Early in 2024, Esquire Advertising launched their newest product – Unmasked. Unmasked is a B2B product intended to help business owners access more potential leads through formerly untapped web traffic. To learn more, click the link below!

The process started with what was more or less a blank check – we were developing a new product called Unmasked, and we needed a logo and some basic branding for the product launch. To start, I experimented with several basic mask shapes and font combos (picture 1) to get the ball rolling and give management some directions to go for / coax some responses out that could provid more clear ideas as far as the visual direction they’d like to take the product. Although I got some good feedback initially, leadership expressed an interest in using AI to generate some more concepts.

Generally, I am not a fan of using AI for creative projects for a myriad of reasons, primarily its unethical assimilation of other artists’ work into the libraries that train the AI models. Because of this, I made sure that any AI usage solely served as general inspiration for a handmade final result. Using Chat GPT, I generated a few dozen general concepts and consulted with the other members of my team to try and establish which aesthetic and colors we were leaning towards (picture 2). 

Based on feedback from leadership, I moved closer to establishing a final color palette and logo after experimenting with different shapes, styles, and colors (picture 3). After ironing out some of the better concepts, we settled on a final design and built out several different versions for use in different circumstances (picture 4).

Esquire officially announced Unmasked on February 1 (picture 5). Want to see more of my work, including smaller projects which don’t make it on the site? Check out my instagram by clicking the button below.