The Big Picture - no. 116

LLM reset

Agent Brand Kit (ABK) work and experiments is ongoing. We’re currently building and testing it on two brands.

Latest unlock: LLM reset. Much like CSS reset but for the annoying design conventions AI applies without asking.

If you don’t know what a CSS reset is: CSS is the code that controls how a website looks, and every browser arrives with its own defaults already applied. A reset wipes them to zero so you’re designing on a blank surface instead of arguing with the browser.

So the kit has two layers, the first being the LLM reset and the second being the creative direction layer (human-made). The reset, in the spirit of CSS reset, clears away the LLM design tropes through a series of directives. E.g. do not, for the love of god, radius the corners of ANY images.

Much like the marketing intern our clients hire to run the social campaigns, we can only hope that the AI will listen. All caps helps a bit.

Another lens through which to view the kit

ABK is addressing an inevitable thing. We polled a few of our past clients and many are already taking the brand assets we created and dropping them into AI tools.

We can:
A) turn a blind eye and/or
B) watch them suffer trying to make the outputs half-decent

As the ones creating brands intended to grow our clients' businesses, it's our obligation to fully enable those brands in every way possible. This means ensuring effective usage across all forms of media and use case.

Hot take: AI is a use case.

A brand guide traditionally exists to ensure that all who uses the brand do so in a way that maximizes the effectiveness of the carefully crafted visual identity through correct and intentional application. These guides are made for designers, marketers and so on. But increasingly they’re being fed into an LLM tool.

But the thing is, AI isn’t adhering to the guidelines so well. It’s got it’s own ideas, fallbacks and a whole hell of a lot of misinterpretations. So a new form of brand guidelines is really required here. This is a big part of what the ABK is.

Colors in nature

It’s summer here. For a while I’ve been thinking about how many tones in nature are not flat, but consist of a multitude of colors, mixed but not fully. How can we capture the beauty of these colors in a digital setting?

I’ve been building some shader based tools in an attempt to mimic these non-flat tones digitally.

Many designers (myself included) are drawn to using noise or grain or other textures that mimic analogue sensibilities. This is a similar idea but while these are non-digital representations, they are of human-created tones, not nature created.

So what I’m noodling on is what does a digital representation of organic tones look like? What are other ways we can make tones on screen that are neither a single hex code nor a gradation.

Sensory Links

• Visual — Nice interview and collection of work by Italian designer Armando Milani

• Words — Met Jason Gaingard at the Interesting People last week (more about that here). I got my hands on a copy of his upcoming book which is a perfect follow up and speaks about creating and nurturing relationships with intention.

• Sound - Listen to Spirit Level