Harold Wilson

Systems & Workflows

The work above is the output. This is the part that makes the output repeatable: the process, the tools, and the judgment behind them.

AI compressed execution, not direction. Anyone can generate an image now; the harder problem is building a system a team can actually run on: a workflow with the right checkpoints, a template that holds up across a hundred variations, and someone who can tell which output is the one worth finishing. That's the work below.

Where AI actually belongs

Every project in the case-study grid is tagged with where it sits on this spectrum. Not every job needs the same amount of AI, and knowing which end of it a job calls for is most of the judgment.

  • Predominantly AI-produced

    AI generation carries the bulk of the finished asset, with hand curation and retouching to get it there.

  • Hybrid: AI + traditional

    AI generation and traditional craft (compositing, illustration, 3D) each do real work in the same finished piece.

  • AI: exploration & acceleration only

    AI speeds up concepting or pre-production, but the finished deliverable is traditional craft, not an AI output.

  • Traditional craft: AI wasn't the tool

    AI wasn't the right fit for the job, and the finished asset says so.

Systems I've Built

  • A custom-trained generation model and prompt-template library that let a five-person team hit a fixed, high-volume image target on a hard conference deadline, with a tracking system to benchmark output and keep quality consistent across the team.
  • A character-consistency model built from an existing illustration style, plus the training deck and network-wide rollout that got other designers using it correctly without me in the room.
  • A production-tracking workflow for benchmarking daily output across a generation team, used to hit volume targets that no manual process could reach on the same timeline.

Where I Teach

Most of the leadership that's mattered in my career happened off the org chart: lunch-and-learns, workshop decks, one-on-one walkthroughs with designers who were nervous about a new tool. That's not a side effect of building these systems, it's half the job. A workflow nobody can run without me isn't a system, it's a bottleneck.