Chris Raroque

What's cool about having mascots and using AI, you can make almost infinite generations and iterations on the same mascot.

Here I took Lily the Ghost and I made a variation where

She has a magnifying glass and she's searching.

You can see how in your app, even in empty states, this is a state where typically there's nothing going on.

Probably for most developers, they would probably just put a looking glass icon or something and it would just say, type something to search or no results found.

This is a great place to put custom illustrations to really give your app a lot more personality.

So that's what I did here.

And I just generated this in GPT-5.

But my pro tip for anyone who's doing this is actually to bring on or hire an actual artist to generate the first version or some sort of concept and then use that and feed it into ChatGPT or whatever you're using to generate as a reference and say, hey, can you kind of riff off of this style?

And that's actually what I did to generate Lily the ghost.

I didn't just directly say, can you make a ghost mascot with a flower on her head?

Not, I didn't do that.

Instead, what I did was I fed in this, this was a hand drawn illustration that my fiance did of our dog Luna.

And I told it, okay, can you use this as a reference and now make me a ghost based off of this?

It didn't actually follow the illustration style that closely, but I did notice that there were some elements that kind of was retained.

Like,

Some of the shadow is very similar.

That's a little trick that I've learned.

If you pay someone for some original art, there's a high chance that the iterations that you get will just be a lot more unique.

Everyone is doing this right now.