BEYOND MAGAZINE

Envisioning the Future with Generative AI and Art Direction for Editorial.

BEYOND Magazine is a high-end Canadian luxury real estate and lifestyle publication produced by Toronto-based real estate brokerage Heaps Estrin in collaboration with SJC (St. Joseph Communications). I was brought on as Art Director for the fourth issue, tasked with managing a tight and shifting timeline while ensuring the magazine maintained its high-end editorial standards. A key challenge was producing AI-generated imagery for a feature article about the future, where traditional photography wasn’t an option—pushing the boundaries of visual storytelling in luxury editorial design.

Role

Art Director, AI Artist

Tools

Adobe Creative Suite, MidJourney,

Methods

Generative AI

Timeline

Five Weeks

CHALLENGE

How do you create editorial-quality AI-generated imagery that aligns with the refined aesthetic of a high-end lifestyle publication, while ensuring it seamlessly integrates with existing creative?

Editorial Design for a Future-Focused Story

During the editorial process, one of the submitted articles, Toronto’s AI-Powered Future, explored how artificial intelligence could transform urban living. The challenge was to create AI imagery that felt polished, high-end, and editorially refined, ensuring it seamlessly fit within the luxury design language of the publication.

Additional Challenges:

Working Within a Defined Brand System While Innovating
The magazine had an established design structure, typography, and brand identity, requiring the AI imagery to be integrated smoothly into existing layouts without disrupting the magazine’s cohesive aesthetic. The visuals needed to push creative boundaries while respecting the publication’s overall tone.

Navigating External Stakeholders with Strong Brand Control
With multiple stakeholders involved—each with a firm vision of the brand’s editorial and visual identity—every design decision required careful alignment and justification. The client had a clear, established luxury brand, and BEYOND Magazine had to seamlessly integrate into that while also pushing editorial creativity.

The Solution: Using MidJourney AI and Photoshop to Imagine Toronto’s Future

After discussions with the editor, we decided that custom AI-generated imagery would create greater visual impact, immersing readers in a bold, speculative vision of what Toronto could look like in the future. This approach allowed us to align the visuals more closely with the story’s forward-thinking narrative while making the design more engaging and dynamic.

Given the article’s visionary themes, we saw an opportunity to elevate visual storytelling by using images that better fit the story’s speculative nature and showcased what Toronto could look like in the future. Instead of sourcing traditional photography, we needed a custom visual approach that would not only align with the article’s futuristic vision but also maintain the high-end aesthetic of the publication.

“Jennifer designed a print magazine I edited. She was quick to learn about the client and to both repurpose and improve on previous layouts. She even spotted copy edits that needed to be made! She also generated beautiful AI images for an article on artificial intelligence. I hadn’t realized how detailed and labour-intensive the AI images generation process could be.

Jennifer is proactive and will make your job easier. she’s full of creative ideas and is a pleasure to work with.”

Vanessa Grant

Editor, BEYOND Magazine, SJC (St. Joseph's Communications)

Impact & Results

BEYOND Magazine demonstrated how editorial design can evolve to embrace emerging technologies without compromising luxury aesthetics. By integrating custom AI visuals, we successfully enhanced the storytelling experience, ensuring the article’s forward-looking themes were reflected in its visual presentation.

This project highlighted the potential of generative AI in high-end editorial design—not as a replacement for traditional photography, but as a tool for expanding creative possibilities. By balancing innovation with brand consistency, we pushed the boundaries of what’s possible in luxury editorial publishing, proving that technology and refined design can coexist seamlessly.

BEYOND Magazine issue 4

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