The Pursuit Bash is more than a gala — it’s a night where Builders, partners, funders, and staff gather as One Big Team to celebrate community and impact, moving hearts and inspiring the future through stories of transformation and bold vision. Last year, with the future of work being reshaped by AI and uncertainty on the rise, our creative direction was an honest response to a simple question: how can we turn fear of AI into hope and action, as we ourselves did by evolving into an AI-first, future-ready organization?
This year’s Bash theme, Let’s Build, is not just an invitation to one evening of fundraising, but a rallying call for the work ahead — and a way of sharing our vision for what’s next. For our overall creative concept, we drew inspiration from the metaphor of a construction site, where progress and transformation are always in motion. The venue came alive with the elements of that world: plywood walls wheat-pasted with posters celebrating our Fellows and Builders which we named the “Gallery”, and cones and traffic signs reimagined as poetic wayfinding to guide guests into a fully immersive experience.
Rather than pitting our creativity against AI, we reimagined the process by embedding AI tools into every step of the creative process. In a traditional process, a large team of specialists collaborates to deliver a large-scale event — creative directors, art directors, designers, copywriters, production artists, prop designers, producers, and more.
For this year’s Bash, we streamlined the process: one creative director, one designer, and a production company that coordinated printing and built the venue from our designs. Artwork for collateral and environmental design — from program brochures to posters, table numbers, and vinyl wraps — was generated through a combination of AI tools and design software, including Adobe Firefly, Illustrator, and Pixelcut.ai. We used Adobe Lightroom Classic and Pixelcut.ai to prepare portraits for large-scale prints and Figma and FigJam for project management. Copy was developed with ChatGPT, using prompts that emulated Pursuit’s straightforward, inspiring voice. In this blended mode, the line between human and AI was intentionally blurred to create a cohesive, on-brand experience across every touchpoint.
For Bash, design extended beyond print into the environment itself — spanning physical objects, communications, and experiences. With FigJam and Figma, we were able to iterate quickly and efficiently. Every step of the process was aggregated into one centralized FigJam file: moodboards for art direction, print and environmental designs, floorplans to map guest journeys and prop placements, even menu and tablescape selections.
This approach streamlined collaboration and made project management far easier. Before FigJam, coordinating across team members, managing versions, and archiving files was cumbersome. With it, creative management became seamless: remote input, centralized feedback, and instant changes made the process fluid and transparent.
We used Figma for lighter design work with variable content such as flyers and social media posts. Instead of creating multiple files in scattered folders, Figma allowed us to centralize designs and enable team members to contribute simultaneously.
We found ourselves with a dilemma: how do we fully embrace AI tools, yet still create designs that feel human? Most advanced generative AI is known for creating hyper-realistic, detailed images that are nearly indistinguishable from photography. Could we move and surprise people by using Gen-AI in a way that was unexpected?
Our inspiration came from Cy Twombly. His improvisational expressions were undeniably human: raw, imperfect, irregular, spontaneous, free. These are the qualities we associate not with AI, but with humankind. We began asking if we could educate and prompt AI to push beyond realism and generate artwork that embraced these fundamental human qualities. Through this process, we produced approximately 6,000 iterations of artwork before arriving at a handful of selects that were used throughout the event.
To upscale the selected artwork, we used Pixelcut.ai to ensure they were ready for prints as large as 70" × 38". We learned that upscaling artwork is very different from upscaling photography, where missing information can often be generated by sampling neighboring pixels. Artwork emulating brush or pencil strokes on textured paper proved far harder to scale since most upscalers aren’t trained to “imagine” how a brush or pencil would actually behave on paper.
To set up production-ready files, we combined old and new techniques. After upscaling the AI-generated images to meet the production requirements, we sharpened each one in Photoshop. While this didn’t fully resolve the issue of missing realistic detail, it ensured that all of our large-scale images were high-resolution enough to satisfy even the most discerning eyes from a distance.
To honor and celebrate our Fellows’ and Builders’ incredible transformation stories, we conducted in-house photoshoots — editorial-style portraits of individuals and our AI-Native community. These large-scale posters were wheat-pasted onto plywood boards and became part of the “Gallery,” showcasing our impact and community to every guest.
Our 13-year-old main camera, the Canon EOS 5D Mark III, has taken great photography with its relatively small 22.3-megapixel full-frame sensor over the years for digital use. For our Bash, though, we printed photos as large as 48" × 36", which would have required at least a 40-megapixel sensor.
To fill the gap, we again turned to Pixelcut.ai for upscaling, ensuring high-resolution quality for large-scale posters. We used Lightroom Classic for editing, retouching, and batch processing. With its new AI features, we were able to streamline the post-production process.
Design, in terms of visual communication, depends on the relationship between what you see and what you read. When copy and visuals work in tandem, the impact multiplies. In larger organizations, designers often collaborate closely with copywriters to shape concepts and sharpen execution. Pursuit doesn’t have a dedicated copywriter — instead, we are all storytellers of transformation.
For this year’s Bash, we used ChatGPT to help craft the language that supported the design and experience. We maintained one continuous conversation thread from conception through production, allowing the AI to carry context and nuance throughout. It served not only as a creative soundboard, but also as an editor and proofreader. This created an instantaneous feedback loop between ChatGPT and our team, ensuring every idea, line of copy, and design element remained on-brand and centered on this year’s theme.
This year’s Bash was not just a celebration — it was a statement of where we’re headed. By embracing AI as a creative partner throughout the entire process, we expanded what was possible while staying grounded in what matters most: people, community, and transformation.
AI helped us prototype rapidly, using Adobe Firefly to generate artwork that evoked raw, human expression in days instead of weeks. With Pixelcut.ai and Lightroom Classic, we upscaled and refined both digital artwork and portrait photography for impactful large-scale prints. ChatGPT helped shape a unified voice across every touchpoint, and Google Labs’ Whisk enabled us to create venue-accurate in-situ mockups for review and iteration. And through FigJam and Figma, we centralized feedback and collaboration — allowing a small team to move with the efficiency and clarity of a much larger studio.
The creative process for the Bash — and the experience the night itself created — reminded us that progress is not a straight line, but a process of learning, iterating, and building together. AI didn’t replace the human creative process; it expanded it. It gave us more time to think, to shape meaning, to be intentional. It allowed us to focus on the why and the feeling — the parts of design that can only come from people.
We’re just getting started. Let’s keep building!