This is a multidisciplinary project across Brand Design and Strategy, Visual Identity, Marketing, Creative Direction, and Design Systems that preceded and served as the foundation for my subsequent website design for the same brand. - THE PROJECT Topnotch Gyms originally presented itself as a fitness provider, but its identity was constrained by a no-code website builder: a monogram for the logo, a basic colour palette and a single typeface created a visually generic experience that communicated services without any identity. → CONTEXT This project was developed for ElevenLabs Hack #7, which challenged creators to recreate a live website in Vercel v0 and redesign it with integrated AI voice experiences. Rather than starting with UI design, I approached it as a complete brand transformation: strategy → identity → digital. I first designed a scalable visual identity system on Canva, then I extended it into merchandise and brand guidelines with ChatGPT. My goal was to transform Topnotch from a gym with a monogram into a lifestyle brand with a distinctive visual identity. → CREATIVE DIRECTION For the brand style and identity I have drawn inspiration from Y2K's nostalgia: instead of the metallic cyber aesthetic often associated with Y2K, I explored its brighter, more optimistic side through references to early-2000s surf culture, stickers, colourful magazines, MSN, and summer vibes. The result is a flexible identity system designed to scale consistently across digital products, campaigns and physical touchpoints. More than a visual refresh, my project demonstrates how strategic branding can transform a service into a culturally relevant lifestyle brand with resonance. → DELIVERABLES ✔ Brand Strategy & Positioning ✔ Visual Identity System ✔ Logo Redesign ✔ Typography & Color System ✔ Brand Guidelines ✔ Marketing Assets ✔ Mobile UI Concepts ✔ Merchandise Concepts ✔ Website Art Direction #BrandDesign #BrandStrategy #CreativeDirection #GraphicDesign #DesignSystems #Marketing #WebDesign Note, this isn't "AI work": it took me three days of zooming and panning on my 12-inch screen low spec tablet/cloudbook just to upscale the first video draft (128MB graphic card and a tiny screen means huge latency and barriers: work takes 50-60x more time than on a laptop, software like Adobe CS doesn't run neither on browser on it, while online SaaS like Tableau or Squarespace run crushes and freezes continuously).

There’s a common misconception that creating with AI means writing a tiny prompt and letting the tool do all the heavy lifting. I wanted to show the opposite: the human thinking, creative direction, judgment, curation and work management behind an AI-assisted video advert. This aim matched the brief for a competition run by Envato on Contra so I submitted my entry to meet this goal. The walkthrough video I’m publishing here documents what happened between a one-minute sketch for a campaign and the design of a whole new brand, and how I also leveraged AI tools. You can use this video as a tutorial of the AI-tools I used in my creative workflow; or, if you want to watch the commercial ad directly, you can skip to the final 2 minutes - THE IDEA This project started with an idea I developed offline. The technology accelerated parts of the execution, but the concept, creative decisions and final result were entirely directed by me. My inspiration for the brand Cats Heaven stemmed from a creative task during a marketing agency open house event, hosted by Among Equals on 1 June 2026. The brief was simple: in 1–5 minutes, create a campaign capable of making the residents of a city take sides, either apologising to dogs for having banned them from the city for decades, or supporting their eviction without apologies and taking the cats’ side. While almost all participants opted for the apology and wrote only text on the provided Post-it, I preferred to visually argue the opposite. So I sketched my idea for a counter-petition from the cats’ perspective, showing how a city without dogs could be better: no unpleasant smells, no dirt, no loud barking, no aggressive behaviour. From the cats’ point of view, most importantly, complete ownership of their humans’ attention, and of the entire pet-budget. The perfect city to be spoiled by humans: simply put, cat's paradise. I later verified, on 26 July, that the brief was inspired by a real historical event in Reykjavík, and that, in June 2026, pet food brand Edgard & Cooper had developed a real campaign around our brief! My work for the campaign didn't go any further that, but my creative idea became the foundation for designing a new brand: Cats Heaven, a supplier of experiences and goods to spoil cats. - THE PROCESS I photographed my Post-it sketch from the agency event, informed Google Gemini about the campaign brief, and prompted it to turn my sketch into a polished poster that I could use for clearer communication. My aim was to use it to develop a new brand. I uploaded the poster and additional branding information to ChatGPT and asked for a brand teardown and strategic analysis. From there, using Envato as my main stock-asset and AI toolkit for producing the video advert meant changing my usual creative process, because I had to develop the commercial concept around the possibilities offered by the available **Envato** stock-assets. I focused on teatime, usually among human friends, but in my advert case, replacing a human with a cat. I edited the video material within Envato, as the platform excels at it, but for newly generated keyframes, I experimented also with frontier models through Use.AI: All-in-One AI Power, using especially ChatGPT 5.6 Because Envato works with single-video inputs, I sometimes had to combine multiple clips into one video first in Canva, layering and preparing those assets before bringing them into Envato. The result wasn’t created by pressing one button. It was built through a sequence of decisions about what to generate, what to reject, what to combine and what to refine. - HUMAN BY DESIGN AI can generate possibilities. It cannot replace the creative direction that determines which possibilities are worth pursuing. For the soundtrack, for example, I initially searched Envato for suitable stock music. Then I changed direction, and I created a custom soundtrack, writing a prompt that gave specific instructions for how the music should vary across each timed video segment. I compared outputs across Envato, ElevenLabs and Eleven Music, selecting the strongest results based on quality, and chose the latter. I took the same approach with sound effects: I sourced, created and compared them across platforms, ultimately using the sound effects I created with ElevenLabs. Finally, in Canva, I stitched, synchronized and refined the audio, video and text tracks into the final advert. In the past, I used to do this in Adobe Creative Cloud Premiere or Adobe Express, but they don’t run on my cloudbook, not even online, and the libraries where I can use PCs are too far away. So Canva is the perfect alternative (although timelines with layered tracks are so painful to pan and zoom on my 12-inch cloudbook!) The important part of the process wasn’t simply knowing which AI tools to use. It was deciding what I wanted to achieve, recognising when an output wasn’t right, making creative decisions about the editing, and managing the work across multiple tools and iterations. AI can accelerate creative production, particularly during prototyping, but ultimately, creative direction from development through to production is human, and so are the best ideas. Humans imagine. Humans direct. Humans select. Humans curate. Humans refine. AI is part of my creative toolkit, not the creative director - DELIVERABLES Initial campaign ✔ Campaign Concept ✔ Campaign Poster New brand design & video ad ✔ Creative Strategy ✔ Brand Concept Development ✔ Brand Teardown & Analysis ✔ Video Advert ✔ AI-Generated Keyframes ✔ Stock Video Curation ✔ Original Music Soundtrack ✔ Sound Design ✔ Audio & Video Editing ✔ Creative Direction ✔ Final Curation #EnvatoChallenge #HumanByDesign #CreativeProcess #Marketing #VideoProduction #BrandDesign #ContentDesign #GraphicDesign #Marketing #AdDesign #GeneralCreator #videoeditorfreelancer