Joel has been a 2D/3D digital artist for over 30 years and started two companies to use these skills.At 19, he started BudgetBanners.com, an internet banner ad design service, which featured an fully-automated, interactive ordering system that let customers to upload their own logos, change fonts and size of text and choose from tons of unique backgrounds he personally designed. Once the order was complete, he was emailed the order details automatically and it only took ~5 minutes to complete an order, thanks to his templates and a clean workflow. The only reason the company failed was a lack of capitol for advertising. He closed the business when he was hired as a Level Designer for 3DO in 1999.More recently, he stopped working as a contract designer to sell his own branded clothing, shoes, skateboards, etc. All of his products were personally designed on Shopify. He still has shops on Redbubble and Threadless, but only for fun. And now, it is pretty clear that digital art won't be a viable career for much longer. Joel has learned to the use all the interesting AI tools during 2023-24 (running locally, not MidJourney) and can use WebUI or ComfyUI to create beautiful images. However, he found that the easier these images became to make, the less he enjoyed making them. After using Stable Diffusion nearly daily, he is thoroughly sick of AI art and how it has hurt his industry and he is tired of watching it fill the net with worthless content. It was time to find something more interesting to do with his creativity.That's why he's since pivoted to creative consulting; in order to draw more deeply on the one skill he truly excels at: creative product design and innovation. Find out more on his personal site at https://www.m0le.me