AI
Two decades of art direction, pointed at a new set of tools.
Two kinds of work here. The systems are real: agents built inside a live client program — one that automates creative QA across a high-volume email pipeline, another that helps art directors generate on-brand imagery without leaving the brand behind. Built, shipped, in use.
The imagery studies are self-directed — tests of what generation can actually do under real brand constraints, and where it quietly stops working. A label that has to stay exact across five lighting conditions. One person's face holding across ten frames. A real product placed into rooms that don't exist.
Different problems, same discipline: the tools aren't the differentiator, the art direction is.
Phantom
A room-by-room test of whether a real object can survive an invented house.
The Devialet Phantom is a real product with real proportions, and most image models render it as a white sphere with a brass disc stuck to the side. The exercise was never to invent a speaker — it was to put an existing one into rooms that don't exist, at the right size, in light that behaves.
The rule: the speaker sits on the building, never on the furniture.
Five surfaces across five rooms, and not one of them is a table. A cantilevered concrete plinth, a plaster niche, a teak pedestal, a stone sill, a travertine console. Architecture holds the product; furniture holds the person, and the two never swap roles.
Five rooms, ordered by the quality of light rather than by geography — each one posing a different problem for a white ovoid with two polished domes:
Board-formed concrete.
The plinth sits in shadow; the speaker is lit entirely by sun bouncing off the polished floor. Nothing touches it directly.
Lime plaster, no shadow.
A white object on a white wall in flat light, with nothing to separate them. A recessed niche gives it an edge to read against.
Teak, through slats.
Bars of light cross the pedestal, the speaker, and the wall as one continuous event, bowing with the curve of the body.
Glass, stone, city.
Cool dusk from the window on one side, warm light from the room on the other, meeting down the middle of the form — the only frame where the speaker glows from within rather than reflecting what's around it.
Limewash and travertine.
The quiet one. Separation comes from material, not light — a machined white surface against a hand-troweled wall.
Phantom
A room-by-room test of whether a real object can survive an invented house.
The Devialet Phantom is a real product with real proportions, and most image models render it as a white sphere with a brass disc stuck to the side. The exercise was never to invent a speaker — it was to put an existing one into rooms that don't exist, at the right size, in light that behaves.
The rule: the speaker sits on the building, never on the furniture.
Five surfaces across five rooms, and not one of them is a table. A cantilevered concrete plinth, a plaster niche, a teak pedestal, a stone sill, a travertine console. Architecture holds the product; furniture holds the person, and the two never swap roles.
Five rooms, ordered by the quality of light rather than by geography — each one posing a different problem for a white ovoid with two polished domes:
Board-formed concrete.
The plinth sits in shadow; the speaker is lit entirely by sun bouncing off the polished floor. Nothing touches it directly.
Lime plaster, no shadow.
A white object on a white wall in flat light, with nothing to separate them. A recessed niche gives it an edge to read against.
Teak, through slats.
Bars of light cross the pedestal, the speaker, and the wall as one continuous event, bowing with the curve of the body.
Glass, stone, city.
Cool dusk from the window on one side, warm light from the room on the other, meeting down the middle of the form — the only frame where the speaker glows from within rather than reflecting what's around it.
Limewash and travertine.
The quiet one. Separation comes from material, not light — a machined white surface against a hand-troweled wall.