2025

Design Awards Silver Winner - Yiqi Zhao

Deepcake Staring Twin

Entrant Company

Yiqi Zhao

Category

Decorative Items - Cushions

Client's Name

Deepcake

Country / Region:

United States

Transforming Digital Ideas into Physical Product Branding
The Staring Twin IP series showcases a revolutionary human-AI approach to turning digital IP concepts into tangible products at scale in a low-cost way. This innovative strategy empowers freelance designers to leverage AI for marketing and business growth, highlighting the transformative power of technology in creative fields. With a following of over 180,000 across various platforms, the project demonstrates how Yiqi's initial sketches can evolve into generative character designs. These designs are quickly scaled into products like pillows and seamlessly integrated into social media stories, driving significant online engagement.
The project emphasizes the potential of community collaboration in enhancing the creator ecosystem, ensuring that the benefits of innovation are accessible to general public interests at targeted platforms. This synergy is particularly empowering for social media creators, and individuals without formal design training. By adopting Yiqi's approach, creators can use AI to transform art into marketable products, tap into media trends, and monetize their digital presence through commissions.
Staring Twin has a base diffusion model integrated into a 50 AI generated sketch based on only one initial hand drawn sketch. The character features and form factors are preserved, while texture, color, style, proportion and mediums are free of exploration. After this co-creating process, highly opinionated generations are brought into traditional DCC tools for post processing. The campaign of pillows then posted and tested its volume on social media platforms to A&B test the most viral one. This approach not only preserves unique brand identities and design aesthetics but also enhances them. Elements such as color patterns, textures, and character IP are maintained, ensuring that each product remains true to its original artistic vision, the unique design value is preserved in the pre-trained model. Yiqi's Staring Twin IP series stands as a testament to the controversial yet transformative potential of AI in the creative sector, offering a blueprint for how digital ideas that are unique to artists can be effectively translated into physical products. This project not only celebrates innovation but also paves the way for a more inclusive and dynamic creative economy.

Credits

Yiqi Zhao
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