DISCOVER PROJECT
Traingent
Ride With Dave
From concepting to character creation and branding. Bringing the world's first AI Cycling Coach to life, straight from the 80's.
SERVICES
CONCEPT, CHARACTER CREATION, ILLUSTRATION, BRANDING, PROMPT ENGINEERING, AI ANIMATION
Project Overview
Traingent came to Superside with a challenge that doesn't come along very often: build a brand and a character at the same time, because neither could exist without the other. The brief was to create Dave, the world's first AI cycling coach with actual soul.
Not just a feature, not just a chatbot. A fully realized character with a backstory, a voice, a visual identity, and enough personality to make riders actually want to be coached. The brand would live or die by how real Dave felt.
Approach
Built from VHS. Powered by AI.
The concept started with a question: what would make an AI coach feel human? The answer was lore.
We gave Dave a past. A ridiculous, lovable, deeply committed past rooted in 80s VHS fitness culture, spandex, and an almost unhinged belief in the power of a good cadence. He existed in 1985 as the face of a straight-to-VHS cycling series. His digital twin got boxed up and forgotten. Then a Traingent intern found the tape at a garage sale, digitized it for laughs, and accidentally merged glitchy 80s code with modern AI. Dave woke up. Still jacked. Still cheeky. Ready to coach again from the cloud. The brand followed the character, not the other way around.
Process
Dave needed to exist across multiple visual contexts, which meant building a system of three distinct visual modes. Photorealistic for content that "comes from the 80s": staged, grainy, Polaroid-era imagery that feels like it was actually shot in 1985. 3D for present-day content and AI interactions, giving him a crisp, modern presence. And 2D illustration rooted in Saturday Morning Cartoon aesthetics (think He-Man, G.I. Joe, TMNT) for social, merch, and animated content. Each mode serves a different context, but all three are unmistakably Dave.
The work started with lore before anything visual was defined. Dave's backstory was written in two tiers: an official version clean enough for a press release, and a deep-cut version full of alternate origin theories, conspiracy-level humor, and character mythology. From there, the visual identity was built around a set of non-negotiables: the wraparound shades, the mullet, the headband, the mustache, the skinsuit, the high socks. These became Dave's instantly recognizable markers, the equivalent of Mario's red hat or Slash's top hat. Once the character was locked, a full Tone of Voice kit was developed covering personality anchors, language traits, sample copy, catchphrases, and guidelines for integrating Dave into app interactions, SMS nudges, and long-term AI prompt design.
Part algorithm. Part mullet. All coach.
TEAM
Ride with Dave is proof that the best AI products aren't built around features. They're built around story. When you give people someone to root for, they stop using a tool and start riding with a friend.
