Fizuy Lub, a brand hallucinated by AI

As part of his takeover of It’s Nice That in August 2022, Richard Turley’s studio Food invited us to take part in a speculative branding project for a fizzy drink, using AI at each step to help with the process. The full writeup is here, and we find it to be an refreshingly clear-eyed (and somewhat tongue in cheek) exploration of how AI can actually be useful to the design process. Designers spend a huge amount of time making and using moodboards. What if AI makes the moodboards that guide the actual creative work?

An text-generator engine named Sudiowrite was fed a description of the experience of drinking a fizzy drink and prompted to iterate on it. Richard and his team liked the phrase “Fizzy Love” that emerged in the text output, so this was fed into an image generator called GLID-3. Like fingers, AI has a notoriously hard time with letterforms, at least as of this writing, so the results were garbled. It produced the words “Fizuy” and “Lub”, which the team combined for the name, then prompted it again with “Fizuy Lub logo”. Christian and Greg sorted through the 150 images it output, grouped the interesting ones into semi-cohesive sets, and used them as a moodboard, drawing variations on 6 different directions.

After choosing one of our sketches, they used Majesty Diffusion on an image of bubbles and tongues that GLID-3 had generated, to produce some more detailed images, which they sent (along with our logo) to 3D artist Jae Yeon Kim, who used the images in the same way we did. The final result is a collaboration between designers and machines, and something that neither side would have come up with independently.