When I decided to develop the visual identity for Diles Que No Me Maten’s Richmond concert, I wanted to avoid the predictable language of rock posters. Instead of photographing the musicians themselves, I imagined a fictional community of people who could exist inside the band’s music.

Each poster introduces a different character. Some appear awkward, others confident, mysterious, rebellious, or quietly eccentric. Together they feel like pages from an imaginary high school yearbook where every outsider became the protagonist.

The visual direction draws from editorial portrait photography, vintage yearbook aesthetics, experimental fashion, and absurd humor. Bold hairstyles, expressive faces, colorful clothing, handmade typography, and carefully controlled studio lighting create a world that feels both familiar and slightly surreal.

Building a Fictional Cast

The band takes inspiration from improvisation, post punk, krautrock, jazz, psychedelia, and Mexican literature. Rather than illustrating those influences literally, I translated their unpredictable energy into a diverse collection of portraits. Every character carries a distinct personality while remaining part of the same visual universe. The result feels playful, slightly uncomfortable, expressive, and memorable, much like the band’s live performances. Although every portrait looks photographic, each image began as an AI directed concept. I developed dozens of prompt variations to explore casting, styling, expression, wardrobe, and personality before selecting the strongest compositions.

Creative Process

This project combines Generative AI with traditional graphic design. I used Midjourney to generate the initial portrait concepts and explore different personalities. I used Figma Weave to experiment with layouts, typography, and visual directions. Finally, I completed every poster in Adobe Photoshop, where I refined the images, balanced color, integrated typography, adjusted composition, and prepared the final production artwork.

The AI tools accelerated exploration, but the creative direction remained entirely human. Every portrait, expression, crop, color decision, and typographic choice served the overall identity of the series.

One of the prompts explored during development was:

Hyperrealistic comedy style yearbook photo of a fictional eccentric Guatemalan Indigenous dye blonde plus size woman with an exaggerated facial expression, absurd hairstyle, strikingly inappropriate outfit, studio lighting, high school yearbook aesthetic, ultra detailed realistic skin texture, subtly comical, rock alternativo y experimental vibe.

That prompt became a creative starting point rather than a finished solution. Each selected image evolved through iteration, editing, curation, and graphic design.

Final Result

The final collection transforms a concert announcement into an editorial portrait series. Rather than promoting a single performance, the posters introduce an imagined cast of characters that reflects the chaotic, poetic, and experimental spirit of Diles Que No Me Maten while giving the Richmond show a distinctive visual identity.

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A great concert poster does more than announce a show. It creates anticipation before the audience hears the first song. For this project, I designed a complete poster series for Solya’s Queen of Texas concert at The Canal Club in Richmond, Virginia. My goal was to build a visual identity that captured her music, personality, and stage presence.

Building the Atmosphere

I drew inspiration from Solya’s Queen of Texas era and blended gothic romance, dream pop, surreal Americana, fashion photography, and sacred symbolism into one cinematic world. Instead of creating standard promotional artwork, I treated every poster like a frame from an independent film or a luxury fashion editorial.

The series places Solya inside a dreamlike version of the Texas desert. Empty highways, abandoned motels, vintage roadside signs, telephone poles, oil pumps, drifting dust, roses, and oversized moons appear throughout the collection. Together they create a lonely yet beautiful landscape that feels both nostalgic and mythical.

Defining the Character

Solya stands at the center of every composition. Flowing ivory dresses, delicate halos, sapphire crosses, and restrained expressions give her an almost timeless presence. She feels mysterious, powerful, vulnerable, and unforgettable all at once. Each poster explores a different emotion while maintaining the same visual language.

Designing for Typography

I designed every composition with typography in mind from the very beginning. I left generous negative space and balanced each scene around the title and event information. The photography and graphic design support each other instead of competing for attention.

Blending AI with Traditional Design

I combined Generative AI with traditional design tools throughout the project. I used Midjourney to explore concepts and generate imagery. I used Figma Weave to experiment with layouts and creative directions. I finished every poster in Adobe Photoshop, where I composited images, refined colors, retouched details, integrated typography, and prepared the final artwork.

AI supported my creative process, but it never replaced design thinking. I directed every image, selected every composition, and refined every detail until the series felt cohesive and intentional.

Final Result

The finished collection presents a cinematic identity for the concert while expanding the visual language of the Queen of Texas album. The posters combine music, fashion, photography, graphic design, and emerging AI tools into one unified campaign that feels haunting, elegant, and distinctly contemporary.

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The project asks a simple question. What if every institution that shapes modern life became a living machine?

At the center is Novia Robot, a quiet and emotionally restrained android who slowly awakens inside a society ruled by towering mechanical patriarchs. Around her are symbolic figures such as the Father of Commerce, Father of Beauty, Father of Family, Father of Production, and Father of Morals. Each character represents a different system of power, transformed into exaggerated cybernetic beings that feel both absurd and strangely believable. They are not villains in a traditional sense. They are living ideologies, designed to embody consumption, beauty standards, productivity, conformity, and authority.

Opposing and surrounding them is another layer of contemporary mythology. Celebrity Pomeranians become monstrous icons of fame. Billboard Women blur the line between advertising and identity. Factory Women embody endless industrial labor. Hipster Invaders represent trend culture, performance, digital validation, and the endless pursuit of relevance.

Visually, the project blends the language of classic Japanese manga with contemporary generative AI workflows. Every character began as a carefully constructed prompt in Midjourney, built around a consistent visual vocabulary inspired by hand painted animation cels, halftone shading, dense ink linework, old film grain, and retro mechanical design. Once each design reached the desired level of consistency, I developed detailed production style reference sheets using Figma Weave, expanding every character into front, back, profile, close ups, mechanical details, footwear, hands, and construction studies. The reference sheet structure itself became part of the creative process, allowing each design to feel as though it belonged to an animated television production from an alternate history.

