first time.

What we learned

  • Using LLM can turn the most frustrating API into something usable as long as you can clearly define the parameters and terminologies.

What's next for Trendprints

  • Refine prompts so that the output is more consistent.
  • Work on being able to edit the images so that users do not have to upload to tools like Canva or Photoshop for further refinements.

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