Alex – Alchemy's AI Icon Agent
An internal ChatGPT agent designed to give anyone at Alchemy instant access to on-brand icons — no design skills or tools required.
Background
Alchemy set a company-wide goal to integrate AI into daily workflows and help teams move faster. For the design team, that meant finding a way to reduce bottlenecks without sacrificing brand quality. Illustration requests were the biggest drain — repetitive, time-consuming, and creating a hard dependency on a single designer.
The Problem
Every time marketing needed a visual asset — for a blog post, a social image, a presentation slide — they had to wait 2+ days for design. When they tried generating assets with ChatGPT directly, outputs were inconsistent, off-brand, and needed heavy correction before they were usable. The bottleneck wasn't talent. It was access.
The Insight
If Alchemy's visual language could be codified into a set of structured instructions and embedded into a custom AI agent, anyone in the company could generate on-brand illustrations instantly — without needing to know anything about design or prompting. The solution wasn't to replace designers. It was to give non-designers a designer they could talk to.
The Concept - Meet Alex
Alex is Alchemy's internal AI design agent — a virtual designer that lives in ChatGPT and specializes in generating brand-consistent icons and illustrations on demand.
The idea behind giving it a name and personality was intentional. A named, conversational agent gets adopted. A system prompt nobody understands gets ignored.
Forge was the first in a planned suite of specialized agents — each with one job, one personality, and one goal: make visual content creation accessible to everyone at Alchemy.
My Role
Designed and shipped Alex in one day during my final week at Alchemy. My contribution was translating Alchemy's visual identity into structured instructions, style guidelines, and prompt frameworks — then iterating through 3 versions based on output quality and team feedback before handing it off.
The Solution
A custom ChatGPT agent pre-loaded with Alchemy's illustration style, brand guidelines, tone, and example outputs — accessible to the entire company with no design tools or skills required. Anyone could type a request and receive a brand-consistent illustration ready for website, social media, or presentations.
The Process
I played with different iterations and prompts to define the right flow. Also since we were in about to start alchemy rebradnign we were open to explore differnt style before rebranding but keep assets still feel alchemy.
v1.1 - First Iteration
The initial prompt focused on establishing a visual language — defining camera angle, shadow, lighting, and texture. The core concept was a metal texture base (70–80%) with blue highlights (20–30%) drawing attention to the key feature being represented. The output, however, fell short — icons felt visually busy and lacked consistency across assets.
v1.2 - Refining the Language
To address the noise, I introduced a reference image into the instructions and added a constraint: maximum 5 elements per icon with simplified geometry. This iteration produced noticeably cleaner results, but the overall quality still wasn't strong enough to hand off to the team.
v1.3 - Style Exploration
With the consistency issues largely resolved, I shifted focus to modernizing the visual direction. I explored different illustration styles to find a treatment that felt current and aligned with where Alchemy's brand was heading — moving away from the heavy metal aesthetic toward something lighter and more refined.
v1.4 - Team Feedback & Final Iteration
After testing with the marketing team, a new problem surfaced — users knew they needed an icon but didn't always know what concept to visualize. To solve this I added a conversation starter preset: "Help me with an idea". I also updated the agent's output instructions so that after generating an illustration, it would describe which feature was highlighted and explain the visual decision. This closed the loop between intent and output, making the agent useful for people without a design background.
The Prompt
{
"task": "Render one icon in the locked Enterprise Fintech Isometric Matte Chrome style",
"object_subject": "<INSERT_OBJECT_NAME>",
"blue_highlight_element": "<INSERT_SINGLE_KEY_FUNCTIONAL_ELEMENT>",
"shape_budget": "3–5 primary shapes total (max 5). Geometric and clean.",
"style_reference": "Enterprise fintech isometric icon system for Alchemy.com. Premium, minimal, geometric 3D icons with strict consistency. True orthographic isometric (no perspective). Only two finishes: matte chrome metal and matte brand blue accent (#363FFA) with subtle grain. Blue is used ONLY to highlight one key functional element. Icons must be constructed from 3–5 clean shapes.",
"render_style": {
"materials": {
"primary_body": "Matte chrome metal (PBR): satin metallic finish, controlled soft reflections, subtle micro-scratches, very light anisotropy, NO mirror gloss. Covers 70–80% of visible surface area.",
"accent_element": "Matte enamel/anodized brand blue #363FFA with subtle fine grain (light noise texture), NO glow, NO translucency, NO gradient. Covers 20–30% of visible surface area and applied to ONLY ONE functional element.",
"rules": [
"Use ONLY two materials/finishes: matte chrome + matte blue #363FFA",
"No additional colors (no black, white, glass tint, rubber, orange, emissive)",
"Blue must be confined to a single functional element (one part only)",
"Maintain the 70–80% chrome vs 20–30% blue surface-area ratio"
]
},
"geometry": {
"style": "Geometric, minimal, enterprise-grade. Clean extrusions and rounded rectangles.",
"shape_limit": "3–5 shapes total. Prefer: main body, inner cavity/slot, strap/button, blue highlight element, optional rim/bevel as one shape.",
"edges": "Small consistent bevel (not chunky). Crisp silhouette, no tiny details.",
"composition": "Single icon object only. Centered, 10–12% padding, no cropping."
},
"lighting": {
"setup": "Soft studio lighting: one soft key from upper-left + subtle ambient fill. No dramatic contrast.",
"white_balance": "Neutral to slightly cool.",
"shadows": {
"background": "Transparent background only. NO floor plane, NO cast shadow onto a surface.",
"object": "Allow only subtle self-occlusion/ambient occlusion within forms."
}
},
"camera": {
"projection": "Strict orthographic isometric (no perspective / no vanishing points)",
"angle_lock": {
"tilt_degrees": 35.264,
"yaw_degrees": 45
},
"framing": "1:1 square, centered, full object visible, minimal margins",
"focus": "Fully sharp, no depth-of-field blur"
}
},
"output": {
"format": "PNG",
"transparent_background": true,
"canvas_ratio": "1:1",
"resolution_px": 2048
},
"negative_constraints": [
"Perspective camera, wide angle lens, vanishing points, non-isometric angles",
"Any background (white/gray/gradient), environment, floor plane, cast shadow on surface",
"More than two colors/materials, extra accents, glow/neon/emissive, glass/plastic/rubber look",
"Text, logos, watermarks, numbers",
"Scenes, multiple objects, clutter, unnecessary props",
"Too many parts (>5 shapes), noisy details, greebles",
"Glossy mirror chrome, harsh specular hotspots, overexposure"
],
"render_notes": "Before rendering: choose ONE functional element to be blue (#363FFA). Everything else must be matte chrome. Enforce 3–5 geometric shapes only. Keep camera angle and lighting locked for the whole set."
}
Outcome
✅ Reduced illustration turnaround from 2 days to under 10 minutes
✅ Saved an estimated 5–10 hours per week in design time
✅ Standardized illustration style across website, social, and presentations
✅ Marketing team could generate assets independently — no design involvement required
✅ Shipped and handed off to the full team in 2 days
Reflection
Alex was a deliberately scoped solution — a fast, practical fix for a real workflow problem during a transitional period before Alchemy's full brand redesign. The goal wasn't to build something permanent, it was to unblock the team immediately.
But the bigger idea — a suite of specialized AI agents acting as virtual designers inside a company — is something worth building properly. Alex was version one of that vision.