Ana Paula Hiriart

"Kid and Dog's Dreamland"

This short piece is inspired by my nephew and his dog, and it became a great playground to truly understand how different AI tools behave and how much creative decision-making is still required.

The Process

Dressed in Spring

Final project for the Midjourney Complete Guide: Master Gen. AI Image Creation certification. The course focused on producing higher-quality image variations in Midjourney and building complete scenes and visual narratives — which I then took a step further, turning the stills into a short, music-driven video with a cinematic finish.

Key Frames & Prompts

Six Midjourney stills used as start and end frames — each pair became one shot in Leonardo AI.

Every prompt locked the same girl, outfit, lighting and background — no camera shake, no sudden movement.

The Process

Photoshoots Built Entirely with AI

These projects were created entirely using AI-driven workflows, exploring tools such as Leonardo AI and Midjourney for image generation, combined with Adobe Firefly, Photoshop and Premiere Pro for post-production and video creation. All videos were developed from AI-generated frames and cinematic scenes built through prompt engineering, turning still images into cohesive visual narratives.

A traditional version of this content — booking talent, a location, a photographer and a full production and post-production team for a month — would typically run somewhere in the €4,000–7,000 range in Europe. Producing it with AI instead meant the company could skip that spend entirely, and still get content fully targeted to different markets and audiences.

The Process

A Brand Built Around Speed

Stamina is a visual brand proposal for a performance sports-sock brand for a client in Mexico. I ran light UX-flavoured market research alongside studying for my UI/UX specialization at the time, then built the brand book — logo, colour system, typography and a custom fox illustration — aimed at a young, active audience.

Nine Characters, Built Entirely by Hand

Handmade Character Proposal

Early character studies for the brand's monkey mascot, explored by hand before settling on the final illustration style — then developed further into a full set of personalities for the character to take on.

Final Packaging

Nine flavours across the full range — coffee, tea lattes and iced lemonades — each pouch illustrated with its own character and personality.

Lifestyle Images

The packaging in context — beach days and pool parties — showing how the character art holds up outside the studio.

A Master Template for Every Pitch

Built as a single master file covering everything a deck needs — covers, section breakers, content layouts, data and map components, an icon set and an imagery direction — so decks stay on-brand whether they're built for an internal review or an external pitch. A handful of slides are shown here as a sample of the full system.

Some slides were built directly in Adobe Illustrator for finer typographic and layout control, then brought together into a single master slide deck in PowerPoint — so the whole team could use, duplicate and present from one file. Generally, the 55+ slides in the full system cover:

• Cover and section-break slides, for opening a deck and moving between topics
• Standard content layouts — headlines, body copy, bullet and numbered lists
• Reusable container components, for callouts and short-form content
• Data and map components, for presenting markets, venues or metrics
• A custom icon and doodle set, one per market
• An imagery direction, with curated photography for every region
• Closing and "thank you" slides, in every language the team presents in

Relaunch Campaign

A full 360° campaign built for the relaunch of IKONO Madrid — concept, social, paid media, CRM and physical pieces, all tied to a launch event I helped take from concept through execution on the night itself.

See the full AI production workflow under Generative AI Production.

The scope covered the full loop: a conversion-oriented landing page, video editing and motion for the campaign itself, and a template system that let the same look and feel flex across different markets without rebuilding it each time. AI was used throughout — for ideation, production and adapting content faster across formats. All of it fed into a relaunch event that I helped bring to life from concept to the night of execution.

Campaign Overview & Phases

What the reopening needed to achieve, and the two-phase approach used to get there — building curiosity first, then going big on the comeback.

Core Messaging

The key idea and tone of voice guardrails that kept every piece of copy — from OOH headlines to Instagram captions — sounding like the same relaunch.

Copywriting

I also wrote the campaign copy, in English and Spanish, split across the two phases — a few of the lines that carried it:

Guidelines Overview

A quick-reference sheet — backgrounds, discount badges, title and subtitle treatment, and the bento-shaped containers used to frame every image across the campaign.

Landing Page

The conversion-focused landing page built for the relaunch.

Out Of Home

The same look and feel taken outdoors — a JCDecaux billboard announcing the reopening date.

Pop Up

The reopening announcement, adapted for both web and mobile.

Imagery Direction

Real people interacting with the space, captured for joy, fun, surprise and play — the emotional core the whole campaign was built around.

Paid Media

Story and feed formats built on the same three principles: grab attention instantly, keep messaging short, and prioritize performance over complexity. Beyond social, some ads also ran across OTA channels, including El Corte Inglés and Entradas.com.

On-Site Installation

Beyond the digital and OOH pieces, I designed a bilingual banner to invite passersby outside the venue itself, coordinated the print supplier, and was on site for the install.

One Concept, Hundreds of Market-Ready Ads

One campaign concept, built once in Figma and adapted across 5 cities, 2 languages and 4 audience segments — turning a single creative idea into hundreds of market-ready ads in days, not weeks.

Every campaign was split into two funnel stages, awareness and conversion, and each stage was tailored to three audience targets: couples, families and friends.

Summer Party Activation

A ticketed brand activation designed to introduce IKONO Madrid to a new audience — full creative direction, print and digital production, on-site content capture, and a parallel identity system built for main partner KAZU.

Social Media Results

Custom Holographic Merchandising

Personalised holographic stickers designed as event giveaways.

Live Totebag Painting — On-Site Activation

As part of the event, I ran a live totebag-painting activation as the on-site graphic artist, set up inside one of IKONO's rooms.

Out Of Home, Across Two Cities

Vienna — Museum Entrance

Mariahilfer Str. 54, Vienna. A large-format ad covering the IKONO Vienna entrance during construction, reading "Magic awaits behind this ad" — turning a closed door into an invitation instead of a dead end, and keeping the brand visible while the space itself was out of action.

