MilkmanBar Identity
The Pershing — a Superside client four days from churning — came in with a last-shot ask: a brand concept for a new cocktail bar tucked behind a coffee shop in East Austin. A full identity wasn't on the table. The timeline didn't allow it. What they needed was a compelling look and feel sharp enough to keep them excited, and clear enough to evolve from later. Two directions. Four days. The clock was already running. AI was the only way this was getting made.
Role: Creative direction (lead). All illustrations and imagery AI-generated under direction.
Credits: Creative Lead — Anoosh Babayan. Design — Fernando Abdo. Produced with the Superside team.
What I did: Led the creative direction across the project, with AI as the primary production engine. Defined the strategic positioning, the voice ("Delivering a damn good time"), and two distinct visual worlds — one painterly and mid-century, one modern and graphic. Every illustration, every character, every photographic mood image was AI-generated and then directed: prompted, curated, regenerated, refined. Built the brand systems around the AI work — typography, color, layout, voice — so the generated assets read as a coherent brand world rather than a stock library. Directed Fernando Abdo at Superside on the design and rollout across menus, posters, coasters, postcards, signage, t-shirts, and tote bags.
The challenge: Four days isn't a branding timeline; it's a sprint. The trap with AI-assisted work is that the output looks generated — flat, generic, tonally inconsistent, the same five faces every brand uses. The job was to make AI-generated illustrations and imagery feel authored: like a real bar with a real point of view that had been around for years. That meant relentless prompt direction, ruthless curation (most generations got cut), and tight art direction across two genuinely different visual languages so the AI work read as Milkman, not as AI. AI made the speed possible. Direction made the work feel like something.
