NO.
05.
High West
Early AI image project for a Park City whiskey brand. Built a still photography library sized to carry across website, ads, social, and whatever the team reached for next.
The brief
High West needed visuals for everything. Website, ads, social, the kind of volume a brand churns through monthly when campaigns are running across multiple channels at once. Hiring photographers for every new asset wasn’t sustainable, and stock photography didn’t fit the brand.
AI image generation was just becoming viable as a third option. This was the project that tested whether it could actually carry the weight.
The approach
Most of the work was figuring out what “High West” looked like in AI. The brand has a specific register. Warm, lived-in, Western without the costume. More whiskey-bar than dive-bar. Getting that out of Midjourney took prompt iteration, reference building, and a lot of throwaways before any of it started reading right.
Once the look was locked, production was the easier part. Bottle close-ups, fire and atmosphere shots, instrument and barrel still lifes, branded campaign visuals. All built from the same prompt foundation so they read as one library, not a dozen one-offs.
The work
A still image library High West could pull from across surfaces. Website hero shots, banner ads, social posts, campaign headlines layered on top of the same visual foundation.
The point of the experiment was to find out whether AI could carry a brand’s still image needs without losing the brand in the process. The library answered that. And the workflow it produced became the playbook for every brand-side AI project I’ve taken on since. Set the visual register first. Build the library second.
— The work
