I recently uprooted from Seattle to Edinburgh and have been struck daily by new and interesting details of this city that I love. One of the subtler characteristics that has caught my eye is how prevalent hand-painted signs are on Edinburgh’s shopfronts. To be sure, there are plenty of gaudy and loud plastic and backlit signs along the high-streets, but that scream is almost equaled out by the confident and quiet assertions of the many understated and unique hand painted signs.
It has been a fun few weeks getting to know some of the latest AI tools through my work on the puzzle counter app (Part 1, Part 2). I will use this post to venture some guesses about how this will affect product development, with a specific focus on how it will change design. It was eye-opening to see how quickly the tools at our disposal have evolved from beguilingly smart tchotchkes into meaningful collaborators for the complex task of product design.
This post promises to be a shorter one. I realized pretty quickly into this stage that my assumptions about how this process would work end-to-end were not correct. I imagined that once I had some sets of wireframes from the initial explorations, I would import those into a tool and voila they would import and provide a the tools necessary to create, edit, and apply a cohesive design system. In reality, this didn’t seem to be the way most tools worked, likely for the best, since there are more straightforward workflows available.
