From 1 Project to 6: How AI Changed How I Work as a Designer
Key Takeaways
- AI’s core value: AI is not simply a tool for working faster; it is a tool for scale that greatly expands the scope of work a single designer can lead.
- Expanding the T-shaped skill set: AI lowers the barriers in areas outside a designer’s specialty where they may be less experienced, such as planning, animation, and code implementation, enabling one person to move across a wider range of disciplines.
- The importance of judgment and direction: As the production burden decreases, the designer’s role shifts toward decision-making, planning, combining data, and setting direction.
Five Key AI Workflows
1. Automating invisible management work: Connect Granola, Claude, Linear, and Slack to automate meeting notes, draft weekly progress updates, and detect missing decisions or task mismatches.
2. Generating ideas and overcoming limits: Quickly produce obvious, entry-level ideas to break through fixed assumptions, and use AI as a “rubber duck” to shift your thinking when complex constraints leave you stuck.
3. Organizing complex systems: Feed raw data, design drafts, and logic conditions into AI to quickly draft data structures, define screen flows, and identify edge cases and badge conditions.
4. Dynamic, interactive prototyping: Build experiences with extensive conditional branching or custom logic, such as personalized onboarding, directly as code prototypes with AI instead of Figma, so behavior-level feedback can be incorporated quickly.
5. Expanding the boundaries of design: Connect the HTML-based design tool Paper with Cursor to shorten the path from design to code, and use AI to establish a starting point for motion work by suggesting transitions, reducing the production burden.
