This is Design At The Most AI-Installed Company: Diego Zaks

George Hastings is the solo founder of Unicorn Studio, the no-code tool that turned WebGL and shaders into something designers can touch and play with. But my favorite thing about George is that he built it alone, with no VC money, after years at IDEO and AREA17. This conversation goes deep into deterministic chisels vs stochastic AI design and his advice to designers who want to build their own tools. Get the UX Tools Newsletter (written by me) Join 100,000+ designers for weekly insights on creative software and the people shaping it: https://uxtools.co CHAPTERS: 0:00 — Cold open and intro 1:39 — The blank page and building your own inspiration 4:48 — Making things vs building products 6:15 — Falling in love with code: AREA17, CodePen, and the browser 8:12 — Open canvas tools and the tension with code 9:06 — Reverse engineering the happy accident 11:02 — Knowing when it's done 12:12 — A tool or a way of thinking? 13:46 — The chisel vs stochastic design 16:50 — Building at 90% agentic: you're the boss, check the work 18:37 — Why AI struggles with shaders 20:24 — An agent inside the walled garden 21:35 — Charging money and the long closed beta 22:37 — The pixel game, Khroma, and getting the building bug 25:47 — Solo, no VC: "I'm really just trying to be an artist" 26:58 — Advice for designer-builders: solve a sexy problem 28:03 — Selling the workflow, not the outputs 30:15 — Soul, special sauce, and letting the shaders go 32:47 — OpenClaw, MCP, and agents using your tool 37:19 — The controlled agent rollout 38:22 — Orchestrators and mourning the old workflow 40:51 — Outro: go play with it LINKS: Unicorn Studio: https://unicorn.studio George Hastings on X: https://x.com/soulegit FOLLOW ME: Newsletter: https://uxtools.co X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertom LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Jamey Gannon is a creative director and Maven instructor teaching designers how to control AI like a creative director. She's running brand sprints, directing image models, and building her own tools while she does it. This conversation covers whether you can actually teach AI taste, the inputs most designers miss when evaluating AI tools, why she took an "AI sabbatical" to get good, and the five-principle framework she uses to direct image models. Want to become an AI Creative Director? Get 10% off Jamey's next cohort with promo code TOMMY here: https://bit.ly/4tJ9nF7 Get the UX Tools Newsletter (written by me) Join 100,000+ designers for weekly insights on creative software and the people shaping it: https://uxtools.co CHAPTERS: 0:00 — Cold open: AI is not magic 0:20 — The rise of AI creative directors 1:42 — Can AI learn taste? 4:30 — What most people miss about prompting 7:58 — Brand sprints, speed, and taste 13:01 — How AI fits into real client work 15:37 — A mood-board tool built with AI 22:00 — Jamey's daily creative stack 27:21 — How she found time to learn AI 31:08 — The one-click AI myth 38:39 — Visibility, distribution, and getting chosen 42:00 — The split between brand and product designers 46:04 — Pricing AI-assisted creative work 49:08 — The AI Creative Director framework 56:01 — Why being remembered matters LINKS: Maven (AI Creative Director course): https://bit.ly/4tJ9nF7 FOLLOW ME: X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertom LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Kevin Espiritu runs Epic Gardening, one of the clearest examples of a creator-led media business that became much more than content: YouTube, commerce, products, books, and Botanical Interests. This conversation covers why Silicon Valley is suddenly fascinated by new media, what Kevin learned from the old SEO and affiliate-marketing era, why creators over-optimize the wrong things, how Epic Gardening thinks about products, IP, TV viewership, brand deals, channel strategy, and what it actually takes to build media that lasts. Get the UX Tools Newsletter (written by me) Join 100,000+ designers for weekly insights on creative software and the people shaping it: https://uxtools.co CHAPTERS: 0:00 Media is soil 0:27 Why new media week starts with Kevin 1:38 Silicon Valley discovers creators 3:26 From SEO hacks to durable media 7:03 True outliers are one-of-one 10:19 Why creators get platform-stuck 12:33 Products, IP, and real media businesses 17:25 Brand deals without draining trust 21:03 YouTube is becoming TV 23:22 Format experiments and channel strategy 30:31 Packaging before production 35:07 Scaling beyond the founder 40:03 Tommy's media company, live consult 45:30 Broad vs niche audiences 50:02 Raising money and the next creator companies 56:06 Cultural campfires LINKS: Epic Gardening: https://www.epicgardening.com Botanical Interests: https://www.botanicalinterests.com Kevin Espiritu on X: https://x.com/KevinEspiritu FOLLOW ME: X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertom IG: https://instagram.com/itsdesignertom LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Tom Krcha founded Pencil.dev after years inside the design tooling cycle, from Flash evangelism to creating Adobe XD, which gives him a rare view of where AI design tools are actually heading. This conversation covers why agents are best at the first 80%, why designers still need the last 20%, what a headless design tool means, how Pencil is building for swarms of AI designers, and why taste comes from still putting your hands in the work. Get the UX Tools Newsletter (written by me) Join 100,000+ designers for weekly insights on creative software and the people shaping it: https://uxtools.co CHAPTERS: 0:00 Headless agents inside design tools 0:31 Why design tools are splitting 1:36 Tom’s path from Flash to Pencil 5:13 Stochastic vs deterministic design 6:16 Why designers still need the chisel 9:18 How Pencil started inside Cursor 10:19 Designer as orchestrator and final authority 12:05 Canvas, tweaker, and headless agents 14:16 What “headless design tool” means 15:52 Context as the portable briefcase 17:09 — Pencil as an agent-first canvas 20:53 Building tools that build tools 24:52 Why users create 50-artboard files 26:26 Agent specialization and subagents 27:35 Why vibe coding feels like Flash 29:38 Can agents create happy accidents? 31:17 The canvas as a crime scene 32:28 Does AI make you a better author? 35:06 What designers do with 60 agents 36:38 Pencil’s roadmap and the future of iteration 38:22 Taste comes from participation LINKS: Pencil.dev: https://pencil.dev Tom Krcha on X: https://x.com/tomkrcha FOLLOW ME: X / Twitter: https://x.com/tommygeoco LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Hannah Ahn is designing healthcare in the exact moment AI is making it easier than ever to take control of our health. She leads design and marketing at Superpower, a health startup building an AI layer across bloodwork, labs, genomics, and medical records. Before that, she came up through product management at Canva, which makes her a useful kind of design leader right now: practical, visual, brand-sensitive, and allergic to treating velocity like the whole job. We talk about designing trust around health data, why Superpower rolled out Claude Code to the design team in January, how she hires for team composition, and why the most underrated signal in a designer right now is still love of the game. Join 100k+ designers reading my newsletter:: https://uxtools.co Come party with me at Config 2026 (June 25): https://luma.com/usxsrlu1 CHAPTERS: 00:00 Designing trust when AI touches your health 03:06 PM to designer was the practical path 06:41 How Superpower runs a five-person design team 10:34 Hiring for composition, not clones 13:55 Love of the game beats credentials 16:46 Rolling Claude Code out in January 21:47 When velocity starts producing slop 24:41 The 1% that makes people trust you 33:23 The junior ladder is breaking 36:31 Designers as architects, not prompt operators LINKS: Superpower: https://superpower.com Hannah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahnhannah/ FOLLOW ME: X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertom IG: https://instagram.com/itsdesignertom LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco