Your Reference Library Is Your Creative DNA
A Conversation with Khulan Dav, creative AI leader behind the Make it Pop newsletter
Your Reference Library Is Your Creative DNA: A Conversation with Khulan Dav
Khulan Dav is one of my favorites on LinkedIn. She’s an AI Creative who works as a Global Content Manager shaping narratives for AI products. But her influence extends well beyond her day job, through her newsletter Make it Pop, her creative practice, and a growing body of AI-generated visual work that’s caught the attention of the creative AI community, like her recent series The Forbidden Feast, created for Mongolian Lunar New Year, which fuses generative AI with retro-Soviet propaganda aesthetics to reclaim the cultural traditions that were suppressed during Mongolia’s socialist era.
This is one example of how she sees things: the most powerful reference images aren’t just visual choices but political ones.
Born in Mongolia, raised across Europe, and now based in New York, Khulan brings a cross-cultural perspective to a question that matters more every day: in a world where anyone can generate an image in seconds, what actually separates good from great?
Her answer has nothing to do with prompt engineering, and it won’t surprise any filmmaker. We’ve always gathered reference images, to share a vision with a DP, to align with a production designer, to show an editor the rhythm we’re after. Fashion brands have built entire collections around a single mood board. It begins long before the first frame is generated, with the images you choose to carry with you.
As Linda Carroll wrote so beautifully in her recent Substack on the magic of metaphor, “metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.” So here are a few, because we all learn differently: your references are the DNA of every frame, the compass before the journey, the recipe before the meal. If your film is a cathedral, your references are the stone. If it’s a garden, they’re the soil. If it’s a song, they’re the key signature. No matter how you see it, the point is the same. Without them, you’re generating in the dark.
So let’s shine some good light on this with Khulan…
Before we get into workflow and tools, let’s start with the fundamental question. What is a reference image, really? Not the textbook definition, but what it means to you as a creative director. And why do you believe it’s not just a nice-to-have but the actual foundation that an entire project is built on?
A reference image isn’t just a visual. It’s a decision. It’s you saying “this is the world I want to build” before you build it.
- Khulan Dav
For me as a creative director, a reference image is the first act of creative direction on any project. It’s where you choose the lighting, the mood, the palette, the compositional logic, the texture of a world, before a single prompt is written or a single asset is generated. It’s your creative DNA made visible.
Most people skip this step entirely. They open a prompt box and start typing. But the strongest work I see, whether it’s AI-generated or traditional, always begins with intentional reference gathering. Whether it’s a film still, a painting, a photograph, or an architectural detail, the reference sets the creative direction before you ever write a word.
And here’s why it’s not a nice-to-have: in the age of AI, everyone has access to the same models, the same resolution, the same speed. The differentiator isn’t the tool. It’s what you feed it. Your reference library is the foundation because it encodes your taste, your point of view, your visual language. Without that foundation, you’re just generating noise.
Let’s get into the nuts and bolts. When you’re starting a new project, where are you actually finding your reference images? And once you find them, how do you organize them? Walk us through what your “reference library” actually looks like.
I’m addicted to Instagram. It’s my primary source, but I’ve been very intentional about how I use it. I actually run two separate accounts. My personal account is just my life, friends, normal stuff. But my second account is purely for creative content. I’ve curated who I follow so carefully that even my Explore feed is just creative work: cinematography, photography, AI art, design. That separation has been really helpful because when I open that second account, I’m immediately in creative mode.
