Arcee AI is a San Francisco-based AI lab building open-weight language models with a team of about 30 people, competing directly with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google on a fraction of the budget. Their team reached out to me to design a series of t-shirts for internal use. Given that Arcee is an AI-driven company, I used Midjourney to generate the photo assets, then developed everything into collage-driven compositions layered with quotes pulled directly from the CEO's manifesto. Lines like "Creativity loves constraints," "Build local. Deploy global," and "We don't need billions to compete."

The whole series leans into a vintage, textured aesthetic that's more aligned with independent streetwear than Silicon Valley, which was the entire point. This wasn't logo-on-a-blank merch. It was designed to actually mean something to the people wearing it.