3.7 – The Prompt Settings Bar Part 2 Image Aesthetics Lesson

Lesson Overview

MidJourney’s prompt settings bar puts several controls right at your fingertips, allowing you to fine-tune how your images are created. This lesson covers the Aesthetics section, which gives you creative control over the artistic direction, randomness, and diversity of your AI images. Stylization, Weird (sometimes called weirdness), and Variety (also known as Chaos) are the main features that let you decide exactly how imaginative or consistent your image results will be.

If you want AI to interpret your prompt almost exactly, low stylization and zero weirdness are your tools. Looking for something more abstract, artistic, or surprising? Increase those settings, and you’ll see just how far the visuals can stray from your original idea. The Variety setting especially helps when brainstorming, creating four distinct options instead of similar ones. Real-world uses range from designing playful game art to preparing unusual marketing imagery or simply exploring creative ideas.

These skills are useful for anyone who wants to control the creative process—whether you’re aiming for precision or pursuing something new. The lesson also covers how to save time by using parameter shortcuts and adjusting image generation speed.

Who This Is For

Curious if this lesson matches your needs? It’s especially helpful for:

• Designers and illustrators wanting more control over AI-generated art style
• Marketers and content creators seeking multiple image options for campaigns
• Educators creating creative prompts and exploring visual diversity
• Product and game developers experimenting with visual concepts
• Anyone interested in seeing and understanding how image generation settings affect outcomes
• Users looking for faster or more flexible image workflows

Where This Fits in a Workflow

These MidJourney Aesthetics controls are most useful right after you’ve crafted a basic prompt and chosen your image format or model type. For example, once you know you want an “8-bit video game character,” you can then decide how closely the output should match your vision, how surprising or abstract you’d like it to be, and whether you want similar or wildly different versions in a single set.

Creative professionals might use stylization and weirdness to explore unexpected concepts during brainstorming. Product teams could iterate quickly on several distinct image directions using the variety setting. By customizing these options, you get to experiment widely without rewriting or rethinking your core prompt each time, making image generation both faster and more creative.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Using these Aesthetics settings replaces a lot of guesswork and repetition that used to come with trial-and-error image prompting. The older, manual approach required rewording prompts or running dozens of generations to try for the right mix of realism, creativity, and variety. Instead, stylization gives you direct control over the level of artistic interpretation, while weirdness and variety let you quickly explore new, offbeat, or widely different results—all from one interface.

For instance, designers who previously needed to generate idea boards by hand can now use high variety settings to get a broad range of design directions in moments. Marketers and educators save time and effort brainstorming or testing different looks, with immediate visual feedback. The shortcut parameters and speed controls also make workflows faster and more repeatable, increasing output quality while giving you more refined results from your creative process.

Practice Exercise

Try these features on your next AI image project to see how much creative control you now have:

1. Start a new image prompt in MidJourney’s web app. Type something simple, such as: “robot reading a book in a café.”
2. Adjust the stylization value to 0, 100, and 1000 separately. Observe how each setting changes the art style of your results.
3. Next, set the weirdness value to 1500 and then to 3000 on the same prompt. Notice the shift in unpredictability and abstraction.
4. Finally, experiment with the variety parameter at 0 and 100 to compare how similar or different your grid images appear.

Reflection: Which setting or combination produced the most interesting or useful image for your intended goal? How would you tune these controls for a real-world project?

Course Context Recap

This lesson continues your journey into mastering prompt controls in MidJourney, building on previous discussions about image size, aspect ratio, and model selection. Here, you learn how to shape the style, randomness, and range of your outputs to better match your creative intent. Up next, you’ll refine these skills by diving deeper into prompt techniques or exploring advanced settings. Keep progressing through the course to unlock the full potential of generative AI for your projects.