Elevating a modern marketing agency’s visual identity through the power of generative AI.
A case study on how Empac developed the visual guidelines and imagery for the redesigned Consiglieri.co website.
Generative AI has dominated the conversation in marketing and design circles for the greater part of 2023. To a degree, it’s made me start playing with the technology to see how I can use it for Empac related projects. Early in my experimentation period, the team at Consiglieri approached me requesting a brand new website that expanded on their client projects and service offerings. As part of the project, it was also requested that we would explore AI generated artwork and see what we could put together to expand on their generative AI style. I was incredibly excited about this opportunity and we quickly got started on the project.
A quick discovery phase.
The team at Consiglieri was clear about the direction for the website and imagery. The assignment was to create a clean, modern website using the best CMS & AI tools to evolve their visual identity and present a more refined experience to prospective clients and employees. They also provided visual inspiration based on previous explorations using Dall-E and Midjourney that included 60’s post-modernism, Bauhaus pattern and Frank Moth.
The design approach.
I had a feeling that the biggest challenge in this project would be figuring out the best way to use generative AI to evolve Consiglieri’s brand elements. Besides the styles Consiglieri have been leveraging, there were a couple additional styles I wanted to explore based on numerous conversations we had over the course of the project. Even though services like Dall-E and Midjourney have evolved over the past year with continual updates, there were still things such as people and artistic styles that the apps would get wrong. So I had a feeling we would be spending a significant amount of time refining the prompts to get exactly what we wanted.
Overall, the team felt like they wanted to create materials that blended eccentricity with allure… a group of professionals with extensive knowledge and experience that is incredibly valuable and unique.
These samples were a great starting point. However, the Consiglieri team described that the world these people lived in felt a bit too old. We needed to find a way to make the individuals feel more modern while maintaining some of the same settings.
The images were starting to become more refined the further we went into rounds of review. We started discussing how we could make the people feel even more modern, what it would look like to ditch the suit and ties, and make the individuals more relatable to all audiences.
A new challenge started to emerge: Were we making the people feel so realistic that we were starting to embark into the uncanny valley? One of the shortcomings of AI in its current state is its ability to generate people that actually looked correct. Even if the people looked correct, it could be mistaken that the people were actually the employees that worked for Consiglieri. So we started removing the people from the images and generating modern settings and furnishings that would allude to the concepts we were aiming for on each web page.
Taking the imagery and bringing it onto the website.
Once we identified the perfect direction for our imagery, we quickly brought them into the website and started reworking the site structure. We combined the imagery with a bold font, identified the colors cognac brown and vintage green to complement the imagery, and overall found a clean & modern way to display Consiglieri's list of clients and services. You can check out the full website here.
Thoughts and next steps.
It was an amazing experience working with Consiglieri on their new website and AI generated visuals. Overall, it felt like a terrific exercise in applying art styles to AI generated artwork and finding a nice, classy way to bring those visuals into a company’s brand. There’s still a few issues with creating AI visuals, but the medium is certainly on a great path to becoming more practical, and useful, for the marketing toolkit. I know we’ll certainly be leveraging it more for future Empac projects.
And speaking of projects in the future… if you’re considering using AI for your visuals and content, we’re always available for a chat to see how generative AI can fit into your business. There’s a lot going on in the space, and we’re thrilled to work with anyone that’s looking to leverage AI video and imagery for their business.