For otto.de, a small team produced homepage teasers across product categories and campaigns. The process was highly manual: gather a briefing, build in Photoshop, rely on implicit knowledge about brand rules that lived primarily in one or two people. When those people weren’t available, quality suffered. Not because substitutes were less capable, but because the knowledge wasn’t written down anywhere.

The project we called “Teasd” started from this problem. It came out of work with the brand management team at Otto and was developed as a concept and prototype. It was never fully implemented, most likely because the thinking was ahead of where tools and workflows were at the time.

The first iteration replaced the manual Photoshop workflow with a browser-based editor that had the brand essentials already baked in: the Otto color palette, spacing rules, typography, and storytelling structure. A designer opening the tool no longer had to know which brand conventions applied to homepage teasers. The tool enforced them by default, allowing the focus to shift from constructing to composing.

The implicit knowledge that had lived in individual people was now in the system. Anyone could produce on-brand teasers without first learning the unwritten rules.

The second step, developed as a vision document, pushed the idea further. Instead of a designer composing teasers one by one, the system would take a briefing and source material and generate multiple variants automatically, each conforming to the codified rules. The designer’s role would shift entirely: not construction, not even composition, but curation and judgment.

From the generated variants, the designer would select, refine if needed, and deploy directly to the production system, including as A/B or multi-variant tests. The path from briefing to production would collapse from hours to minutes.

The full vision and scribbles are available as a PDF download.