Manual
Visual Electric
Visual Electric
Visual Electric
Technological breakthroughs have a history of enabling new forms of creative expression. Photography. Cinema. Electronic music.
Each of these mediums were born out of scientific discoveries — but their potential wasn’t unlocked until a great creative tool was also invented. The Kodak Camera. The Vitascope projector. The Moog Synthesizer.
Today we find ourselves at a similar moment at the dawn of generative AI — an innovation with unprecedented creative opportunity. We just need the right tools to unlock its potential.
In order to be truly useful, AI needs to augment our existing creative process with all its winding paths, switchbacks and u-turns. This requires tools that embrace ambiguity over certainty. Often our best new ideas appear in the margins. Many existing AI tools present results as answers to a user’s question, leaving little room to build, or tweak, or meander.
But the best tools become an extension of yourself. Like a musical instrument, they are something you play. You arrive at exciting, unexpected places through experimentation and improvisation.
Introducing Visual Electric.
Visual Electric is the first image generator designed for creatives — a generative canvas that facilitates the flow of ideas, so you can truly spread out and see where the tool takes you. It is designed to help give form to the vision in your mind's eye… or lead you to something even better.
We helped launch the brand with an experimental and playful brand identity that positions Visual Electric as a niche creative tool for curious visual experimenters.
Visual Electric complements the creative process, offering a departure from conventional chat-based interfaces and instead providing a rich, generative canvas that sparks inspiration and facilitates the open-ended and often messy development of visual concepts. The platform is designed to be a new frontier for creative individuals seeking an intuitive and dynamic tool to bring their ideas to life.
The interface encourages iterative development through its remix functionality, allowing users to refine their concepts by experimenting with different moods and colors. This adaptability empowers creators to explore a wide spectrum of styles and iterations until their vision is perfected.
Creative approach:
Visualizing the mind’s eye
The logo is a manifestation of the idea that Visual Electric helps people realize their creative vision. The process of imagining, visualizing, and seeing is central to the brand name and identity, and the logo brings the name to life through the form of an eye that changes form, blinks, and acts as a portal for stunning imagery.
A language of experimentation
Central to the brand identity is Visual Electric Sans—a bespoke typeface with various glyphs and icons inspired by electrical circuit symbols. The typeface is both minimalistic and engineered in its form, and playfully experimental in its behavior as it comes to life in motion—reinforcing the generative nature of the medium.
We collaborated closely with Visual Electric to curate a collection of predefined image styles that a user can select and apply to a prompt. Ranging from classic photographic aesthetics to diverse analog artistic mediums, we aimed to broaden the spectrum of image-making possibilities within the tool. By doing so, we inspire users to explore beyond the confines of digital hyper-realism, fostering a more diverse and innovative approach to AI-driven image generation.
Visual Electric is embraced by writers, musicians, designers, and creatives alike, empowering them to breathe life into their ideas. With its robust customization options and the happy accidents that arise through AI "hallucinations", the tool fosters a culture of innovation, inspiring creators to craft imagery that's less derivative and more surprising and original.
With thanks to Adam, Colin, Zach and the VE team for building such an incredibly fun tool.