The context
Alico is a flexible packaging company from Medellín. For its presence at Cafés de Colombia Expo 2025 (Bogotá), the innovation team wanted to offer attendees — coffee brand owners — something more memorable than a brochure: the chance to see their own brand on a package, generated with AI from their vision.
The project was developed together with Alico’s IT team during my innovation internship.
The key design decision
The challenge wasn’t technical but one of translation: how do you turn the blurry vision a coffee grower has of their brand into instructions an AI model can execute well?
The answer was to design the form as a creative brief interview: instead of asking “describe your packaging”, the 19-step journey asks for the brand’s name, its cultural references (rural farming culture? premium international brands?), its differentiating factor, and asks the user to rate graphic elements according to Gestalt principles — proximity, similarity, closure and continuity. Each answer becomes a concrete parameter for the generation.
What I built
- The form’s visual experience: a step-by-step journey with Alico’s identity and the warmth of the coffee world, designed to be completed in the context of a trade fair
- An editable summary at the end, so the user can review their answers before submitting
- The n8n automation flow that receives each response, sends it to the Leonardo API (combining different image generation models) and delivers the generated packaging straight to the participant’s inbox
The process
It was joint work with Alico’s IT team: the form was custom built with the fair’s identity, and n8n orchestrated the connection between the answers, the generation models and the email delivery. My contribution focused on making the journey feel like a brand conversation — not a survey — and on having the automation run on its own: I wasn’t in Bogotá, and the system served the fair’s attendees without me.
The outcome
The fair experience was the starting point of something bigger: the concept evolved into a platform where Alico’s clients upload their logo and view realistic renders of their brand on different types of packaging. That leap sped up decision-making in pre-sales and reduced the dependence on manual renders.
[image: examples of packaging generated by the platform — coffee bag, doypack and tray with the brand applied]
What I learned
Artificial intelligence has opened up new ways for companies to interact with their customers. This project showed me that concretely: the same technology worked as an experience that surprises a coffee grower at a fair and as a pre-sales tool that saves manual renders. The value isn’t in the AI model, but in the experience designed around it.
