The most useful thing GenAI has given me isn’t “art”, and it isn’t speed for its own sake. It’s something far simpler and, if you spend your life in ideas, quietly liberating. It has shortened the distance between a story in your head and an image you can point at.

If you work in communications, brand or experience, you’ll recognise the gap immediately. Ideas tend to sit in language for far too long; we describe a scene, a mood, a world, everyone nods, everyone imagines something slightly different, and then, weeks later, someone “makes it visual”, at which point the conversation finally becomes real and everyone discovers what they were actually disagreeing about.

GenAI doesn’t remove that mess. It lets you enter it earlier. It gives you a way to rough out a visual direction fast enough to think with it, change your mind, test alternatives and reach alignment before the project calcifies into decks, deadlines and polite misunderstanding. This is what I mean when I talk about the augmented studio, not as a grand concept but as a daily shift in how you work; you stop waiting for “the visual phase” to arrive later, and you start exploring visual thinking alongside the strategy, while the idea is still light enough to move.

That’s the crux for me: visualisation as a creative thinking tool. Not as finished output, not as replacement for designers, but as a way to pull an idea out of abstraction and place a version of it on the table while it’s still malleable.

I started testing this in small ways, partly because that’s how you learn where the edges are. Neu-Falkenstein in the Jura has become a regular family walk since lockdown; the kids climb the stones, ask questions, and my brain does its usual thing, quietly rebuilding rooflines and courtyards from whatever the weather has left behind. Using GenAI here isn’t about claiming accuracy. It’s about turning that vague mental reconstruction into something you can see, critique and adjust.

GenAI will absolutely try to romanticise everything. It tidies up the stonework, adds improbable drama, gives you skies that suggest a Netflix budget. You have to rein it in with constraints, repeat what you mean and accept that you’re producing a visual hypothesis, not a historical document. When it starts to click, the value is surprisingly grounded. You feel the scale again, the approach, the logic of the ridge.

The story becomes easier to tell because you’re no longer relying on hand-waving. The same instinct applies in Basel. The surviving medieval gates hit hard precisely because most of the walls are gone. Rebuilding the approach to Spalentor as a lived scene, dusty road, cart tracks, travellers approaching, restores context. You stop seeing the gate as a static object and start seeing it as part of a journey. That’s often what our work is about anyway: restoring context so meaning makes sense.

The same loop shaped the visual identity of this site. I always knew I wanted a distinct house style, something you could recognise in seconds without needing a logo, something that delivered that quiet internal moment of yes, that’s exactly my taste. The early foundations were laid years ago inside Episerver at Bain & Company, shaping careers pages and learning how structure sets emotional temperature. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it taught me that spacing, rhythm and restraint are choreography, not decoration.

When alotté began to form, that discipline returned almost instinctively: minimalism, earthy tones, generous space, nothing forced. Two visual lanes emerged that feel like siblings rather than strangers. One sits in a restrained editorial illustration style, thin ink linework, visible pencil texture, muted palette and calm observational figures. The other leans into warmer, dreamlike photorealism, slightly cinematic but grounded in the same restrained colour world.

Both were built through iteration inside DALL·E and Gemini, not by accident but by refinement. Hundreds of tiny adjustments. Adding detail, removing detail, widening the frame, muting the palette, returning everything to that earthy, spacious foundation that alotté sits on. After a while the images stopped feeling generated and started feeling authored.

That’s the quiet point underneath all of this.