Red Antler hackathon has teams build a full flying-car brand using AI tool Flora

September 3, 2026 · thedrum.com

Red Antler, the branding agency, ran an internal AI hackathon in which cross-disciplinary teams built a complete flying-car brand, including wordmark, website, advertising and comms, using the AI tool Flora. Designers, copywriters, strategists and motion creatives worked inside the same AI canvas, blurring traditional role boundaries. Kiser Barnes, chief creative officer and partner at Red Antler, points to a growing group of creatives who treat AI as reinvention, saying it means "creating entirely new processes, shifting workflows and ways of making." Ethan Proia, head of design at Flora, calls AI-assisted work a subtractive process. Traditional creative work builds an idea layer by layer; AI-assisted work starts from a generated output and refines it into shape.

Smaller, independent agencies gain access to prototyping speed once limited to firms with far larger budgets and headcounts, since Flora's tools can generate wordmarks, symbols, color systems, storyboards, 3D renders and motion tests within seconds. Creative directors can stress-test more concepts before committing budget to production, and shared AI workspaces let strategists, writers and motion teams contribute simultaneously at the same stage of a project. Junior creatives are taking on roles as scouts for new tools and platforms, and agency leadership is shifting toward creating conditions for multidisciplinary experimentation.