"Designers can look at a piece of creative and know ""it's Braun"", computers will look at the same and see only shape and fonts.

We are years away from computers that think creatively for themselves but with the right guidance we discovered deep learning algorithms can be trained to mimic a broad set of design rules while imagining new and novel shapes. Braun's minimalist style, so transformative for industrial design over the last century, was an ideal candidate.

Our intent? We needed to teach our AI how to speak Braun - to understand nuances of form and layout, right and wrong combinations and aesthetics that a human designer takes for granted.

The ambition is to create an extension to the Adobe Suite that empowers designers around the world to do what they do best, design - not to create a plethora of formats and outputs of a core campaign vision.

"A broad selection of Braun's vast catalogue of work was refined down to core shapes and geometric compositions. These shapes created an alphabet, a visual code, or language, that encompassed the totality of the Braun design ethos.

A generative adversarial network - two neural networks competing - were trained on these letters and a series of tests were run to see if new and novel shapes could be created. The stunning success of this initial run led to a more sophisticated approach designed to create new objects and new layouts in separate stages, generating millions of new elements and compositions.

An extension was developed for InDesign to read the current composition of a layout, temporarily converting it to a simplified format, which was then matched to appropriate suggestions from DesignLanguage.ai using another deep learning technique. If approved by the Designer, this suggestion was then applied to the elements on the page.

With Adobe's support we are now moving into an executional phase of the process using AI and traditional computer vision techniques to filter the new elements being created and in turn informing the design of the initial alphabet itself. "

"Following robust testing across a multitude of experiments, formats, inputs and outputs the expectation is to roll the Adobe extension out to Designers around the world as well as Braun's network of designers as another tool in their Adobe quiver of creative assets.

This is expected to result in an increased efficiency in production and development of campaign assets - freeing the Designers time to focus back up the chain on concepts and work that adds real value to the Brand and its bottom line.

In time, the AI will be taught new languages for different brands, with a plan that in future, all Brands will have their own bespoke language included within its lexicon creating efficiencies at scale