Generative Now was yet another opportunity to work with Lightspeed, a global venture capital firm and frequent client of Made by Things. Lightspeed has backed several AI startups including foundational model companies, infrastructure, enterprise tools, and vertical applications. Notable AI investments include: Mistral, Character.ai, Stability AI, Hugging Face, Reka A, Vanta, Sana Labs, and Glean.

Because they play such a large role in the AI world, Lightspeed wanted to create a podcast where they can platform key figures in tech. As a brand, Lightpseed tends to keep things minimal in order to let their partner brands shine. Without their own in-house creative team, they lean heavily on Made by Things for developing branding for projects like Generative Now. AI is an interesting topic to create branding around, because there’s very little pre-established imagery to connote the subject matter. This is both exciting and challenging during the branding process. We leaned into the cache of the Lightspeed brand by building the imagery around the “L” icon, but placed it in a sort of liminal digital space.

Lightspeed also regularly publishes blog posts on AI-related topics and taps into my expertise to create editorial illustrations. Since photography often falls short in capturing the broader meaning of these stories, illustration becomes a powerful tool to convey deeper concepts.