M — N Associates’ Metis identity revolves around a Gen Alpha mascot

The mascot at the centre of Metis – VitaDairy’s pre-teen milk brand in Vietnam – was first shaped through AI in the early stages of Vietnam-based studio M — N Associates’ design process, then refined by hand into something its target audience could feel attached to. Gen Alpha is the first audience growing up with AI as part of daily life, so the studio wanted the method of creating Vitrô to reflect that. “At the beginning, the AI outputs were quite rough, but what interested us was the unpredictability,” Duy Nguyen, Co-Founder & Partner at M — N Associates, tells us. “Some of the awkward proportions, expressions and compositions felt strangely aligned with Gen Alpha culture.” The studio kept the strangeness and worked back into it manually. How many curls should sit on Vitrô’s head? Should the character have a mouth? Where to place the eyes? How long should the limbs be? None of these calibrations could be reliably held by a prompt, so the team adjusted them by hand until Vitrô felt carefree and slightly absurd. “Characters like Fido Dido for 7UP, figures that feel simple, loose and emotionally open rather than overly descriptive or narrative-driven,” Co-Founder & Partner Lan Mai explains, became the reference point for how Vitrô behaves. Emotional flexibility was the design goal. Vitrô plays loosely on the Vietnamese phrase ‘vô tri,’ which translates approximately to ‘meaningless.’ “Vitrô became intentionally blank. That simplicity allows people to project their own emotions and humour onto the character much more naturally,” Lan Mai adds. A cloudy-headed silhouette, white and minimal, sits in strong contrast to the soft pastels and nutritional hierarchy that define most of the dairy category in Vietnam, where the visual conventions still skew toward parents.