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The Insight: Real creative direction starts where extraction ends. When you build visual architectures that belong to the community holding them, the work stops looking like a campaign and starts looking like history.
The Method: Whether directing independent documentary films, shaping sovereign media archives like The Nile Speaks, or designing living spatial commons, true creative direction treats the camera and the frame as instruments of preservation, not consumption.
The Invitation: Open for strategic creative direction and long-term collaborations that build permanent vessels for stories that refuse to be erased.
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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For the Contra x Envato Challenge, 'Human by Design', we built a brand identity and animated a promo video for 'Olo', an accessible crypto-trading platform.
To us, the core of this challenge wasn't about creating more content with AI, but about maintaining one clear creative direction. When drawing from a massive library of separate AI generations, stock footage, fonts, and music, a project can easily turn into a disjointed visual mess. Envato served as our entire toolkit - from AI-generated audio and assets to stock templates and typography.
But every asset still had to answer one crucial question: 'Does this truly feel like Olo'? Guided by the brand promise of making crypto trading accessible for everyone, everywhere, human instinct drove the entire creative process:
1. Curating over generating: Rejecting raw AI outputs that felt flat or out of context and ruthlessly filtering for what actually worked.
2. Building a visual identity: Applying custom effects to transform generic stock footage into a unified aesthetic.
3. Directing the flow: Motion design, precise typography, and timing every single movement to the rhythm of the music in After Effects. Envato Stock and AI tools dramatically accelerate the build process, but it’s the human creator who infuses the soul. It provides the ingredients, but art direction, taste, and instinct define the quality of the final result.
Toolkit: Envato (Envato AI, Stock, Fonts, Audio) + After Effects & Adobe Illustrator.
Brand DesignCreative Design Motion DesignAdobe After EffectsEnvatoenvatochallengeaftereffectsbranding
Nice🔥
Lately I’ve been experimenting with how sketching, AI and motion design can work together.
This logo was originally created for a project that never went into production, so I decided to give it a second life.
Sketch → references → Runway for the 3D exploration → After Effects for the final polish.
It’s exciting seeing how quickly ideas can evolve when you combine traditional design thinking with new creative tools.
When a film production company asks for a website without using photography, you're forced to tell the story in a completely different way. That's exactly what made designing for Mindsoup such an exciting challenge.
Mindsoup is a film production company that partners with bold artists to develop and finance films that challenge the way audiences see the world. Their productions have earned more than 80 international awards, including two Academy Award nominations.
The goal was to transform an analogue creative direction into an interactive digital experience. Instead of relying on film stills or photography, the website needed to communicate Mindsoup's identity through illustration, typography and motion while remaining clean, minimal and highly professional.
The visual language is built around a cinema auditorium, where every occupied seat represents a different story waiting to be told.
I illustrated the chairs by hand using markers and paint on acetate sheets, then recreated those overlapping layers digitally in Squarespace. As visitors scroll, the illustrations gradually unfold, creating a subtle narrative journey.
Finish Layer and other tools I used:
Layers — Recreated the physical acetate overlays digitally and became the foundation of the scrolling experience.
Block Transforms — Added subtle hover interactions to section titles.
Custom Font Uploads — Preserved the project's typographic identity.
Pin Block — Kept the central illustration anchored while the story unfolds around it.
Preview: https://pike-orca-875m.squarespace.com/
Password: mindsoup
Once live, it will be available at mindsoupfilms.com.
Thanks to the Mindsoup team for trusting me with their new digital identity—and thanks to Squarespace Circle for leading me to this challenge.
WOW!! love love love it!!
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