Industry: Media

Interactive Visual Essay for the New York Times

Giorgia Lupi turns the creative process into a looping, hand-drawn argument for taking the detour.

Pentagram and Giorgia Lupi created a digital visual essay for The New York Times examining what human intuition, iteration and imperfection contribute to creative work in the age of AI. The piece uses sketches, process diagrams and a colorful hand-drawn animation to contrast nonlinear discovery with generative AI’s optimized paths.

Insights

In the visual essay for The New York Times, Giorgia Lupi uses the story of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue as an entry point into uncertainty and improvisation. Pentagram frames these qualities as part of creative discovery rather than steps to optimize away.
The closing animation makes that argument visible: the line runs directly from the brief into listening and immersion, then loops, branches and doubles back. The structure of the drawing becomes a model of the team’s iterative process.
Sketches and early visual tests expose the decisions behind the finished essay. Pentagram describes drawing and looking as a feedback loop, connecting the piece’s argument about craft to the actual process material it shows.
The essay’s position on AI is conditional. Pentagram says the team sometimes uses it after the creative direction is resolved, for implementation at scale; the distinction is between automating execution and handing over exploratory judgment.