Title: Lumiq — Designing a Full Brand Mascot System in 48 Hours (First Time Using Recraft)

The brief

When I came across Recraft's mascot design challenge, the ask was simple but demanding: invent a character, give it a name, a personality, and a world — then prove it could travel across a poster, a sticker pack, packaging, and social content while staying unmistakably itself. The catch? I had never used Recraft before, and I had under 48 hours to deliver.

The concept

I built Nova, the mascot for a fictional AI productivity brand called Lumiq. Nova is a small glowing orb made of light and flowing data streams — equal parts clever and caring, designed to feel like a companion rather than a logo. The goal was a character that could communicate warmth and intelligence at once, in a category usually dominated by cold, sterile tech branding.

The process

I started with broad character exploration, generating multiple directions before locking in Nova's final look. From there, every application — the sticker pack, poster, social post, packaging mockup, and wordmark — was built to keep Nova visually and emotionally consistent, using a defined color system (deep navy, electric violet, soft white, warm gold) across every touchpoint.

The biggest challenge was technical: partway through, I hit a tool limitation that meant I couldn't carry over a direct image reference for later assets. I solved it by writing increasingly precise, descriptive prompts to recreate Nova's exact visual signature by hand-tuned language instead of image-to-image generation — which actually became one of the most valuable skills I picked up from this project.

The result

A complete brand mascot system: original character, name-logo, sticker pack, poster, packaging mockup, and social content — all shipped and submitted within the challenge deadline, as a complete beginner to the tool.

What this proved to me

That I can take an unfamiliar tool, an ambiguous brief, and a tight deadline, and still deliver something cohesive and professional. This project is now the foundation of how I approach brand and character work — fast, intentional, and consistent under pressure.