With Christmas just around the corner, a client would like to develop a new scooter range for the festive period and into 2027. They want to offer an edgy inline scooter, with all black body and blue wheel hubs. They also want to develop Dinosaur and Unicorn styled iterations of this inline scooter and also some new styles of a 3 wheel scooter they developed for sale in 2026. These are initial visuals of these items.
The client came up with some initial ideas by way of ChatGPT which I ran with. AI is very useful for blasting out some impressive visuals, but AI don’t translate directly to actual print ready designs. And they tend not to be exactly the same as the base products supplied by factories. Decal artwork needs to be created as per the cutter guides supplied from the factory, colourways need to be figured out, and so on. And this is before we even get to packaging artwork development.
From the initially supplied concepts, I set to work on developing assets to use in the creation of decals and subsequent visuals of each scooter.
The AI era – it’s a crazy time we’re living in. To create stylised products such as these, generally, stock imagery libraries would be utilised for some off-the-shelf style which comes at a price, or in some special cases (with a decent budget!), artists would be hired to create assets. And for the box office licenses from the likes of Lucasfilm or Hasbro, manufacturers would be supplied with style guides fit to bursting with all manner of assets which can be used to create products like these and have them in their branded packaging.
Invariably, a large spend would be dedicated to the development of these types of assets. Deep pockets required. But nowadays with AI, some of this can be shortcutted – especially for small businesses. The assets I created here utilised tools such as Nanonbanana and Black Forest Labs Flux. With my prompting, I was able to fairly quickly generate good quality, usable dinosaur characters (ie the T-Rex and Pteranodons), background landscapes and vegetation as pictured in the rough draft here.
Using some other tools I could take these assets and rescale them for suitable use in artworks destined for print production. So, in a matter of a few days, using AI, I could generate and adapt some very usable designs which historically would have taken much longer or be much more expensive to develop.
The Unicorn and dino scooters here were developed in much the same way. Assets generated with nanobanana and Flux, with layout done in Illustrator, with visuals then created in Photoshop.
