Hey there,
Last week I wrote about the gravitational pull of productive flow, that difficulty of stopping when the feedback loop between building and seeing results gets tight enough. This week the same thing happened, but in an entirely different domain.
The Pull
It started on Wednesday. I was creating content, needed some visuals, and remembered a picture of myself I'd made a while back through a nano banana cam filter. The kind that renders you in a Wes Anderson aesthetic, complete with corduroy blazer and a library that belongs in The Grand Budapest Hotel.
What if we could do more with that? I started feeding Claude prompts for image generation through Gemini, just to see what would come back. Within hours I wasn't making images for a blog post anymore. I was building a world.
Each image suggested the next one. The colour palette kept converging on warm ambers and muted greens. Compositions gravitated toward that Wes Anderson symmetry, that centred framing where everything feels simultaneously precise and playful. By Wednesday evening I was supposed to have stopped working. Instead I was deep into what was rapidly becoming the entire visual identity of Askara Solutions. Thursday the same. Friday too. Even the last minutes before sleep, lying in bed with my phone, generating one more image because the previous one had sparked something I couldn't let go of.
The same obsessive energy I described last week with Conrad's skill files, just pointed at a completely different canvas.
When Flaws Become Features
When you generate video with current AI tools, the results are beautiful but unmistakably artificial. People move in slightly uncanny ways. Objects behave according to physics that doesn't quite exist. Machines make motions that are mechanically impossible. Most people see this as a limitation, something to work around until the technology improves.
But within the retro-futurist genre, these artifacts become assets.
In one video, a printer spits out paper with such force that it smashes a newspaper right out of someone's hands. In another, a perpetual motion device made of brass gears and glass tubes performs rotations that defy every law of mechanics, looping endlessly in ways that are mesmerising precisely because they couldn't happen in reality. These moments don't break immersion. They enhance it. Because when you're already in a world where mid-century aesthetics meet impossible technology, where analogue instruments somehow perform digital miracles, the weird physics of AI-generated video becomes part of the charm.
Everyone in the AI content space is chasing photorealism, trying to make generated media indistinguishable from reality. But there's an entirely different creative direction available if you lean into the strangeness rather than fighting it. Build a world where the flaws are features. Where the uncanny becomes whimsical. Where the limitations of the technology actively serve the story you're telling.
The retro-futurist aesthetic gives permission for things to be delightfully wrong, and that permission transforms a technical shortcoming into a distinctive creative advantage.
Full Circle, Sharper Tools
Almost exactly a year ago, Simon and I were deep in the branding work that would turn Certaify into Askara Solutions. Names, logos, house styles, visual coherence. I got excited about the same things then, explored it all with ChatGPT, and got some first inspirations down. The tools were vastly inferior to where we stand now.
Coming back to this same creative territory with Claude co-work and Gemini is like returning to a familiar trail after a growth spurt. The landscape is the same but you're seeing it from higher up. What took days of careful prompting a year ago now flows in hours. Ideas that felt aspirational last March are achievable in an afternoon.
The branding instincts I developed back then didn't disappear when the tools weren't ready. They waited. And now they're combining with capabilities that didn't exist twelve months ago, producing something neither could have created alone.
Integration
We're heading into our final build cycle before the accelerator programme concludes, with the pitch event in Tallinn at the end of it. The whole team is all hands on deck to deliver real, demonstrable products. And those products are about to step out in a visual identity that feels genuinely ours.
A year of invisible foundational work that doesn't photograph well. And now, right as we prepare to present it all, a world emerges to wrap it in. Not planned. Not forced. Just the creative process returning what you need at the moment you need it, in a form you couldn't have predicted.
The final cycle starts now.
With care, Ben