Sable Season
A visual world for a cultural season, developed with AI-assisted image exploration and finished by hand for print and screen.
- Role
- Creative direction and design
- Duration
- 6 weeks
- Team
- Programme lead, two venue marketers, me
- Year
- 2024
Responsibilities
Visual direction, image system, templates, print specification
The challenge
Eleven events, four venues, one small budget, and a need for the season to read as a single idea.
Commissioning original photography for every event was impossible, and stock imagery would have flattened the programme's character.
Constraints
- No performance photography available before launch
- Assets needed by four teams with different software
- Print and social from one source system
What the evidence showed
Previous seasons had used each venue's own house style, so audiences never connected events into a programme.
Key decisions
AI for exploration, hand for finishing
Generated imagery set the material and light direction. Every published asset was then composited, colour-corrected and typeset by hand.
One image grammar, eleven subjects
A shared crop, palette and light angle let each event look distinct while reading as one season.
Templates the venues can actually use
Assets shipped in three formats with locked type and open image slots, so nothing drifted in production.
Before and after
Before
Eleven separately designed event graphics with no shared identity.
After
One season system with locked typography and an open image slot per event.
Outcome
A programme of eleven events shared one recognisable world produced within a small independent budget.
The system was reused for the following season with a new palette and no redesign.
Being explicit about where AI was used, and where it was not, made the client conversation straightforward rather than awkward.