Preston Zly — Visual Workflow Architecture
A workflow for an independent designer making limited edition footwear
Preston Zly is an independent luxury footwear label founded by Johanna Preston and Petr Zly. The brand produces small-batch, handcrafted shoes with a strong design point of view — bold silhouettes, distinctive colourways, and a hand-rendered illustration aesthetic built up over years of craft. The challenge wasn't the quality of the work. It was the production cost and time required to bring new colourways to market. Every variation required manual sketching from scratch, making it difficult to explore the design space quickly or maintain a pipeline of visual content for social and e-commerce.
The Challenge
Petr's hand-rendered colourway illustrations are a distinctive and recognisable part of the Preston Zly brand. They communicate the label's craft sensibility in a way that product photography alone cannot. But producing each illustration manually meant that exploring colourway options — a critical part of the design process — was slow and expensive. Every new colourway required starting from scratch. The brand also needed a consistent pipeline of editorial imagery for social media, e-commerce, and campaign use, and had no repeatable system for generating it.
The visual identity was strong. The production system wasn't keeping up with it.
What Was Built
The System
The engagement produced a two-part AI content workflow system that sits alongside the existing illustration practice rather than replacing it.
The first layer is a colourway generation system. Using ChatGPT with image generation enabled, Petr's existing hand-rendered sketches are used as style references. A prototype photograph of the physical boot provides the source of truth. From there, colourway variations can be generated rapidly using exact hex codes — preserving the hand-rendered aesthetic while dramatically reducing the time required to explore the design space. Multiple colourways can be assessed in a single session. Final renders are refined in Affinity Photo to ensure colour accuracy against the approved palette.
The second layer is an editorial image system. Using the same prototype photograph, the workflow places the boot in styled editorial contexts — moody studio, cobblestone street, marble floor — generating campaign-ready imagery without a full production shoot for every colourway.
Both layers are documented as a step-by-step standard operating procedure, written so that any member of the team can operate the system independently.
Deliverables
What was delivered
— AI colourway generation workflow using ChatGPT + existing style references
— Editorial image generation workflow for social, e-commerce, and campaign use
— Affinity Photo colour refinement process for production-accurate outputs
— Optional motion content workflow using Higgsfield for Reels and Stories
— Full standard operating procedure with prompt templates and troubleshooting guide
The Visual System
How the visual system works
Illustration-led, AI-assisted
The system is built around preservation, not replacement. Petr's hand-rendered illustration style — the specific line weight, rendering texture, and white background — is the anchor. The AI workflow uses that existing style as a reference input, which means every generated colourway remains recognisably part of the same visual language.
The colourway system produces two boots shown side by side on a white background, matching the existing illustration convention. The editorial system places the same boot in contextually appropriate scenes — dark studio, cobblestone, marble — at medium format depth of field, consistent with the brand's positioning as a luxury independent label.
The result is a visual pipeline that can move from new prototype to multiple colourway options to editorial imagery in a single working session, without requiring a shoot or a manual illustration for every output.
Outcomes
What changed
— Colourway exploration time reduced from days to hours
— A repeatable production pipeline for editorial content across social and e-commerce
— A documented system the team can operate independently
— Visual output that remains consistent with the hand-rendered brand aesthetic
