Chris Raroque

And I have a whole video on my channel documenting how I build these things.

But right now, what I'm using primarily is ChatGPT.

I've noticed for some reason it's very good at making these kind of illustrations.

And I think with the newest models, with I think ChatGPT 5, once it started with that, it got really good at following instructions for mascots.

But my pro tip...

if you want to make mascots.

Here, for example, is this AI meeting assistant app that I was working on.

It had this mascot that people just absolutely loved named Lily the Ghost.

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.