The Cunning Folk
BRAND STRATEGY | VERBAL IDENTITY | VISUAL IDENTITY | MOTION | AI CASE STUDY | INDEPENDENT CONCEPT PROJECT
Everything here was made with the tools I’m afraid of.
Every image has a history. Touch them.
BRIEF
Brand a new independent coffee shop in Brooklyn — from market research to name to an identity that holds across signage, packaging, merch, and social, with a tone that felt authentic and unique.
THE PROBLEM
Loneliness is epidemic. Third spaces, the rooms outside home and work where people gather casually, have collapsed. Coffee shops answer with a broken trade-off: beautiful brands that feel cold, or warm communities that lack visual intention and craft. No one combines all three: genuine community, an unapologetic visual identity, and a brand that feels alive rather than generic.
That's the gap. That's where The Cunning Folk lives.
I answered a problem about loneliness with a brand about belonging, and pushed that belonging to the point of absurdity. The illogicality is where the fun lies. The Cunning Folk looks like a benevolent folk-horror cult you'd actually want to join.
A place that welcomes you completely, but doesn't ask permission to be itself.
STRATEGY
The Cunning Folk is my argument for imagination over sterility.
Five pillars hold it together. The Gathering, where belonging is real and earned; everyone comes in the same way, and from the first visit you're part of something already alive. The Duality, by day a place for personal work and focus, by night live music and ritual, the old rhythm of individual labour and collective fire. The Knowing, a room that operates by an older logic and knows something you don't; the staff remember your name, and the place feels like it was here long before you arrived. Earned Authority, everything here was chosen by someone who knows. Confidence without attitude. The Ritual, recurring nights, repeating songs, the same opening hour. Patterns make a place feel like home.
Most of the positioning is already in the name. In British folk tradition, the cunning folk were village healers and keepers of older knowledge, the ones who remembered how things worked before the modern world rationalized everything away.
The groundwork, in order: the strategy presentation → that sold the concept, then the visual territory board → that set the look.
IDENTITY
A warm folk-horror visual language built on a palette of cream, faded black, and ritual red, and an aesthetic that appears analog. The irony underneath it all is the point: none of this is real. And then there's the rabbit, who appears where you don't expect. She is the Cunning One, and she surfaces across the logo, the photography, and the artwork. What follows is how that language holds together across image, type, logo, and voice.
ART & PHOTOGRAPHY
The art is primarily woodblock print: high-contrast, hand-cut. The photography evokes a 1970s film register, grain, and faded colour. Golden hour runs through it on purpose, the threshold between day and night, the brand's duality held in a single frame.
LOGO
The logotype is set in Thorben, a display face with a hand-crafted feel that reads like a skeletal forest of bare trees. The rabbit, the Cunning One, works as the logomark. From there, the mark lives in different materials: Clean vector for everyday use. Hand-cut felt and carved wood to test the limits.
VOICE AND TYPOGRAPHY
The voice exploits the gap between what something seems to say and what it actually does. Simple words, cunning underneath. The typography holds it: Nayuki squished tight, a retro typface half-embracing and half-devouring each other, claustrophobic and strange. Garamond grounds the secondary text.
THE CRAFT
Using AI in the art world carries stigma. The sense is that if you're using these tools, you're either making garbage or betraying the craft. I felt that going in, and the fear isn't irrational. These tools arrive with a near-cultish fervour, a whole industry insisting you drink the Kool-Aid. There's good reason to be wary. But I couldn't help being curious about what they offered. What I found was better than I feared.
REFLECTION
The most valuable thing AI gave me wasn't artwork. It was a thinking partner. Before anything got made, I built a custom assistant that held the whole brand in its head and pushed back when I needed it to. The research, the strategy, the early visual direction all took shape in that back-and-forth. A process that broke things open more than once, and kept me from getting stuck.
Then there's the making, where most of the fear lives, and a lot of the excitement too. A new asset stream on tap is genuinely thrilling: custom raw material instead of plasticine stock libraries, and photoreal images and video that used to be out of reach. People love to say AI art is garbage, and left to its own devices, it is: generic, weightless, instantly forgettable. But that's a verdict on the steering, not the tool. Pushed hard, art-directed, and cut without mercy, it makes material strong enough to carry a brand. And it hasn't been a clean break from how the work always went. Designers have always pulled assets from outside sources: stock images/video and illustrations, typefaces. We choose and assemble them. AI is just another source in that pipeline. I'm still the designer, still making the choices. For now, at least.
My process has changed, and I've chosen to embrace that. When the tool is helping and the work is enjoyable, I lean in. When the AI starts doing too much of the steering, the work stops being fun, and I've learned to trust that. That feeling is my compass: it tells me when to take my hands off the wheel and when to grab it back. A flat "I don't use this stuff" rule would be easier to defend, but it would leave me behind in my own craft and close off possibilities that genuinely excite me. My goal is to reach somewhere new and better realize my visions, not replace what I find precious.
The cunning folk traded in the powers the rational world feared and called dark. AI is the dark art of this moment, and I won't pretend it's harmless. I used it anyway, eyes open. Fitting, for a brand built on it. Black magic, through and through.
THE DARK ARTS
Current versions as of June 2026. All of these ran on the pro or paid tiers. The quality and control differ noticeably from the free versions.
Claude Opus 4.8: research, strategy, naming, and the prompts behind the images. A custom project that held the whole brand. Thinking partner, worked out loud in voice mode.
Midjourney V8.1: aesthetic and unbridled experimentation. The Cunning One, the sigils, the carved-wood texture.
Nano Banana 2 (Gemini): control. Anatomy fixes, palette swaps, blank mockups.
ChatGPT Images 2.0: composition. Scenes, stylized mockups, torn paper, designs placed onto cups and bags.
Runway Gen-4.5: motion. Every video begins as a still built through the process above, then set in motion: the procession up top in 70s folk-horror style, the day-to-dark logo loop, and the fireside gathering that closes this out.
Recraft V4.1: design exploration. Poster layouts to push against.
Topaz: upscaling.
Figma Weave: testing ground. Image and video models compared. Other tools too, the details now foggy.
THE OLD WAYS
Illustrator: Logo illustration, final design assembly space.
Photoshop: colour locked, film grain, image edits, animated GIF logo, mockup design placement when AI fell short,
Premiere: Video refinement
Figma: moodboarding.
