ADC Digital Experience
The AI behind the 2019 ADC DiX Visual
AI stood at the center of ADC Digital Experience 2019, an event by Art Directors Club Germany. This year’s motto was “Let Go”, which saw creatives and digital experts presenting outstanding projects and outlining best practices for digital change processes. Sometimes it’s important to let go and take a break from the usual processes – and it was in this spirit that the banner was developed for the event.
The basis of our algorithm was the “VGG16” neural network, which was pretrained with over 1.2 million images from 1,000 categories. Our algorithm underwent 200 iterations in order to transfer the style of one image to the contents of another image. It took 2.5 hours to accomplish this on the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card, currently one of the best on the market. Altogether, we experimented with over 50 different style and content images.
The banner’s production was subject to an extremely tight time frame. By making the deliberate decision to carry out the creative process using intelligence augmentation (IA), the approach became very novel.
We had to find a common language between ‘designer’ and ‘data scientist’. It was important we did this so that we could translate the designer’s ideas into an algorithm that produced the desired results.
By the end, there were hundreds of images that had to be viewed, preselected, and processed by the illustrator. The task was complete after five days. Combining human intuition and decision-making with the help of a machine – that is, the intelligence-augmentation approach – worked marvelously. The visuals for ADC Digital Experience 2019 were delivered right on time.
