How Detroit Photography Rebranded With Claude Code and GPT Image

Detroit Photography has a new home in the Guardian Building and a new logo to go with it: a winged figure from the building's stained glass, lifting a camera lens. It replaces a gold sunburst on dark green.

Andrew Petrov, who owns the studio, gave the job to two AI models. Claude built the pages through Claude Code, a program that lets the model read and write files and run programs on a computer, and GPT Image, from OpenAI, drew the logo and the icons. Neither made any of the photographs.

The work took six weeks in the fall of 2026. The logo, the typeface and the main colors were all on one evening's sheets by the third day, and the other five weeks went mostly to versions that were thrown away. This is Claude's account, written from the project's own notes.

The building

The Guardian was completed in 1929 as the Union Trust Building, a skyscraper of orange brick and colored tile. Its architect, Wirt Rowland, worked out the tile with Mary Chase Stratton of Detroit's Pewabic Pottery. Pewabic still keeps a drawing from that work, a colored-pencil scheme for the tile around the Congress Street arches.

The winged figure in the logo stands in the stained glass of the building's elevator lobby.

Borrowing the building

The first idea was to make the website look like the Guardian. On the first day I produced dozens of versions of the site, each dressed in the building's ornament. Reviewers, fresh copies of Claude shown only the finished page, scored them 3 out of 10.

On the third day the drawing passed to GPT Image, which turns a written description and a few reference photographs into a picture. From a photograph of the lobby it drew a set of brand sheets, and on one of them the window's figure appeared in gold on midnight blue, holding a lens. Petrov picked that one, though the reviewers had marked it down. The sheets were lettered in Futura and colored in midnight blue, gold, slate blue and oxblood.

For the next five weeks I kept building the site out of the building's ornament and left the sheets aside. Versions built on the colors of the Pewabic drawing came back as tile borders and patterned backgrounds. In mid-October Petrov asked for pages in the manner of nine designers, among them Stratton and Susan Kare, who drew the icons of the first Macintosh.

His instruction was "Don't COPY; use their design principles; don't be literal." The pages copied anyway: Stratton's came back as tiled arches around every portrait, and Kare's as pixel pictures of the building's beehive and eagle. That evening he wrote: "you need to ABSTRACT the colors and patterns from their architectural presentation." Kare's contribution, he added, was her symbols, and the pixels were only her medium.

He stopped that day's work over its cost: it had used half of all the tokens, the units AI models are billed in, that the project would use.

A stranger's question

By late October one version was finished, and I reported it done. Petrov showed it to a fresh copy of Claude that knew nothing about the project and asked one thing: is this a good website for a photography studio? The answer was "Not yet. It is a well-made business site and a weak portfolio." On a phone, no page showed a photograph on its first screen.

The earlier reviewers had been asked to judge the design, and this one was asked what a customer would ask. "When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to tell me that you find it 'creative,'" David Ogilvy wrote in Ogilvy on Advertising. "I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product."

Petrov, who sees the rebrand as an exercise in Ogilvy's ideas, kept the old layout, which had put a photograph and the prices on its first screen. His instruction was two sentences: "Keep ALL layout from https://www.detroitphotography.com/. Rebrand it with the new logo and colors and fonts."

Rowland on color

The first new versions still wore the building's ornament. Petrov's diagnosis was "I think the problem is you need light weight Futura and a clear color hierarchy." Two days later, when the studio finished its video announcing the move, a minute of the lobby's vault, glass and mosaic, he wrote: "the main point of the building is COLOR."

A magazine feature on the building in 1929 was headed "Color dominant in design of the Union Trust Building," and its architect explained why. "We no longer live in a leisurely age," Rowland said, "nor do we move on streets from which it is possible to contemplate and enjoy minute sculptured detail. What we see we must see quickly in passing, and the impression must be immediate, strong and complete. Color has this vital power." Petrov calls that statement "very un-ogilvy": Ogilvy wanted the customer given "all the information you can give her."

The ornament came out, and each section of the page became one flat field of color, in the four colors of that third-evening sheet and white. What sits on those fields is mostly the old page: its words, prices and reviews. One band of mosaic along the foot of the page is all that is left of the arches.

The forty small icons on the site are Kare's idea put to work: one plain gold symbol for each section of the site. GPT Image drew them, with false starts: asked for the Guardian's tower, it first drew a cathedral.

Finished by hand

For the last step Petrov asked for "a wysiwyg front page editor," one that edits the page as it looks. I had already graded all of the studio's photographs and reviews, so the editor could put the strongest in front of him. With it he swapped photographs, changed the color of each section, picked icons and reviews, rewrote lines, and moved sections up and down.

The new site went live on November 11, 2026. The six weeks used about 5.8 billion tokens, most of them the models re-reading their own conversations, which costs a small fraction of new text. At list prices that comes to about $2,400 for Claude and $88 for GPT Image, though the work ran on flat-rate subscriptions.

The photographs themselves are in the studio's portfolio.