OVERVIEW.
About this project
Vela is a fictional AI-powered personal finance platform — a self-initiated project created specifically to document and demonstrate how I integrate generative AI tools into a professional brand identity workflow. Every stage shown here reflects how I work with real clients: AI accelerates and enriches the process, but the strategic thinking, curation and craft remain entirely human.
The brief
Vela needed a visual identity that balanced intelligence with approachability — a brand that felt as precise and trustworthy as the best fintech platforms, while remaining warm enough to connect with its audience of urban professionals managing their financial lives for the first time. The name Vela — meaning sail in multiple languages — suggested direction, momentum and clarity.
Stage 1 - Moodboard exploration with Midjourney
Rather than spending hours pulling reference images manually, I used Midjourney to rapidly generate two distinct visual directions from a written brief - exploring the full range of creative territory before committing to a single route.
Direction A - Dark and data-driven: A high-contrast dark mode aesthetic with electric cyan accents, sharp UI screens and abstract data visualisation. Premium, confident, technology-forward.
Direction B - Light and considered: A clean white brand identity presentation with navy and cyan, soft studio lighting and stationery mockups. More approachable, editorial, Scandinavian in influence.
Generating both directions took under 20 minutes. Presenting two genuinely different creative territories to a client at this stage of a project - before a single pixel of the final identity has been designed - creates faster, more confident decision-making and fewer revision cycles downstream.
Stage 2 - Logo concept exploration with Ideogram
With Direction A selected as the primary route, I used Ideogram to rapidly explore geometric V mark concepts - generating twelve distinct logo directions from a single prompt in under five minutes.
Ideogram's strength over other AI image generators is its understanding of typographic form and geometric precision, making it particularly useful for logomark ideation. The outputs are not finished logos - they are starting points. What I'm looking for at this stage is a spark: an angle, a proportion, a structural idea worth developing further.
Three concepts from the Ideogram exploration were selected for development - each showing a distinct personality within the same geometric territory: faceted and angular, minimal and precise, or bold and direct.
Stage 3 - Logo refinement
The strongest concept from the Ideogram exploration was the first image - a faceted geometric V mark with an angular internal cutout - was taken into Adobe Illustrator for manual refinement. Every point, curve and proportion was redrawn from scratch. The AI output informed the direction; the final mark was built by hand to professional production standards.
The VELA wordmark was set in a spaced geometric sans serif, chosen to complement the precision of the mark without competing with it.
Stage 4 - Mockup environment generation with Adobe Firefly
With the refined logo complete, I used Adobe Firefly's Generative Fill in Photoshop to create a presentation environment - transforming a flat logo-on-background into a dramatic, photorealistic brand scene in seconds.
The before and after images below show the transformation: a clean flat presentation becoming a premium product launch visual with a deep blue studio environment, directional spotlight and reflective floor surface - all generated from a single text prompt without any photography or 3D rendering.
This stage alone saves several hours of mockup sourcing, purchasing and compositing on a typical brand project - time that goes directly back into the creative work.
The outcome
The Vela project demonstrates that AI tools, used with senior design judgment, don't replace the creative process - they expand it. More directions explored, richer presentations delivered, faster decisions made. The craft, the strategy and the taste remain entirely human. The tools just make the bandwidth bigger.