Barcelona — Arenas Shopping Center Takeover

A full takeover of every advertising surface across Arenas: digital MUPIs, entrance screens, directional window vinyls, printed QR materials and a 4-metre suspended centrepiece — all production-ready assets adapted and prepared within two weeks, across multiple design programs, coordinated straight through to production.

IKONO City Tote Bags

Seven tote bags designed to be sold at the entrance of IKONO museums in Madrid, Barcelona, Vienna, Rome, Copenhagen, Berlin and Budapest. Each bag included acrylic fabric paints so kids could colour it in, and the bags were also given away at brand activations and in exchange for visitor reviews.

Design: 100% designed and illustrated by me in Adobe Illustrator, in a black-and-white doodle style that brings each city to life through its landmarks. The artwork was prepared as SVG files for print.

Production: I coordinated pricing, suppliers and delivery times with printers in each country, together with each museum's marketing specialist, and adapted the file formats to every printer's requirements.

Hand-Painted Denim

Inked Jackets started as a personal hobby and grew into a small business — hand-painting custom denim jackets with acrylic paint and a varnish-sealing technique, entirely self-taught. Every jacket was designed and painted to order, based on what each client wanted: their pet, a favourite animal, a character, or something entirely their own.

The Process

The Designs

A range built entirely on client requests — pets, animals, characters, and the occasional fan-art piece.

Worn

The finished jackets, out in the world.

Building a Brand From the Fabric Up

Gravity Co. was a personal streetwear brand I started a few years ago and ran entirely on my own — every design hand-illustrated in Procreate, then tested until I found the right supplier, fabric and print method (a heat-pressed patch, printed directly onto the fabric). Beyond the art, I handled every part of the business myself: sourcing, budgeting, packaging design, and shipping orders worldwide. In one month alone, the brand sold over 100 shirts. It paused during the pandemic and never quite picked back up, but it taught me more about running a brand than any single design project has — and it's something I'd love to revisit one day.

The Designs

Each design hand-illustrated from scratch in Procreate, then colour-separated and heat-pressed as a patch directly onto the fabric.

Worn

Product photography and real customers wearing the pieces — part of the same shoot-it-yourself approach that ran through the whole brand.

Stories Kids Learn From

KNOTION's library of children's stories needed covers and interior illustrations that could travel — across subjects, age groups and languages. I designed and painted the covers for each title, customising every one to its story and adapting it for different language editions, and illustrated the spreads inside. Everything was hand-painted on a Wacom tablet in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, moving between a clean vector style and a softer, realistic painted finish depending on the book. A finished cover took me two days — twice the speed of any other designer on the team.

The Covers

Each cover built around its own story and characters, then localised for every language edition — one consistent series look, many destinations.

Worlds to Explore

Landmark scenes painted for the travel stories — Cappadocia, Hagia Sophia and a classical Greek temple — in a textured vector style with hand-drawn line work.

Inside a Story

Spreads from an illustrated science story on the life cycle of the butterfly, painted in the softer, realistic style.

1,000 Grumpy Avocados

I led a cross-functional team of investors, marketers and developers to build a distinctive collection of 1,000 NFTs from the ground up. As creative lead, I owned the art direction, the social media marketing, the animations and the curation of every trait — designing one grumpy base character and a library of hand-drawn pieces that the code could combine into 1,000 different avocados. Working closely with the developers, I made sure the art system and the technical build fit together seamlessly, which let us establish the brand in the blockchain space and ship a varied, funny collection that resonated with its audience.

One Character, Four Skins

Everything starts from a single base: a small, permanently unimpressed avocado. Four skins — classic green, golden, red and pale — set the foundation every trait is drawn to fit.

Building the Trait System

The collection is a set of layers — skin, eyes, mouth, hat or hair, clothes or seed, back, object and background. Each trait was drawn to sit precisely on the base character, so any combination the code picks still reads as one finished illustration.

Rarity & One-of-Ones

Curating rarity was part of the art direction: three rare trait families — gold, rainbow and egg — are spread thinly across the collection, and ten one-of-one avocados break the style completely, from a low-poly vector version to solid gold, a child's drawing and a realistic render.

Icon System, Built on a Custom Grid

A 64×64px icon system built from scratch on a custom grid matched to the brand's own geometry — 70+ icons across three families, used everywhere from room signage in 7 museums to investor pitch decks.

A Custom Signage Design System

Two connected systems built for the same problem: museums aren't a single start-to-finish path, they're a space people have to find their own way through. Signage handles the practical side, while a storytelling grid at each room's entrance, translated into 7 languages, gives context before visitors even walk in.

I worked directly with the architecture team and the art director, measuring spaces in person to propose the right global sizing and make sure every safety and directional rule — emergency exits, do-not-enter zones, room numbers — was clearly marked without breaking the brand's visual language.

Grid & Systems

User Experience Navigation Maps

Branded 3D wayfinding maps designed to help visitors navigate seven IKONO venues across Europe — researched, drawn by hand and tested on-site before rollout.

The Process

Custom Piece for a Medical Office

A large-scale, hand-drawn illustration of the muscles of the human back, custom-made for a medical office — worked entirely freehand in fine-liner ink and charcoal.

The Process

The challenge was threefold: the complexity of human anatomy itself, keeping the fine-liner shading consistent across a piece this size, and the sheer physical work of drawing at 1.80 × 2 metres — but it was a good reminder of why I love art.

Drawn With an Everyday Pen

A series of animal portraits drawn freehand with a standard ballpoint pen — no references copied and no digital tools, just line, pattern and a lot of patience. The pieces were created for an art exhibition, where the collection sold out almost entirely in its first week.