How do founders create product images, brand visuals, and logos with AI?

Image models now split by job: Nano Banana (Gemini) for editing real product photos into lifestyle scenes, ChatGPT's 4o image generation for text-heavy marketing graphics and mockups, Midjourney for brand look and campaign imagery, and Ideogram for logo concepts and typography. The founder pattern that works: keep the real product pixels and generate the world around them, rather than generating the product itself. Remember that pure AI output has no copyright protection, so keep your human edits documented.

A quick orientation. The real value is below: resources worth your time, from people who've actually done it.