Side B Coffee

Invited to give a guest lecture for Pratt Institute's Digital Marketing Program, I walked students through how I used Lovart to build a brand identity system for a conceptual coffee shop, and more importantly, the thinking that made the tool work.

The concept: a coffee shop where vinyl records serve as the main visual element, expressing the idea of sharing music while sharing coffee. ChatGPT helped expand the concept and suggested the name Side B Coffee. I passed a selection of ideas to Lovart as context, aiming for a brand that felt community-oriented, warm, elegant, and lively.

The first batch of logos was not good. One option showed potential with a clean, minimal line style, so I used it as a starting point and refined it further with a playful, hand-drawn approach. At that point, text prompts were no longer enough to describe stylistic nuances, so I switched to reference images.

Once the logo direction was confirmed, Lovart generated a 10-page brand identity system in about two minutes, with surprisingly strong consistency across typography, color, and layout. From there I moved into derived applications.

Not every generated application worked. To sort them, I built a simple filtering system: designs that met my criteria moved to the left; the rest went right.
A design had to meet at least one of the following.

The final VI package was still far from mature commercial use, but remarkably effective for idea exploration. In creative content generation, AI enables speed, scale, and rapid iteration. What matters most is not how many visuals are generated. It is how well they inspire you, and how well you judge the results.

AI lowers production barriers and accelerates output. In this context, taste becomes more valuable than ever. AI is a tool. The user's taste determines its capabilities and its limits.