How to Design a Brand Mascot with AI, No Illustration Skills Required
A design studio cofounder's seven-step walkthrough, prompts included: references in Figma, rough concepts in Krea, cleanup and new poses in Nano Banana 2, then posters that prove the character is a system, not a one-off generation.
How to design brand mascots with AI (krea). No experience needed
Hi, I'm Alex, cofounder at @relate_studio. In this tutorial, I'll walk you through how we design brand mascots with AI: finding first concepts in Krea, refining the best direction in Nano Banana 2, generating new poses and angles, and turning everything into a concept you can scale.
A lot of brand designers shy away from projects like this because mascot design feels like something that requires strong illustration or 3D skills. In reality, AI tools alone can already get you to a result strong enough to present to a client and detailed enough for a motion designer to use as reference for a full 3D build. For the sake of this article, I will show you how we made the following mascot for the Yoru project
1. Gather references and define the mascot
Start by collecting references in Figma and deciding what kind of personality, proportions, materials, and overall style you want. For this mascot, we wanted a stylized 3D anthropomorphic character. Most of my references were 3D, but I also included a few 2D examples. One of them actually had more personality than any of the 3D references.
Don't limit yourself to