Overtime
Twelve evocative themes that expand our horizons, drive our desire to learn, explore, and push limits.
What happens when a studio treats its own curiosity as the client?
In 2023, generative AI was moving fast, DALL-E was everywhere and Midjourney had just launched. Our creative director came to me with an assignment: turn that moment into a studio project. As a brand studio that leans on stock photography constantly, we needed a real answer, not a hot take, to what AI could actually do for art-directed imagery, the kind of image we'd normally have to license or shoot.
Most agency AI experimentation happens quietly inside a single client project, justified after the fact by whatever it produces. Overtime flipped that order. We picked twelve abstract, emotional themes, Noise, Mistake, Vibration, Distortion, Energy, Turmoil, Love, Organic, Memory, Connection, Delicious, Evolution, and used AI and new design tools to see where each one led.
Overtime isn't trying to ship a product. It's R&D the studio runs on itself, a way to stay fluent in tools that move faster than most client timelines allow, so that fluency is already there the next time a real brief calls for it. View the full site at www.overtime.companypolicy.studio
Research first, prompts second
Before we opened a single prompt window ourselves, we spent time looking at what other people were already getting out of these tools, the images that were genuinely beautiful, and what seemed to be producing them. AI art direction wasn't obvious yet in 2023, so that research mattered as much as the experimentation that followed.
Only then did we turn to our own twelve themes. I contributed to the visual exploration on several of them and designed the UX/UI for the site itself, the system that lets Noise sit next to Love next to Distortion and still read as one studio's point of view instead of twelve disconnected experiments.