Monthly Archives: November 2025

Intrigued by Gemini 3 Image Generation — and Learning My Own Visual Voice

Posted on by
Reply

(An rbotyee writeup)

For most of my life, I’ve been a person of words, code, and structured reasoning. My visual thinking has always been more about simple diagrams, outlines, and flowcharts than about illustrative or aesthetic expression. I admire visual clarity in others, and Laura often tells me I have good visual taste, but I’ve never developed a confident visual voice of my own.

That’s why this morning experimenting with Gemini 3 Pro Image — better known by its community nickname “Nano Banana Pro” — has been so unexpectedly exciting. For the first time, I feel like I might be able to partner with an AI system to explore visual communication in a new way. Not to replace my analytical strengths, but to augment them.

Why This Matters to Me Right Now

Twice recently, in two different gatherings, I found myself in long conversations with friends who are deeply skeptical of AI. Some of their concerns are valid — ones I share — but much of their thinking is based on outdated examples, surface-level assumptions, or lack of deep experience. What they needed most was validation first, not argumentation.

What I wished I could offer them was:

  • Something gentle,
  • Something thoughtful,
  • Something that validated their concerns,
  • And something that invited curiosity rather than defensiveness.

So I began experimenting with creating a one-page handout — the kind of thing I might give to someone after a conversation, not as a rebuttal but as a small invitation to explore. That test case became the focal point for exploring Gemini’s image generation.

Discovering the Possibilities of Gemini 3 Pro Image (Nano Banana Pro)

What surprised me is how much the model can do when treated not like a prompt-slot machine but like a collaborative illustrator that reasons before drawing. It can:

  • Produce high-fidelity, text-forward infographics
  • Follow structured logical layouts
  • Render crisp typography with unusual accuracy
  • Blend gentle provocations and validation
  • Support multiple iterations without losing coherence

And unlike older image models, it responds well to:

  • Semantic layout instructions
  • Clean, text-first design
  • Negative constraints about style
  • Explicit direction about whitespace
  • Aesthetic scaffolding (“Swiss style,” “warm minimalist,” “ink line work”)

This has opened something for me: a way to bridge my conceptual and verbal strengths with a visual medium that I can steer — not perfectly yet, but more than I ever could before.

The Role of ChatGPT as My “Image Wrangler”

As I worked with Gemini, I realized I needed someone — or some thing — to help me translate:

  • My intentions
  • My style uncertainties
  • My pedagogical goals
  • My audience sensitivities
  • My complicated relationship with AI skepticism

…into prompts and design structures that Nano Banana Pro can actually use.

That’s where ChatGPT comes in. I’ve begun to treat ChatGPT as:

  • A translator between my verbal world and Gemini’s visual world
  • A coach helping me articulate my emerging aesthetic
  • A wrangler that can turn my conceptual goals into structured prompts
  • A critical partner that helps me keep the tone humane, validating, and curious

This first handout — aimed at my AI-skeptical friends — became the perfect sandbox. And honestly, it has been more fun and more meaningful than I expected.

Early Insights About My Emerging Visual Style

After several rounds of iteration, I’m beginning to see hints of what resonates with me visually:

  • Clean white backgrounds for print
  • Soft accent colors, not full palettes
  • Minimal representational imagery (fewer cutesy characters)
  • Gentle but intellectually provocative text
  • Tables, flowcharts, and conceptual comparisons
  • Hand-drawn or ink-line accents in moderation
  • A style that feels human, thoughtful, and non-corporate

But this is early. My taste will evolve. I want to try a whole range of visual idioms — the “warm minimalist” direction is promising, but hardly the end of the journey.

Looking Ahead:

Exploring My Visual Voice, and Synthesizing It with AI

The broader project is bigger than a single handout.

I’m building:

  • A course: Human Flourishing & Critical Thinking with AI: To Bot or Not to Bot
  • A book
  • Workshops
  • And possibly a community for thoughtful skeptics and the simply curious

To support this work, I want:

  • Gemini 3 Pro Image to be my visual collaborator
  • ChatGPT to be my prompt designer, guide, wrangler, and reflective partner
  • A growing library of experiments so I understand the model’s strengths and quirks
  • A clearer sense of my own visual voice

This is one of the first creative explorations where I feel both the rigor and the play happening at the same time. And it’s anchored in something real: how to have better, kinder conversations about AI with the people I care about.

Provenance Statement (for WordPress)

This post was co-developed by Raymond Yee and ChatGPT using the rbotyee writeup protocol. Raymond provided the concepts, reflective framing, narrative direction, personal tone, and material from recent conversations. ChatGPT assisted with organization, synthesis, and stylistic structuring. All factual claims about AI models are grounded in publicly available information as of November 2025.