Although created with generative AI, the work is fundamentally about art direction. Every character required iterative prompt development, visual editing, design refinement, narrative thinking, and production planning. The AI generated possibilities, but the final identity of each character came through hundreds of creative decisions involving silhouette, symbolism, proportion, fashion, materials, personality, and world building.

The result is a fictional cast that feels simultaneously nostalgic and contemporary. Familiar enough to recall lost manga and anime from the nineteen eighties, yet rooted in today’s conversations about technology, identity, consumer culture, labor, beauty, and social performance.

This collection serves as both concept art and the visual foundation for an experimental AI music video that continues to evolve.

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The creative direction imagines the band inside a recording studio where reality and synthetic performance collide. Musicians confront digital versions of themselves performing inside holographic spaces surrounded by glowing sound waves, oversized microphones, distorted portraits, and saturated neon color. Every poster presents a different interpretation of the same idea while maintaining a unified visual language inspired by vintage gig posters, photocopied zines, screen printing, and worn concert ephemera.

To develop the series, I combined Midjourney, Figma Weave, and Adobe Photoshop into a single creative workflow. Midjourney generated the initial imagery, Figma Weave helped explore compositions and visual directions, and Photoshop was used for compositing, typography, color grading, distressed textures, and final production. My role included creative direction, prompt engineering, image editing, layout design, typography, and production across the entire poster collection.

The visual system embraces imperfections. Heavy grain, worn paper, distressed type, fluorescent color palettes, and oversized graphic elements recreate the energy of underground music culture while introducing futuristic themes of identity, technology, and performance. Each poster is designed to feel loud, tactile, and collectible, capturing the intensity of a live metalcore show before the first note is even played.

This project demonstrates how emerging creative tools can become part of a professional design process while remaining driven by strong art direction and graphic design fundamentals. The result is a cohesive promotional campaign that merges music, experimental photography, digital illustration, and contemporary poster design into a distinctive visual identity for the event.

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The creative direction blends surrealism, botanical forms, vintage fashion, and Moschino’s unmistakable sense of play. Sculptural garments bloom into oversized organic silhouettes, floral textures become couture, and whimsical accessories transform into expressive design elements. Every composition was designed to feel like a luxury fashion editorial while introducing visitors to the visual language of the exhibition.

The imagery was created with Midjourney, using Moschino’s real product photography as creative reference, while the complete campaign was designed and assembled in Adobe InDesign. Figma Weave supported concept development, visual exploration, and creative ideation throughout the process. My role included creative direction, prompt engineering, image curation, typography, editorial layout design, color refinement, and final production.

Sfumato RVA demonstrates how Generative AI can become part of a professional creative workflow while remaining guided by strong design principles. The result is a cohesive campaign that merges fashion, editorial storytelling, and contemporary visual technology into a world that feels elegant, playful, surreal, and unmistakably Moschino.

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Each poster presents a stylized micro-world where diverse characters engage in physical activity: running, stretching, lifting, playing—captured in a soft, sculptural aesthetic. The visual language balances playfulness with intention, emphasizing inclusivity, accessibility, and the joy of movement in public space.

The project was developed using a hybrid generative workflow. Midjourney was used in the early stages to define the visual direction through a moodboard and sref-based style exploration, establishing the tone, forms, and color systems. From there, Weavy.ai became the central tool for production; handling design, layout, typography, final rendering, and style extraction to ensure coherence across all six compositions.

Weavy’s ability to maintain stylistic consistency allowed the series to function as a unified system rather than individual posters. Typography, spatial hierarchy, and composition were refined within this environment, enabling a seamless integration between generative imagery and graphic design structure.

The result is a cohesive campaign that feels both synthetic and human, where crafted digital forms echo real-world movement, and technology becomes a tool for amplifying community presence rather than replacing it.

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The images are developed through a hybrid creative process that blends traditional artistic exploration with contemporary generative tools. Each piece begins with loose sketching and photographic studies to establish composition, gesture, and spatial balance. From there, generative AI is used as a visual exploration engine to experiment with unexpected combinations of forms, textures, and patterns. The results are then refined through digital illustration, where color, line, and atmosphere are carefully shaped into the final artwork.

This oscillation between mediums allows intuition and technology to interact throughout the process. Rather than replacing traditional methods, AI becomes one layer within a broader artistic workflow that includes drawing, photography, and digital craft.

The series is produced as premium giclée satin prints (11 × 14 inches) and is currently available at STUFF-RVA and DAGNABIT! shops in Richmond. Each print is part of the Pheromones series and is individually numbered.

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My role focused on compositing and preparing the athlete shots that appear throughout the sequence. A key requirement of the broadcast workflow was the ability to update the opening daily as new competitions and standout moments emerged across the Games. This meant integrating new athlete footage and disciplines quickly while maintaining visual continuity with the established design system.

To support this rapid turnaround pipeline, we built an AI assisted compositing workflow inside Adobe After Effects using the plugins Mask Prompter 3 and Lockdown 3. These tools allowed for faster rotoscoping, surface tracking, and precise compositing of athletes into the evolving sequence. The system made it possible to adapt the opening throughout the Games, ensuring that the title reflected the latest Olympic highlights and performances in near real time.

This production approach balanced cinematic design with broadcast practicality. The result was a dynamic opening that evolved throughout the Paris Games while preserving the visual identity developed by Imaginary Forces.

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