My Stance on AI
Every piece of work you see here was made by hand. By me.
No AI image generation. No AI illustration. No shortcuts dressed up as a service.
If you hire me to design something, I design it.
That means drawing it, building it, thinking through it, and making deliberate decisions about every part of it. It does not mean typing a prompt into a generator and handing you whatever comes out. That would not be design work. That would be curation of someone else's machine output, and it would not be worth what you are paying for.
When a client pays for a book cover, a brand identity, or a social media direction, they are paying for craft. They are paying for someone who understands visual composition, typography, colour and storytelling, and who applies all of that to their specific project. AI cannot do that work. It can produce images, but it cannot think about your project.
Using AI to complete work a client is paying for is not honest.
I do not think AI image generation is always wrong in every context. But using it to fulfil a paid client brief is a different thing entirely. If someone commissions an illustration, they are commissioning an illustration. Passing off machine output as hand-crafted work is just not something I am willing to do, regardless of how much easier it would make things.
There is also a practical reason. AI image tools are trained on the work of illustrators and designers who did not consent to that use. Profiting from that output while charging clients for "original illustration" would mean taking money from the client and taking value from the illustrators who never agreed to train the model. Neither of those feels right.
Every line, every layout, every decision is made by hand.
The Knight Errant book cover went through twelve full versions across several weeks. Every element of the illustration, the knight, the horse, the rose borders, the heraldic shields, the flames, was drawn as individual vector paths in Affinity Designer. The plumes on the helmet alone were redrawn twice because the first version was not good enough.
The Comet Core cover involved building an entire isometric conference room from scratch in vectors, placing five characters, and designing the typography to work at both full print size and 200-pixel retail thumbnail. That is the kind of work that goes into these projects, and there is no version of that process where a generator can replace it.
When you hire AEAN Studios, you get work that was actually thought about and actually made.
See the process for yourself
Knight Errant
Twelve iterations documented from first sketch through to final print-ready file, every decision explained.
Book Cover DesignThe Comet Core
A hand-built vector conference room, five characters, and a title designed to survive at thumbnail scale.
All ProjectsSelected Work
Every project in the portfolio was made by hand. The process documentation is there for the ones where it matters most to show it.
To be fully transparent about where it does appear.
I use Claude (an AI assistant made by Anthropic) to help with things like writing, research, building site code, and organising my thinking. This page was written by me and reviewed for accuracy, but I use AI tools for that kind of writing and admin support.
That is a different category of use entirely. Using a writing tool to help structure a document is not the same as using an image generator to produce a client deliverable and presenting it as original creative work. I think that distinction is important and worth being clear about.
Design and illustration work: entirely by hand, no exceptions. Admin, writing, and site tools: I use what helps, and I am honest about it.
If you have any questions about how a specific piece of work was made, just ask. I am happy to walk through the process for any project.
