Tailored, Part Two

The Brief That Assumed a Man

One dataset, two readings, and where AI actually belongs in the process.

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In the last piece I made a distinction between two kinds of designers: the ones who operate the software, and the ones who understand what a tool is for. I traced it across three instruments — QuarkXPress, the Adobe Creative Suite, and now AI. The argument was that the job never changes. The instrument does.

This is the part I didn’t show you: what that actually looks like on a real brief, with a real client, when the AI is doing exactly the work it’s good at and none of the work it isn’t.

The project was for Sennheiser, autumn 2023 into spring 2024. Product photography for the high-end audiophile lines — the HD 600 and HD 800 series, the reference-grade open-back headphones the brand built its reputation on. The job was to refresh the mood and situational imagery for digital and social. Straightforward on paper.

Then I read the brief properly.

The premise, in the client’s own words

Sennheiser’s brief was honest about its audience in a way that most briefs aren’t. The audiophile customer base, it stated, is mostly comprised of males — up to 95%. Detail-oriented, technically fluent, the kind of people who bring deep expertise from whatever other field they work in. The brand knew exactly who was buying.

Attached to the brief was something more valuable than a demographic: Sennheiser’s own consumer research. Years of it. Four distinct audiophile attitudes, each drawn from real interviews —

Love for Music. The listener for whom music is lifelong companionship.
Crave for Learning. The one who grows by sharing what he’s learned.
The Fun of Discovery. The explorer who never knows what he’ll come across.
Gadget Fascination. The one who wants to know how the sound is made, and why.

And underneath the attitudes, the insight that actually mattered. The research described the deep listening moment — headphones on, at home, at night — as something close to an internal dialogue. A process of emotional self-regulation. A personal bubble that provides a unique space to rest, think, and reflect. The research called it me-time, and it treated it as the real reason these products exist. Not the specifications. The feeling.

I want to be precise about what happened next, because it’s the whole point.

I didn’t do new research. I re-read the old research.

Here’s the thing about that beautiful insight: nothing in it is male.

Rest, reflection, self-regulation, the private space carved out of a loud life — none of that belongs to one gender. But every image the category had ever produced assumed it did. The man in the listening chair. The man on the commute. The 95% wasn’t just describing who bought the headphones; it had quietly become the template for who got to be pictured using them. The demographic fact had hardened into a visual default, and nobody had gone back to check whether the default was doing any real work.

So the art-direction decision wasn’t “let’s add women to reach women.” That’s a marketing tactic, and a shallow one. The decision was smaller and, I think, sharper: the insight is gender-neutral, so the imagery should be too. I took Sennheiser’s own personas — the piano player, the traveller, the one who craves the discovery — and I asked who else, honestly, they could be. The research didn’t have to change. Only the assumption sitting on top of it did.

This is what the discipline is for. Not generating a new answer. Reading the existing material closely enough to notice the unexamined thing in it.

Where the AI comes in — and where it doesn’t

I’ve been building toward a specific claim across both these pieces, and here it is stated plainly: AI is an instrument for one stage of the process, not all of them. On this project you can see the boundary exactly.

The research — Empathize and Define, if you want the Design Thinking vocabulary — was human, and it stayed human. Sennheiser’s four attitudes, the listening moments, the me-time insight, the decision to re-read male-coded data as gender-neutral: none of that went through a model. It couldn’t have. That’s judgment, and judgment is the part you don’t outsource.

Then comes Ideate. This is where Adobe Firefly earned its place.

I needed to see the personas before I could shoot them. A woman with wired headphones knitting on a train. An Eastern European brunette at a piano in a home studio. A figure seen from behind, autumn scarf, headphones, walking. A commuter on the U-Bahn. A woman on a lake pontoon. In the old workflow, these are mood-board scavenger hunts — days of stock libraries and rough sketches to test whether a scenario even holds together. With Firefly, I storyboarded every scenario as fast as I could describe it, and threw most of them away just as fast. That’s the correct use of the tool: not to make the final image, but to think in pictures quickly enough that the exploration is free.

Firefly is also, not incidentally, built inside the ecosystem I already work in and trained on licensed content — which for a real client deliverable is not a footnote. It’s the difference between a prototype you can stand behind and one you can’t.

And then Prototype, in the literal photographic sense. The storyboard became a shoot. The outdoor scenario went to a real location — Steg Percha, on Lake Starnberg — for the emotional register you only get from actual light on actual water. The studio work went the other direction entirely: black backgrounds, 45-degree angles, clean product shots of the 800-series hardware, built for the technical authority the audiophile audience demands and rewards. Two disciplines, one continuous line of thinking, with the AI having done its job three steps upstream and then stepped out of the frame.

The job doesn’t change

QuarkXPress set type. Adobe unified the studio. Firefly lets me storyboard a scenario in the time it takes to write a sentence. Three instruments, three different problems, decades apart.

What carried the Sennheiser project wasn’t the tool. It was reading a brief closely enough to find the assumption hiding inside good research — and knowing which part of the work an instrument can take off my hands, and which part it can never have. The model made the personas visible. It didn’t decide they should be women. That decision came from the same place it always has.

The craftsman picked up another instrument to master. The judgment is still his to keep.

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Alex Revnic is a senior graphic designer and art director based in Munich. Art direction and photography for the Sennheiser audiophile lines, autumn 2023 – spring 2024.