AIDesignLA
Essays, workflows, case studies, and conversations from the AI Design LA community. Honest writing from people doing the work — published on Substack and here.
Over coffee recently, another Design Director and I got into a long conversation about what it actually means to transform a design team with AI. We weren't talking about how to get one designer to use Claude, Figma Make, Cursor, or Lovable. Most of us spent the past year figuring that out, experimenting in public, sharing what we learned. What comes next is harder.
Essay
Over coffee recently, another Design Director and I got into a long conversation about what it actually means to transform a design team with AI. We weren't talking about how to get one designer to use Claude, Figma Make, Cursor, or Lovable. Most of us spent the past year figuring that out, experimenting in public, sharing what we learned. What comes next is harder.
Essay
We have been naming tokens for humans for twenty years. The question now is whether the same conventions work when the consumer is a language model. Spoiler: mostly yes, with three specific exceptions that will trip you up.
Workflow
Not a tutorial. A field report from six months of using Claude to synthesize interview notes across fifteen research studies. The workflow that stuck, the one that broke, and the part you still have to do yourself.
Essay
I was wrong about vibe coding being a shortcut. I was wrong about prompting being the main skill. I was wrong about the designer's role shrinking. Here is what actually happened and what I think it means.
Case Study
I redesigned a real client's marketing site using only Figma Make. Full walkthrough of the process, the surprising parts, the moments where it failed, and whether I'd do it again on a deadline.
Research
Three rounds of user testing on showing AI reasoning inside a product UI. Short finding: explaining yourself helps at first, then starts to erode trust if you keep doing it. The threshold is lower than you think.
Essay
The name made designers nervous. The practice turns out to be less radical than the discourse around it. Here is what vibe coding actually is, what it is not, and why the interface shift matters more than the hype.
Research
AI interfaces break a silent contract: the same action should produce the same result. When that contract disappears, the whole vocabulary of affordances, feedback, and mental models has to be rethought.
Meet designers, builders, researchers, and creative technologists exploring how AI is changing design practice.
