Case study

Glace Noire

A self-initiated gothic art brand. The catalog is the campaign — not a client-services reel.

Role: Brand designer & art director 2025–2026 · Solo · self-initiated

Problem

A folder of dark images is not a brand. By 2026, generic AI wall art is a commodity — high search volume, almost no reason to pay. The work needed a name, a constraint, and a public catalog that a recruiter or a buyer can open.

The tempting mistake is to sell Glace Noire as an agency before the campaign exists. Client videos, event coverage, and fashion editorials for other companies are not published here, so they are not claimed here.

Role

I named Glace Noire, set the visual system, produced the stills, built the art hub and the store path, and wrote the commercial licence. AI enters as a still generator. The file that ships is composited and graded by hand. This is a brand I built for my own work, not a retainer for someone else’s.

Process

  1. Name the world Gothic atmosphere, not costume horror. Near-black surfaces, crimson rules, Cinzel display, and the GP seal. The brand had to survive as a social handle and as a store without looking like a prompt dump.
  2. Make the catalog the campaign Fourteen series, 168 works, each as a 4K desktop file and a mobile crop — 336 files. Series names are the chapters: Stone Sanctuary, Midnight Masquerade, Burned Canvas, Urban Noir. Volume without a named world is stock. A named world without volume is a mood board.
  3. Split brand traffic from checkout glacenoire.com carries the public art brand and social traffic. Checkout stays on gianniperugini.com so there is one store, one Payhip cart, and one commercial licence. Buyers should not hunt across two untested carts.
  4. Price the scarce thing Personal wallpaper packs stay cheap because that market is flooded. The published offer that is not a commodity is the $79+ complete archive under a written Standard Commercial Licence — websites, social, ads, flattened client work; resale, merch, logos, NFTs, and AI training excluded.

What is published

Only URLs a recruiter can open today. Follower counts are not estimated. Client deliverables that are not public are not listed.

  1. glacenoire.com/art — art hub for the brand; shop and free sample point at the live store.
  2. gianniperugini.com/archive.html — Digital Art Store: 14 collections, free sample, commercial archive.
  3. commercial-licence.html — Standard Commercial Licence, including what is not permitted.
  4. Instagram / Pinterest — public Glace Noire profiles, handle glace_noire_studio.

What is not claimed

The brand homepage still lists AI-generated videos, event coverage, and client identity packages. Those lines do not have published client assets, so they are out of this case study. Photography on this site is photographed, not generated, and it is not sold as Glace Noire client work.

Published stills

Four files from the live catalog. These are store artworks, not mood-board extras.

Stone Sanctuary — Crypt Stairs, a gothic stone stairwell with a single shaft of top light
Stone Sanctuary — Crypt Stairs. The still used as the generation-log example on How I work with AI.
Midnight Masquerade — Portrait Veil, a high-contrast gothic portrait behind a veil
Midnight Masquerade — Portrait Veil. Theatrical gothic, one of the four featured collections.
Burned Canvas — Ember Crack, a textured burned painting with ember cracks and soot
Burned Canvas — Ember Crack. Texture and material, not a character prompt.
Urban Noir — Rain Reflections, wet pavement and amber streetlight at night
Urban Noir — Rain Reflections. The same night language as the homepage hero photograph, as a still in the catalog.

Decisions worth defending

  1. The Portfolio card used to say “advertising and creative services for brands.” That was the agency homepage talking. The card now matches the catalog.
  2. Checkout was not moved onto glacenoire.com. One Payhip store is easier to trust than a second cart built to look like an agency.
  3. The commercial licence leads with exclusions. A $79 file that can be resold, printed on merch, or used to train a model is not a licence, it is a leak.
  4. AI is disclosed as an input. If a still would pass as a raw model dump, it is not the store file.

Tech stack

  • HTML / CSS
  • Payhip
  • GA4
  • ChatGPT (GPT Image)
  • Grok Imagine
  • Pixelmator Pro
  • Photoshop
  • Cursor (AI-assisted)

Live brand

Open the published catalog, not the unbacked service list. The art hub is the public face; the store is where the files are sold.

Open the art hub Open the store

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