Jerusalem Marathon
"This is how we've done it for 20 years" — the mindset that nearly broke the Jerusalem Marathon, and the technology that rewrote the rules. Called in to design the entire event solo on an impossible timeline, I brought AI in as a full creative partner: custom agents that wrote code to automate Adobe and pushed out hundreds of print and digital files in near-zero time. Uncompromising human creative, paired with the right automation, doing the work of whole departments.
Sometimes the hardest part of a massive project isn't the deadline — it's the fixed thinking around it.I was called in to design the most recent Jerusalem Marathon, stepping into a system that had run the event the same way for two decades. The timeline was impossible: a week and a half, from zero. The conditions were anything but normal — this was wartime, with air-raid sirens part of the backdrop.Under that kind of pressure and uncertainty, the old methods simply buckled. If I was going to carry this marathon on my own and still deliver something extraordinary, I had to break the prevailing mindset and change the rules from the ground up. Twenty years of "how it's always been done" is not a guarantee of efficiency.So instead of bringing in a battalion of designers, I recruited AI as a full partner in my workflow. I wove it through every stage — from concept and rapid reference-building to custom agents I built to write code that automated Adobe software directly.Those agents became my production team. They cut, closed, and wrapped hundreds of complex files for print and digital automatically, in near-zero time — from the enormous scaffolding and stage structures on the ground, down to the runners' bib numbers.The result proved the point: uncompromising human creative, paired with the right technology and automation, can do the work of entire departments — and outperform any outdated way of working.Video and editing: Spark Digital.