Background
Pioneering Creativity with AI
In the bustling heart of New York City, the Superside leadership team made a memorable impression at a recent event. We wanted to gift something unique to a selected group of customers and prospects. Our vision was to showcase Superside's exceptional talent and how they are innovating by integrating Artificial Intelligence into their work.
THE BRIEF
Capturing Essence in Pixar Style
The task was ambitious: design and print 21 distinctive Pixar-style posters featuring prospects and customers and deliver them in person at a dinner event in New York.
Our guidance
The nimble Superside marketing creative team is always up for a challenge, but this one required achieving Pixar-like accuracy, personal resemblance, and personality representation for 21 images in 3-5 days.
Nah! We'll use Superside—they said.
Like our 450+ customers, we use Superside as an extension of our in-house creative team to access the full range of creative skills, fresh creative perspectives, and efficient creative capacity.
Or when we're too desperate to get really cool design done in a snap.
The woRK
Creative Expertise Shapes AI-Driven Design
Emarie Gows, Creative Director at Superside, outlined the triple challenge of the project.
"We had essentially three challenges: one was capturing the Pixar style accurately; two was making the character recognizable to the customers and everyone who knows them; and three was capturing their personalities with details in the background."
To craft the images, Júlio Aymoré, Generative AI Creative Lead at Superside, suggested the following approach:
- Research images and information on Linkedin and the Internet about each prospect's appearance, location, and favorite things.
- Feed ChatGPT with the research and list of tweets to extract trends, such as "she likes to dance and the outdoors," to use when prompting to enrich the background.
- Feed ChatGPT with the pictures, ask the AI to describe the person's appearance, and use the output to prompt ChatGPT + DALL-E for image generation.
The team quickly realized that the generated images didn't look quite like the prospects, so Júlio came up with a brilliant idea. What if we had better data sets? What if we tapped into widely available images of people used to train AI models: celebrities and actors?
"When I prompted 'thick eyebrow,' I got literally any kind of eyebrows, you know. I realized I needed a better data set. Large amounts of public data come from well-known people, such as actors. There's a lot of imagery on the Internet."
So, Júlio used a website to match each customer with a celebrity look-alike. Next, he fed pictures of these actors into ChatGPT, extracting descriptions to sharpen his image prompts. To wrap it up, he dove into Photoshop, applying the finishing touches to ensure each portrait hit the mark.
Emarie explained why the human touch was also critical to refine the results.
"Craft meets AI because there were moments where the team was like, oh maybe this person won't like having such a big nose!"
This approach, coupled with AI-generated copy and the streamlined efficiency of creating 3D avatars without traditional 3D illustrators, dramatically condensed the project timeline.
3D modeling is akin to sculpting with stone or clay. You begin with basic shapes and gradually carve out details—tugging here, tweaking there—to bring features like lips, eyes, and hair to life. It's a meticulous transformation process, from simple forms to intricate, lifelike figures.
"With 3D modeling, it would have required one month to create just one character, you know.”
THE IMPACT
Delivering Unimaginable Results
The project culminated in just 5 days, including AI image creation, poster printing in NYC, and personal distribution by CEO Fredrik Thomassen. The outcomes were astonishing:
Creative efficiency
By harnessing AI's power, guided by our designers' skilled hands, we achieved a whopping 98.79% reduction in design hours. When we double-checked this number with Kristy Cunningham, our dedicated Creative Project Manager (CPM), she explained:
"It's quite nice to see and compare the exact time in design hours when using traditional approaches. We've perfected the estimation of the savings to a science."
Cost savings
The project saved an estimated $227,921 compared to conventional approaches, proving just how much bang for your buck you get by weaving AI into the creative workflow.
Creative speed
The Superside team showcased the level of design agility and fast-track innovation they're capable of. Just like our customers, when we face a design challenge under an unreasonable timeline, our mantra is simple: "Just Superside it!"
Superside: Human-Powered Design, Enhanced by AI
Extend your in-house creative team to reduce project costs, accelerate timelines and unlock new creative possibilities