More visuals from the rejected brand direction I shared earlier.
Really good to see this direction resonating with so many of you. It was one of our favourite explorations to build, from the narrative behind it to the visual world that brought it to life.
Great work doesn’t always make the final cut, and sometimes the reason has little to do with the quality of the direction.
Curious why this one was rejected? I’ve shared the story in the first comment✨
Back in 2016 I made a lot of cinemagraphs for HBO.
They took a surprising amount of work. Masking footage, finding the right loop, freezing parts of the frame and getting everything to transition cleanly.
I’ve had an idea for a simpler cinemagraph tool kicking around in my head ever since.
About a month ago I built another small tool using Toolcraft as the starting point, so yesterday I wanted to see if it could handle this idea too.
A few hours later I had a working cinemagraph editor.
Drop in a video → find your loop → choose how it loops → paint the areas you want to keep still → export.
Basically the workflow I used 10 years ago, condensed into a few controls.
Still rough around the edges, but kind of wild to finally build a tool I’ve been thinking about for a decade.
The masking-and-looping history is exactly why a simpler cinemagraph workflow feels valuable; the tricky part is preserving a seamless transition without making the tool feel like a timeline editor. Curious direction for an AI-assisted app.
→ The wordmark sits at eye level, spanning the full width, cutting across the middle of the space. Here the type claims the room, and because the interior is symmetrical and calm, it can take the weight.
→ A high-contrast serif against soft plaster. The architecture is all curves and matte texture, so the type brings the only sharp edges in the frame. Contrast without adding a single element.
10 down, 20 to go. A third of the way.
Template by Hariom, adapted and customized by me. Interior imagery generated with AI.
Contrast without adding a single element is such a clean way to put it. With 20 more of these to go, are you locking the typographic approach per venue type, or is Ofelia's centered serif going to be the constant across the whole 30?