{25} AI Assisted Design, Continuous Deployments & Your Style
{25} AI Assisted Design, Continuous Deployments & Your Style
Featuring Ben Blaiszik, Manoela Ilic, Jimmy Cleveland, Bryan Hutchinson, and Tony Fadell
Design: AI Assisted Design
Ben Blaiszik
It’s a natural evolution to go from AI generated art to AI generated interfaces. What I’d like to see is an AI assisted design workflow. Here’s what I have in mind:
A human provides the v1 design. This could be as simple as a napkin sketch or as complicated as a coded functional prototype.
AI takes the initial design along with prompts suggesting the direction the team would like to take the design.
AI provides a collection of variants that iterate on the initial design using the prompts as a guide.
The team takes a promising variant and marks it up with suggested improvements, and adjusts the prompt.
Steps 3 and 4 are repeated to refine the design until the team is happy with the results.
Frontend: Reactive Shaders
Manoela Ilic
It’s amazing to see what browsers can do these days with WebGL.
Taking real-time data from an audio source and applying it to a shader might seem like a “neat trick” with no real-world application. To that, I’d say:
Art is a real-world application.
Adding techniques like this to your tool belt can come in handy in unexpected ways. Maybe one day, you find yourself working with streaming data from weather instruments. You need to find a way to make sense of it, and the static visualizations just aren’t cutting it. Suddenly you remember this tutorial and realize you can use Three.js to create a more dynamic visualization.
Backend: Continuous Deployments
Jimmy Cleveland
I’m a big fan of Vercel. I’m able to spend the majority of my time thinking about how my apps are designed and function without worrying about all of the supporting infrastructure that helps get my code from my personal laptop to the internet.
Even though Vercel automates everything for my preferred NextJS tech stack, it is still useful to take a deeper dive into continuous deployments. Jimmy walks you through using Vercel to deploy a minimal webpack javascript app. It’s particularly useful to see how preview deployments work on feature branches.
Marketing: Honing Your Style
Bryan Hutchinson
What I like about this tip is the emphasis on YOUR attention. You are not offloading your evaluation of “what is good” to the crowd or an external authority. This allows you to learn from the output of others while honing your personal style.
In addition to benefits to your writing and style, general awareness is living. Don’t shut yourself off to the outside world. Take it in.
Team: Design Everything
Tony Fadell
The realization that you are not restricted by established conventions should be a freeing sensation. Your process, brand, schedule, work environment, revenue model, and everything in between is waiting to be designed or redesigned.
Each design is an opportunity to improve in some area. A simple shift can reduce cost, increase revenue, improve moral, add trust, or reduce effort.
This might feel overwhelming, but you don’t have to design everything at once. Do one thing at a time. Focus on making a single improvement, then move on to the next design opportunity.