AI Counter Display Design, From a Hand Sketch to a 4K Store Shot in One Session

There are two AIs built specifically for POP display design and other POP materials, and we build both. This session is about one of them, AI POP Displays. The other one, Bellto, gets its own video.

I wanted to show the sketch route, where the starting point is a drawing instead of a written brief. The sketch was for a counter display for a cordless glue gun, drawn by hand, with notes written all over it.

I've spent close to four years in point-of-purchase, and I build AI POP Displays. This is the written record of the session, step by step.

Brief or sketch, where do you start?

A new project has two doors.

The first is the brief. You drop in whatever information you have, the client's email, the product, anything the client sent you. You don't write any prompts yourself. The tool writes them.

The second is the sketch. If you've already drawn something, by hand or on an iPad, you give it the drawing, notes included, and it reads them.

There's also a third set of options for a render you already have, the mini-apps, if all you want is to make changes to it or improve its quality. This time I went in through the sketch door.

What did I give it?

Three files. The sketch, a photo of the product, which was a big cordless glue gun, and the brand's logo. The sketch goes in the sketch area, and the bottom of the form has slots for the logo, artwork and product photos.

Once the sketch is in, you choose how closely to follow it. Faithful to the sketch, balanced, or free interpretation, which partly depends on how well you draw.

Then a few fields. The project name and the brand, home and decor for the sector, counter for the display type. There's a notes field too, but the notes were already on the sketch, so I left it empty. Last come the aspect ratio, the number of concepts and the quality. The credits you have left sit in the bottom left corner.

While it worked, I read the notes on the drawing back. They asked for an infographic section, a battery slot with green LED lighting, the battery specs, an LCD touchscreen with buttons, more infographics, the glue gun specs, the logo, and the glue gun itself with green LED lighting.

What came back in the first two concepts?

Two concepts, quickly, and both were very good. I kept the first one, because it carried most of the annotations I'd given it.

That's the part of the sketch route I wanted to see. The notes weren't decoration on the drawing, and most of them came back as parts of the display.

If there's a customer's sketch with notes on it in your inbox right now, run it through the free plan and check which notes come back on the render.

How is the editor laid out?

The edit button opens the editor, and two areas matter.

On the right is the version tree. Every version of the display sits there, and you can pick any of them to keep working on.

At the bottom are edit with prompt and the mini-apps. Edit with prompt takes any change you describe in your own words, and you can upload images along with it. The mini-apps are one-click changes:

• Change ratio, for example to landscape when the image is going into a presentation.
• Change background, to a white studio, to somewhere else, or to a background you describe.
• Generate angles, flat or perspective, photo or line drawing, with or without the product, keeping the scene or cleaning it.
• Convert to line drawing, for a presentation, or as a base for measurements or a blueprint.
• Convert to real life, which makes an image that still looks like a render look as real as possible.
• Remove product, to check the display with nothing on it.
• Apply graphic, to put artwork on the display.

How did I turn the green LED red?

With edit with prompt. I asked it to change the green LED around the glue gun and the glue gun battery to a red one, kept the quality at standard, and applied it.

The red LED came back on the same display, and it looked great. Then I used compare versions, which puts two versions side by side. Here the change was obvious, but it gives you the before and the after, and you can compare any other pair of versions too.

If a detail on your render is the wrong color or in the wrong place, describe the change in plain words on that image instead of starting again.

What did the three angles show?

Next I tried generate angles. I picked perspective views from the front, the side and the top, as photos, with the product, on the same background. That's three credits, one per view, and it takes a little longer because there's more to process.

A minute or two later the three views were there. The front view, the side view and the top-down view. The result was really good.

What did the line drawing give the manufacturer?

I took one of those views and converted it to a line drawing.

What came back was the display as a drawing. That's the version you'd use to add measurements later, or to make the job easier for the manufacturer.

What does real life add in 4K?

The last test was convert to real life. One thing matters here, which is selecting the version you want to apply the change to, because that's the version it changes. I went back to version two.

Before converting it, I changed it to landscape with change ratio, 16:9, so the picture would come out bigger and read better. The display itself stayed the same.

Then I converted that version to real life at Ultra. Standard is 2K and Ultra is 4K, and Ultra takes a little longer.

It came back as a tool shop. It added a lot of the product around the display and put the display on a shelf, and it looked real. You download it at 4K, and it's the kind of picture that makes a presentation much clearer for your department or your team.

What do I take from the session?

A sketch covered in handwritten notes is a good input. Most of the notes came back as parts of the display, and nobody had to write a prompt.

A change is one sentence on the image. The red LED took a single edit, and compare versions showed exactly what moved.

Everything after the first concept came from the version tree. The angles, the line drawing, the landscape crop and the 4K store shot were all made from versions of the same display. How the sketch route works in general is in sketch to render for POP displays, and what to do when a render comes back wrong is in my AI display render came out wrong, now what?

Where the line drawing goes next

A line drawing of a concept is where the image stops. The measurements still have to come from somewhere, and that's the other AI, the one the next video is about.

Bellto is an AI agent for brands and agencies that takes a POP campaign from brief to shop drawings. It proposes the campaign mix and materials, floor stand, glorifier, shelf strip, stopper, with the budget split per store, and designs every piece with you at real scale in parametric 3D, proportions derived from the product and the facings. A dimension change recomputes the whole piece and re-runs the manufacturing checks in seconds. Every approved piece comes out as a 3D model, a part-by-part cutlist, dimensioned drawings, a STEP of the assembly and a cut DXF per part, a package a workshop can quote without redrawing. The quote comes from the manufacturer.

We're building it now. The waitlist is open to any brand, and we're contacting the first ones soon to run the first real campaigns end to end. It opens by invitation, in small groups. Pricing goes first to the people on the list, and there's no card. POP manufacturers can sign up too.

For the sketch on your desk today, signup is free with 15 one-time credits and no card required, enough for the drawing, the logo, the product photo and the first concepts. Edit with prompt, the angles, the line drawing, real life and Ultra are Pro, and Pro is $49 a month for 150 concept generations at the founding price, with the $69 list price stated openly. Nothing you upload or render trains AI models, on any plan.