Responses by Emma Damiani, designer, and Malte Gruhl, art director and creative director, Studio Gruhl.
Background: Vitamin brand Performula creates hyperpersonalized supplements in the form of daily powder sachets specifically tailored to your body. Unlike the one‑size‑fits‑all products you see on the market, these formulas are developed based on your blood markers for truly individualized support. The target audience ranges from athletes to top managers—pretty much everyone for whom optimal day‑to‑day mental and physical performance is important to their success.
Design thinking: We like to create very bold work that drills into a category and its symbols. Our aim is always to evoke emotions and build memories by tapping into clear design references: silver foil in packaging as a symbol of futurism, a strong use of blue for the science aspect and jewelry‑like 3‑D assets combined with a very clean yet contemporary graphic‑design language.
Challenges: Creating the ingredient visuals. We produced custom 3‑D visuals derived from microscopic analyses of the actual ingredients and reinterpreted them to communicate elegance and beauty. Inspired by fine jewelry, each sculptural form elevates these images far beyond conventional scientific 3‑D visualizations.
Favorite details: We’re especially proud of how we bridged the gap between science and luxury in a way that still feels visually cohesive and creates an interesting dynamic. Rather than focusing too much on scientific accuracy, we created a visual language that drew inspiration from science while feeling elegant, aspirational and futuristic. This approach enabled us to deliver a rich library of various assets, extending the usual brand kit you would see in a classic rebrand.
New lessons: There was definitely a learning curve in developing our own workflow for generating the AI imagery used in the brand system. Over the last couple of months, we have developed a strategy that lets us guarantee visual and aesthetic consistency across all generated images. It’s still not exactly where we want it to be, but we’ve reached a point where we can give clients a real appetite for art direction, showing them the clear benefits of custom imagery over, for example, free or low‑cost stock material.
Visual influences: We try to draw from influences that resonate on a more emotional level. Our visual direction was shaped by references that people could intuitively connect with. We paired the elements with a minimal graphic system to create something both elevated and accessible—even to those without a design background.
Browse Projects
