Design automation · benchmark 01
A closed design request was pulled out of the Service Dashboard together with the files that were actually delivered to the client. The brief was then handed to an automated board renderer with no sight of the finished artwork — same nine boards, same pixel dimensions, same look family. Both sets are below, side by side, so the gap is a thing you can look at rather than a claim.
Nothing here is paraphrased. These are the stored field values on the ticket, including the free-text brief the account manager typed.
DV Ribbon: 192h x 1344w OOT / Outfield Walls: 192h x 1008w Loge: 90h x 16768w (times 2) Club: 90h x 11360w Reserve Left & Right Fascia: 90h x 9600w Reserve Middle Fascia: 90h x 15060w Pavilion Fascia: 40 x 4000 Pavilion Insert: 160h x 960w
That is the entire brief. Eight dimensions and a job title. No copy direction, no colour, no reference to the look it belongs to, no note about what the boards are for. The word CHARGE! appears nowhere in the ticket — it comes from the title.
Which is the finding, not a complaint: the ticket carries the geometry and almost none of the intent. Everything a designer needs beyond the sizes is being carried somewhere the ticket cannot see.
Frames lifted straight out of the delivered revision-4 files. This is the benchmark — the standard the automated set has to be judged against.
Delivered file · frame at 4.0s
Delivered file · frame at 4.0s
Delivered file · scroll sideways · the word and the mark alternate along the run
The fascia is the whole lesson. At 100:1 the designer did not stretch one word across the board — the lockup repeats along the run with the mark dropped between copies, so the message reads from any seat instead of only from centre field. That decision is consistent across every long board in the set, and it is a rule, not a taste call.
Same nine sizes, rendered to the exact pixel dimensions the ticket asked for. The interlocking club mark is the client's own, taken from approved content in their folder — in live running it arrives as a supplied asset, and nothing about it is invented here.
Scroll sideways · shown at roughly a fifth of true width
Matched dimensions, no scaling tricks. Judge the three that can be judged at full size.
Delivered
Generated from the brief
Delivered
Generated from the brief
Delivered
Generated from the brief
| Dimension | Result | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Board matrix | match | All nine boards at the exact dimensions in the brief, including both Loge runs. |
| Long-board behaviour | match | Everything past roughly 12:1 tiles the lockup rather than stretching it, mark alternating between repeats — the same call the designer made. |
| Club mark | match | The client's own mark, recovered from approved content in their folder. |
| Palette | close | Navy bed, saturated club blue, white type, ice highlights on facet edges. |
| Typeface | substitute | Heavy condensed grotesque standing in for the licensed face on the delivered files. Correct weight and proportion, wrong licence — a real run needs the studio font installed. |
| Motion | not attempted | The delivered files are ten-second animations. These are stills. Motion needs a render lane and hardware that does not exist here yet. |
| Copy | inferred | Taken from the job title because the ticket carries no copy field. It happened to be right. On a job where the wording lives in the source email, it would not be. |
| Time | 31s | Nine boards, 79 million pixels, one pass, no hardware acceleration. The ticket itself ran four revision rounds across four weeks. |
The board-size matrix, the aspect rule, the asset placement and the export naming are deterministic. That is the highest-volume, best-specified part of the work, and it does not need a model to guess at it.
Nothing here invented a look. The look family was read off approved content the client had already signed off. A cold "make me something new" is a different and much smaller slice of the volume.
The brief field holds geometry and nothing else. Copy, direction and reference links are arriving somewhere the ticket cannot store them. That is one intake column, and it gates everything downstream.