Designer AI — Charge 2026 bench

01 — The request, as filed

Charge 2026 · Dodger Stadium

Nothing here is paraphrased. These are the stored field values on the ticket, including the free-text brief the account manager typed.

Charge 2026 Done Revision 4

Venue

Dodger Stadium

Look

Prompt Look 4

Opened

25 Feb 2026

Due

23 Mar 2026

Boards

9 files

Ticket

a4fad4ee…d366e0

Brief — verbatim

DV Ribbon: 192h x 1344w
OOT / Outfield Walls: 192h x 1008w
Loge: 90h x 16768w (times 2)
Club: 90h x 11360w
Reserve Left & Right Fascia: 90h x 9600w
Reserve Middle Fascia: 90h x 15060w
Pavilion Fascia: 40 x 4000
Pavilion Insert: 160h x 960w

That is the entire brief. Eight dimensions and a job title. No copy direction, no colour, no reference to the look it belongs to, no note about what the boards are for. The word CHARGE! appears nowhere in the ticket — it comes from the title.

Which is the finding, not a complaint: the ticket carries the geometry and almost none of the intent. Everything a designer needs beyond the sizes is being carried somewhere the ticket cannot see.

02 — What was delivered

The approved files, pulled from the client folder

Frames lifted straight out of the delivered revision-4 files. This is the benchmark — the standard the automated set has to be judged against.

DV Ribbon1344 × 192

Delivered file · frame at 4.0s

Pavilion Insert960 × 160

Delivered file · frame at 4.0s

Pavilion Fascia4000 × 40 · 100:1 lockup repeats

Delivered file · scroll sideways · the word and the mark alternate along the run

The fascia is the whole lesson. At 100:1 the designer did not stretch one word across the board — the lockup repeats along the run with the mark dropped between copies, so the message reads from any seat instead of only from centre field. That decision is consistent across every long board in the set, and it is a rule, not a taste call.

03 — Built from the brief

Nine boards, generated in 31 seconds

Same nine sizes, rendered to the exact pixel dimensions the ticket asked for. The interlocking club mark is the client's own, taken from approved content in their folder — in live running it arrives as a supplied asset, and nothing about it is invented here.

DV Ribbon1344 × 192 single lockup

OOT / Outfield Walls1008 × 192 single lockup

Pavilion Insert960 × 160 single lockup

Loge — 1B16768 × 90 · 186:1 39 repeats

Scroll sideways · shown at roughly a fifth of true width

Loge — 3B16768 × 90 · 186:1 39 repeats

Reserve Middle Fascia15060 × 90 · 167:1 35 repeats

Club11360 × 90 · 126:1 27 repeats

Reserve Left & Right Fascia9600 × 90 · 107:1 22 repeats

Pavilion Fascia4000 × 40 · 100:1 22 repeats

04 — Side by side

Delivered above, generated below

Matched dimensions, no scaling tricks. Judge the three that can be judged at full size.

DV Ribbon 1344 × 192

Delivered

Generated from the brief

Pavilion Insert 960 × 160

Delivered

Generated from the brief

Pavilion Fascia — first 1400px at true scale 4000 × 40

Delivered

Generated from the brief

05 — Read-out

What matched, and what did not

Dimension	Result	Detail
Board matrix	match	All nine boards at the exact dimensions in the brief, including both Loge runs.
Long-board behaviour	match	Everything past roughly 12:1 tiles the lockup rather than stretching it, mark alternating between repeats — the same call the designer made.
Club mark	match	The client's own mark, recovered from approved content in their folder.
Palette	close	Navy bed, saturated club blue, white type, ice highlights on facet edges.
Typeface	substitute	Heavy condensed grotesque standing in for the licensed face on the delivered files. Correct weight and proportion, wrong licence — a real run needs the studio font installed.
Motion	not attempted	The delivered files are ten-second animations. These are stills. Motion needs a render lane and hardware that does not exist here yet.
Copy	inferred	Taken from the job title because the ticket carries no copy field. It happened to be right. On a job where the wording lives in the source email, it would not be.
Time	31s	Nine boards, 79 million pixels, one pass, no hardware acceleration. The ticket itself ran four revision rounds across four weeks.

What this proves

The board-size matrix, the aspect rule, the asset placement and the export naming are deterministic. That is the highest-volume, best-specified part of the work, and it does not need a model to guess at it.

What it does not

Nothing here invented a look. The look family was read off approved content the client had already signed off. A cold "make me something new" is a different and much smaller slice of the volume.

The blocker to fix first

The brief field holds geometry and nothing else. Copy, direction and reference links are arriving somewhere the ticket cannot store them. That is one intake column, and it gates everything downstream.

Benchmark 02

The same test, on a ticket that did carry its reference.

Benchmark 01 closed on one finding: the ticket holds geometry and nothing else, and that single missing intake column gates everything downstream. So the next ticket was chosen for the opposite property — a closed, client-approved sponsor board whose notes field holds the reference material the account manager actually sent. Same rule as before: the delivered proof was never opened until the rebuild was finished.

06 — The request, as filed

Jo Malone London 2026 · MetLife Stadium

Stored field values on the ticket, unedited. The notes field is three links — that is the whole written brief.

Jo Malone London 2026 Done Approved

Venue

Met Life Stadium

Property

New York Giants

Tricode

MET-ADH

Opened

23 Jul 2026

Due

28 Jul 2026

Boards

15120 × 120

Ticket

b74f1bde…7aa0f6

Notes — verbatim

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/957be6snpp03hkwf01qn1/…
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/p2j5rs7z8n6bq0xrls2uj/…
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/d21n91psqdvahm8a2mpqm/…

One board size and three links. No copy, no look direction, no colour — the same shape of brief as benchmark 01. The difference is that here the intent did not vanish: it was parked in the links, and the links still resolve.

