Every year, BURTON hosted a private themed event for friends of the brand at Rosa Khutor. For one of these events, titled 45th Element and themed around an intergalactic cruise, BURTON’s Russian team brought me in to design the landing page

The client provided the page structure and two visual references, Dune and The Fifth Element, and wanted the design to reflect the resort’s landscape and character. I had five days and a modest budget, but I knew the resort well and was already into snowboarding, so the setting was familiar. Once AI image-generation tools became available, I returned to the project. I kept the original concept and page structure but rebuilt the visuals

Planet Rosa Khutor

The mountain village of Rosa Khutor became a spaceport and the starting point for exploring the resort. As invited guests scrolled, the page took them across an alternate planet built from the region’s geography and local memes while guiding them through a short onboarding for the event

The opening section was built around a real drone photo of Rosa Khutor mountain village, reworked using AI tools and Photoshop while keeping the resort’s familiar architecture and terrain recognisable

The dune section was inspired by a real weather anomaly, when a Saharan storm covered the snowy slopes with sand, turning parts of Rosa Khutor into orange, almost “Martian” landscapes

The sea creature was based on a photo of a beluga whale and reworked to fit the landing page’s fictional world while still referencing the beluga whales that live at the Port of Sochi

The landing page handled guest registration successfully and received positive feedback on its design from both attendees and BURTON’s team in Russia. Despite that, I was never fully satisfied with the execution, so once AI image tools became available, I returned to the project and rebuilt the visuals until the result was closer to what I had in mind. AI really did make a big difference to the visual work. We’ll see where it goes from here

Every year, BURTON hosted a private themed event for friends of the brand at Rosa Khutor. For one of these events, titled 45th Element and themed around an intergalactic cruise, BURTON’s Russian team brought me in to design the landing page

The client provided the page structure and two visual references, Dune and The Fifth Element, and wanted the design to reflect the resort’s landscape and character. I had five days and a modest budget, but I knew the resort well and was already into snowboarding, so the setting was familiar. Once AI image-generation tools became available, I returned to the project. I kept the original concept and page structure but rebuilt the visuals

Planet Rosa Khutor

The mountain village of Rosa Khutor became a spaceport and the starting point for exploring the resort. As invited guests scrolled, the page took them across an alternate planet built from the region’s geography and local memes while guiding them through a short onboarding for the event

The opening section was built around a real drone photo of Rosa Khutor mountain village, reworked using AI tools and Photoshop while keeping the resort’s familiar architecture and terrain recognisable

The dune section was inspired by a real weather anomaly, when a Saharan storm covered the snowy slopes with sand, turning parts of Rosa Khutor into orange, almost “Martian” landscapes

The sea creature was based on a photo of a beluga whale and reworked to fit the landing page’s fictional world while still referencing the beluga whales that live at the Port of Sochi

The landing page handled guest registration successfully and received positive feedback on its design from both attendees and BURTON’s team in Russia. Despite that, I was never fully satisfied with the execution, so once AI image tools became available, I returned to the project and rebuilt the visuals until the result was closer to what I had in mind. AI really did make a big difference to the visual work. We’ll see where it goes from here