Generative portraits for IBM

Published by Tim on Tuesday November 8, 2022

Last modified on September 30th, 2025 at 17:40

A few months ago, I had a call with a sympathetic team from Swift.co agency in Portland. They approached me based on generative portraits I posted a few years ago. Swift.co works for IBM and the request was for a social media campaign to feature creative tech personalities on IBM’s channels. The idea was to apply the design system of my generative portraits to those of the featured personalities. I took on the project and started making it happen. First I rebuilt the code of the portrait series cleanly with Processing and then, in the next step, developed many dozens of variations of motion patterns. Early on I realized a problem: The size of the team in Portland and the time difference between the U.S. and Germany made this project very challenging in terms of communication. Therefore, i was looking for a solution that would keep the communication effort as lean as possible. So I came up with a process that would end up with many variants to choose from. I wrote a script that launched a process that generates about 100 renderings for a supplied image template. Swift’s art directors could then curate and select the variations. We had to do some fine-tuning in the beginning, but in the end, every batch was a hit. I am very happy with the result and especially with the many learnings from the project. Thank you Swift and thank you IBM. I hope we will work together again soon. You can see the visuals on IBM’s social media channels.