Make Design Fun Again

Design is a process of turning our idea into reality. There is always the fun part and not so fun part in the process. Creating design iterations — fun. Making sure all layers are named correctly — not so fun. Testing out color ideas — fun. Making sure all colors are assigned the right variable tokens — not so fun. That boring stuff isn’t going anywhere. Maybe we just don’t have to be the ones doing it.

Throughout the design tools history, we are basically just letting our tools do more boring stuff. We use Photoshop instead of pen and paper so we don’t need to start from scratch when we make mistakes. We use Figma instead of Photoshop so we don’t need to manually recreate the same components on every page. We always move to a new tool when it can save us time. Now is that time again.

Enter AI, aka the world’s most patient intern. Not the most creative (yet) but really great at the boring stuff. I found that using Figma Make (Figma’s AI assistant) like a design intern in Figma is pretty awesome. I can just tell it to do things anytime I feel what I am doing is repetitive. It’s working well from renaming layers or replacing content to creating an entire color variables system while applying it across all my designs. I am still learning its limits (it can be slow sometimes) but when it works, it really saves me time to do the actual “designing”.

In the usual design process, we have an idea first and try to realize it in design. Then we found out issues or edge cases with the design and have to start over. I was trying to diagram out an idea the other day and asked Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) to check for errors. It actually suggested a different type of diagram that works better for my idea. I would probably arrive at a similar conclusion later but this really speeds up the process. Here is a fun one: Try asking AI to be your interviewer and let it poke holes in your idea or showing you all the edge cases. You might be surprised at things you’ve missed.

A design project often starts with lots of research materials — reports, documentations, interview transcripts, etc… Our job is to distill them into design solutions. I often feed them into Gemini (Google’s AI assistant) to get a summary as well as highlighting any patterns quickly. It’s much faster than trying to read everything raw (And yes, I still read them and check the sources because AI hallucinations are real). The difference is that you would have a rough idea before verifying the materials and you can more easily pinpoint what you are looking for.

Being able to ask AI to do things is cool and all but what if…it can just do things on its own? What if the canvas can have its own opinion? It’s been interesting to follow the progress of those new types of design tools that have an “AI-native” canvas. The AI sits in the background and reacts to what’s on the canvas in real-time, then pointing out inconsistencies, filling the gaps, and suggesting improvements. The canvas itself is also “open” to other AI agents so they can make design changes directly on canvas too. We are not at “full auto-pilot” with these new tools yet but I am looking forward to not having to worry about boring stuff anymore. Now, the only thing left for us designers is to figure out what to complain about next.