MIA is the intelligent assistant inside MGID's advertising platform — and the first time the brand needed a face, not just an interface. As Head of Product Design, I initiated and led the identity work: there was no brief for "what an AI assistant should look like," so the first job was defining the problem itself. I set the two constraints everything else had to answer to — the character had to carry real personality in marketing and hero moments, and reduce cleanly to a small UI icon without losing recognition. Most mascot systems fail at one of these ends; I made solving both a non-negotiable from the start.

I drove the work from strategy through execution: positioning the character against the crowded "friendly blob" pattern, defining a two-tier identity system — glossy 3D for brand surfaces, flat with gradient hints for product UI — and locking the recognition anchors that hold both tiers together. Beyond the character itself, I established the production approach: a generative pipeline combining prompt-engineered image models, AI video, and code-based animation, documented so the design team can extend MIA's states and assets without me in the loop. The outcome is not just a mascot but a system — identity rules, motion language, and a repeatable way to produce both.