07 — What the reference actually held

267 MB behind three links

Pulled and opened. This is what the account manager sent, and it answers almost every question the ticket leaves open.

Item	What it settles
Sponsor logo	Vector and PNG, black and white lockups. Placed as supplied — nothing redrawn.
Brand guidelines	112 pages. The board's cream is named in it: Buckram Buttermilk #fcf9ee. That is where the colour on the rebuild comes from, not from sampling a picture.
Licensed fonts	Malone Serif (primary), Lars Malone, Sabon Next. The real typeface, installed and used — the substitution flagged in benchmark 01 does not apply here.
Product imagery	Three cut-outs at 3000 × 3000 with alpha. The objects scattered across the cream field are the client's own product photography.
Last season's board	The 2025 ribbon as it ran, plus last season's preview render. It carries the copy line and the lockup order.
Venue photography	Four full-resolution shots of the ribbon in place, showing how the board sits in the bowl and what neighbouring sponsors do with it.

2025 board, in the bowl client-supplied · 5184 × 3456

The board the ticket is about — a single continuous ribbon under the club level.

2025 board as it ran client-supplied

Lockup left, copy right, cream bed. The line reads Iconic Fragrances for Game Day and Every Day — that is where the 2026 copy comes from.

Last season's proof sheet client-supplied · previous vendor outside reference

Worth noting on its own: the pack the client sent includes the 2025 proof sheet from the board's previous supplier — 50% and 100% rows, same idea as the ANC sheet.

One thing the pack does not contain: the club mark. The sponsor's logo is supplied in vector; the interlocking team mark that sits beside it is not. It was recovered from a 50 × 44 pixel region of the client's own 2025 preview file and rebuilt at working resolution. It is accurate, but it came out of a video frame, and on a live run it should arrive as an asset rather than be reconstructed.

08 — What was delivered

The proof the client was actually sent

Filed 23 July, proof out the following afternoon, opened eight times, approved and filed to the client's approved folder. This is the benchmark.

Delivered proof sheet 1920 × 1080 · frame at 4.0s

Board title, a full-width squeeze of the whole run, then the run cut into seven rows at working scale, over an ANC bar naming venue and property.

The delivered board is 15168 × 72. The ticket asked for 15120 × 120. Neither number is wrong — the ticket carries what was requested and the proof carries what the board actually is — but nothing in the system reconciles them, so the request field is not a reliable spec. The rebuild below was built to the ticket, because the ticket is what an automated pass would be handed.

09 — Built from the request and the reference

One board, 15120 × 120, composited from supplied assets

No image model was asked to imagine a sponsor board. At 126:1 there is nothing to imagine — the work is placing a supplied logo, a supplied typeface, supplied product cut-outs and a named colour at exact pixel dimensions, and repeating the unit along the run so the message reads from every seat. That is composition, and it is deterministic.

The run 15120 × 120 · 126:1 2 repeats

Scroll sideways · shown at a quarter of true width · open the full 15120 × 120 file

Rebuilt proof sheet 1920 × 1080

Rendered into ANC's own client sheet — geometry measured off the delivered proof, artwork built from the brief.

10 — Side by side

Delivered above, generated below

Same canvas, same crop, no scaling tricks.

Delivered · full sheet

Built from the request and the reference

Delivered · detail row, lockup

Generated · same row

Delivered · detail row, copy line

Generated · same row

The delivered file is a fifteen-second animation; the frames above are stills from it. Open the delivered proof.

11 — Read-out

What the reference changed

Dimension	Result	Detail
Board size	match	15120 × 120, exactly as filed on the ticket.
Typeface	match	Malone Serif, the client's licensed primary, taken from the reference and installed. Benchmark 01 had to substitute; here nothing is stood in for.
Colour	match	#fcf9ee, read by name out of the brand guidelines rather than sampled off a picture.
Sponsor logo	match	Placed from the supplied file.
Copy	match	Carried forward verbatim from last season's board in the reference. Benchmark 01 had to infer copy from the job title; here it is in the pack.
Long-board behaviour	match	The unit repeats along the run with the lockup dropped between copies — the same rule the designer applied, and the same rule benchmark 01 found on the Dodgers fascia.
Club mark	recovered	Not in the pack. Rebuilt from a 50 × 44 pixel region of the client's 2025 preview. Accurate at this size, but it should be a supplied asset.
Product styling	close	The client's own cut-outs, scattered at varied scale and angle. The delivered board places them with a designer's rhythm against the copy; the generated one distributes them evenly.
Motion	not attempted	The delivered file scrolls for fifteen seconds. This is a still.
Sheet layout	match	Title, FULL squeeze, seven detail rows, ANC bar with venue and property. Measured off the delivered sheet and reproduced.

What benchmark 02 adds

Given the reference, the two soft results from benchmark 01 — wrong licence on the type, copy guessed off the job title — both close. Neither needed a better model. They needed the pack that was sitting in the notes field the whole time.

What is still a person's job

Where the product shots fall against the words. The generated board spaces them; the delivered board composes them. That is the part worth a designer's afternoon, and it is a much smaller part than the run itself.

The blocker, restated

Benchmark 01 said the intake column is the gate. Benchmark 02 shows what a filled one is worth. The links were in free text and had to be found by reading the notes — a reference field on the ticket makes this pass repeatable instead of lucky.