Company Phone Numbers as MidJourney Style References - Part 1: Disney

Midjourney is an artificial intelligence (AI) image generator that has the ability to render a consistent style by using saved style reference tags. The tags can be any string of numbers, which makes trying out random style references a fun creative surprise. By taking a public phone number and turning it into a reference number, we can see just how much fate aligns with the phone number and creative visuals.

The Creative Approach

The system for this experiment is simple, take a phone number and use it as a style reference.

The results are expected to be a surprise, and Im hoping that through this series I can uncover a few things, a) a specific set of style references that will become part of my go-to for image generation, and b) how connected things are in the universe and if the alignment of a specific brand's phone number as a pre-defined style actually aligns with their ethos, mission, or brand positioning.

If you're not sure what a Midjourney style reference tag is, you can learn how to leverage this yourself in discord at the end of this post.

Experiment 1: Disney

Step 1: Find the Phone Number

As any respected internet user does, I turned to Google to help me find a good phone number to use for Disney. I chose the number " 4079347639 " which is a direct line to customer service for buying a new ticket to Disney World.

Step 2: Apply the --sref to a basic prompt related to the brand

Next I used that number as my style reference to see what the style actually looks like. To my surprise it was a vibrant and friendly style!

The first prompt I used was basic: "Mickey Mouse --sref 4079347639"

Mickey Mouse on a blue background with pillowy clouds, cute and happy, smiling, painted in the style of vintage children's book illustration with modern feature characteristics

Step 3: Create a miniseries of generated images

After I tested the initial image with the most basic prompt to see the style, I was excited to see a larger series around these visuals. I decided to focus solely on rendering Disney Princesses with this style reference in Midjourney and it was a great experiment to see how the style can be consistent and you can save so much time describing what you want if it's lumped into a reference tag.

The prompts tested were:

Snow White --sref 4079347639
Elsa --sref 4079347639
Princess Jasmine --sref 4079347639
Mulan --sref 4079347639
Disney Merida --sref 4079347639

Snow White on a blue background with pillowy clouds, cute and happy, smiling, painted in the style of vintage children's book illustration with modern feature characteristics

Elsa on a blue background with specs of snow, cute and happy, smiling, painted in the style of vintage children's book illustration with modern feature characteristics

Princess Jasmine sits in a window with Middle Eastern architectural shapes, cute and happy, smiling, painted in the style of vintage children's book illustration with modern feature characteristics

Mulan on a blue background with pink brush strokes, cute and happy, smiling, painted in the style of vintage children's book illustration with modern feature characteristics

Merida standing in the woods holding a bow and arrow, cute and happy, smiling, painted in the style of vintage children's book illustration with modern feature characteristics

Step 4: Observation & Results Analysis

The easiest part, is just looking at what our experiment yielded. What I found was a very playful and soft illustrative style. While this isn't something I would say screams to be in the Disney style by any means, we still do get an "animated" or "cartoon" rendering of figures, which made this style reference feel like a fun re-imagination of Disney characters.

I appreciated the hand-drawn feel, and the texture throughout the images. My favorite part was how much pink came through in specific areas of the princess renderings, even without (for the most part) implying a princess or feminine color palette.

Share Your AI Images with Sour Power

Does this style reference have you wanting to explore some of your own prompts and re-imagine them in a new style? If you do end up creating images with this style reference, share them on twitter or instagram and tag @sourpowww3r!

Pro Tip: Use Midjourney to Write Your ALT Text

If you know me, you know that digital accessibility is a TOP priority for everything that I do. Which means writing ALT text or Captions for images is at the top of my to-do list when I'm creating informational content. For this post, I generated my images using my style reference and then input that image back into discord to get a description to provide in my caption. This was an easy way to see key adjectives to piece together what I thought was the best example of how to describe what was generated to a user who may not be able to see or render the image.

What's a Midjourney Style Reference Tag?

Midjourney will let you use a reference image or style to generate new artwork. To utilize this feature in discord, you would use the parameter --sref and then add the appropriate reference after that. You can leverage the --sref in two different ways, through an image URL or a pre-saved style that outputs a numeric sequence.

For example, you can use --sref https://assets-global.website-files.com/621844a7b905bdfca04e3d78/66017f7b960f138d1b1d570e_womaninred_sourpower_ai.png to use a specific image as reference.

Alternatively, you can use --sref 1111 to use a pre-saved style as reference.

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//credit: inspired by @aliejules on X