A flawed practice · Love The Elephant
A small-group cohort for makers, writers and working creatives. Practical, judgment-led, and built around using AI on terms that honour and extend what's distinctive about your work.
AI is reshaping how creative work gets made — whether you're using it daily or watching it happen. Sometimes it helps the work travel. Often it sands off the edges that made the work yours in the first place.
Most of what's being taught about AI to working creatives is tool training. New models. New prompts. New workflows. Not much about judgment. Not much about what the tools are doing to the soul of the work over time.
signature is built around the missing layer. How to see what AI is doing to your work. How to name what must survive. How to use the tools with discernment so they extend the work without flattening it.
The most valuable thing in your work is the part that's recognisably yours. The work of signature is the discipline of recognising it, naming it, and using AI on terms that serve it.
You have serious craft and limited confidence with the tools. You want a first contact that's intelligent, bounded and respectful of how you already work. You'd rather build literacy now than have someone else's bad habits imposed on your process later.
You're familiar with the tools and you can feel the outputs drifting toward the same softer mean as everyone else's. You want better judgment, stronger tool choices, and a clearer handle on what's making the work feel less alive each time you use them.
Live, online, ten artists per cohort. Small assignments between sessions. The final session built around participants' own current work.
Session one
Learning to see what AI is doing to creative work. Side-by-side comparisons of original work with generative versions. Vocabulary for what gets lost — smoothing, harmonising, structural drift, false polish. Practical exercises in noticing.
Session two
Naming the non-negotiables of your own signature. The form, palette, texture, asymmetry, mood and tension that mark visual work. The syntax, rhythm and word-choice that mark voice work. Turning instinct into language you can use when briefing, editing, and evaluating outputs.
Session three
Choosing AI deliberately. Which tool classes tend toward surreal drift, cinematic polish, or stronger style retention. Where AI is safe for scaffolding. Where it should stay away from the part that matters most.
Session four
Bringing it home. A live working session on participants' real current projects, with feedback from the room and the teacher. Each artist leaves with a personal protocol for the work going forward.
Session five
Treating your style as a commercial asset. Contract language and pricing models that account for the seed and the extension. Up-to-the-minute landscape on creative IP and what's changing in 2026. Practical frameworks for charging beyond the first artefact.
Sessions one through four are shared between Cohort and Cohort + Commercial. Session five — the asset — runs separately for those taking the commercial layer, and is also included in Team and 1:1 offerings.
Four group sessions. Live, online, ten artists per cohort. The full craft and judgment curriculum.
All four cohort sessions plus session five — the asset — on commercial protection. For practitioners who want the craft work and the commercial layer together.
Private group intensive for an in-house creative team or studio group. Ten to twenty participants, with a short onboarding to scope the curriculum to your team's actual work. Includes the asset.
For senior practitioners who need privacy with their work. An intensive month for one client at a time — four teaching sessions and three applied coaching sessions on your current project. Includes the asset.
signature reserves one seat in each Cohort for an early-to-mid career maker, writer or working creative who would benefit from the work but couldn't otherwise afford the entry. Awarded by short application, decision a week before the cohort opens.
To apply, write to mandy@lovetheelephant.com with the subject line *signature scholarship*. Two short questions: what are you making, and what would change in your practice if you had judgment about AI use.
Mandy Leontakianakis is a senior brand and creative strategist with twenty years of experience in the rooms where brands and creative teams make decisions about who they are. Former Chief Strategy Officer at TBWA Dublin and Havas Southern Africa. Brand work for Jameson, Heineken, FNB, MTN, Coca-Cola and Diageo. A literature and writing graduate (UCT, English with a creative writing thesis) before any of the brand work. Founder of Love The Elephant, the practice signature is part of.
She started signature because the question of what AI is doing to creative distinctiveness shows up in two worlds at once — in her brand work with CMOs, and in her own community of working makers. Different vocabulary. Same structural problem. signature is where both audiences get the conversation, taught from inside the live experience of running it.
Selected sessions in future cohorts may include a guest practitioner whose work extends the curriculum in a particular direction.
The Cohort is the four-session craft and judgment curriculum. Cohort + Commercial adds a fifth session on commercial protection — IP awareness, style-as-asset thinking, contract language, pricing models for the seed and the extension. The commercial layer suits established practitioners whose commercial situation actively benefits from the additional work. The Cohort on its own suits anyone who wants the judgment piece without the commercial workshop.
No. signature is for working creatives, not engineers. What matters is your eye, your judgment and your willingness to test.
No. signature focuses on the kinds of tools and tendencies most relevant to keeping your signature intact, so participants leave with judgment rather than overwhelm.
Yes. The team session is a private intensive for in-house creative teams or studio groups, run for ten to twenty participants. Same curriculum, adjusted to the work your team is actually doing. Useful for setting shared standards across the people you lead.
No. signature is pro-quality, pro-authorship and pro-discernment. The work is in deciding where AI helps your practice and where it should stay out of it.
Tell us whether you're enquiring as an individual, for a team, or for the 1:1 intensive — and we'll share the next available dates, format details and a short conversation about whether signature is the right fit.