Work

Brand, packaging and product design

packaging, marks, and the work that got cut

Four projects. Two are brands for products I make and sell, one is the brand I replaced, and one is a writing app I specified and never built. The rejected work is here too, because the reasons it got rejected are the part worth reading.

Three of these are products I also had to make and sell, so none of the constraints were hypothetical. A lid has a die line and a minimum print run. A nutrition panel has a format I don’t control and numbers I have to stand behind. The fourth is a writing app I only specified, and the constraint there was a keyboard that already means something to everyone who would use it. Most of what these pages show is what those constraints ruled out.

The method

353 generations, and the ones i threw out

Kova’s lifestyle and product imagery is generated. I swept 353 favorites out of Higgsfield, kept 352 of them in an approved folder, and cut a 59-variant campaign set down from there. Everything in this section is generated, and I am saying so because a page about design should be clear about which pictures a camera took.

Contact sheet of 35 generated frames: models with cups, Nutrition Facts panel attempts, and cup renders on tables and rooftops.
generated The sweep · sheet 1 of 11
Contact sheet of the campaign set: one model in a green tank holding a Kova cup, across rooftops, courts and parks.
generated The campaign set · 59 variants

The contact sheets are the rejected work. I am leaving them up because a set of four finished pictures says nothing about how they were chosen.

Two of the four proposed locks hold up

Generated frame 284: a woman in a plain green tank on an LA rooftop, holding an unbranded white cup.
generated Kept · no third-party mark, no invented lettering
Generated frame 330: a woman crouched on a white rooftop ledge with the downtown skyline behind her, holding a plain cup.
generated Kept · clean garment, plain cup

The other two do not, and this is the part worth reading

Rejected generated frame 307: the same model on a court, with a Nike swoosh rendered on the centre of her tank top.
rejected A Nike swoosh across the chest. Nobody put it there. The generator did, and it is somebody else’s trademark on my product shot.
Rejected generated frame 292: the model holding a cup whose printed brand name renders as nonsense letters.
rejected Nonsense lettering on the cup. That is my product’s own surface, in a picture meant to sell it.
Rejected generated frame 201: two Kova cups on scoops under the headline Try both flavors. Delivered free, with a stray comma before the full stop.
rejected It bakes a delivery hook into the picture, which I don’t put in capture copy, and the line carries a typo no crop can fix.

Both of the failed frames were written down as clean in my own notes. I caught them by rendering every frame at full size instead of cropping to where I expected a problem to be. A cropped check tells you about the crop.

This is also why the bear never comes out of a generator. A mark that has to stay exactly itself does not go through a process whose whole nature is to approximate.

generated imagery · art direction · review

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AI operations, solutions, or internal tooling — work where the job is turning a messy process into a system that holds. Remote, or close to Los Angeles. English and Spanish.

Open to work JET/OS · design