Last month @aiDotEngineer gave me 10 minutes to kick off the design track with how we use AI at Airfoil. In short, we’re now a team of 25 designers with a few dozen agents running around everyday… but what we make is no less human than before. Hope you enjoy it!

convergence to the mean when everyone looks at everyone else to decide what to make, we eventually stop making anything of our own. we copy what works. borrow the language, the aesthetic, the features. we call it learning from the market, following best practices, staying competitive. together, everything starts to feel familiar. polished, interchangeable. nothing wrong. nothing alive. the mean isn’t necessarily bad. it’s where everything lands when we remove the reasons for it to be different. numbers are easier to compare than feelings, so we make things that produce numbers. we study what gets attention, then shape ourselves around it. eventually the feedback stops informing the work and starts authoring it. we’re no longer asking what we want to say. we’re asking what will be rewarded for saying. ai makes this loop frictionless. it can draw from more references than we could see in a lifetime. but access to every perspective isn’t the same as having one. it hasn’t lived a particular life that makes one detail unbearable and another beautiful. when we ask it to choose for us without bringing any intention of our own, we get something plausible, easy to approve. then we ship it, measure it, copy it, and feed it back into the next round. a tidal wave of mid. this changes not just the work, but the people making it. we describe ourselves in categories platforms can distribute and markets understand. designer. founder. creator. pick a niche. build a brand. be consistent. the parts that don’t fit become inconvenient, even when those contradictions might produce our most interesting work. we become easier to classify and harder to tell apart. i think we need to approach making things more like artists. an artist develops a perspective through the work. making, noticing, choosing, failing, returning. learning what matters even when nobody else cares. craft gives that perspective a form precise enough for someone else to experience. the life outside the work matters too. the places you’ve lived, the people you’ve loved, the things you’re embarrassed to care about. these aren’t distractions from having something to say. they’re how you come to have something to say. we understand this with music, paintings, photographs, movies. we expect a person to be present in the choices. we want to experience something we wouldn’t have encountered without them. software can do this too. a piece of software expresses beliefs about how life should feel. what deserves your attention. what you should be free to change. whether a task should feel like paperwork or play. even a small interaction can carry someone’s care, humor, or curiosity. but we rarely talk about software as a medium. we talk about it as an industry. markets to capture, workflows to optimize, competitors to catch up with. we add a feature because someone else has it, without asking whether it belongs. products accumulate the same parts and lose what made them worth choosing. underneath the branding, it’s all the same thing. artists learn from others too. the question is whether you’re absorbing those influences into a point of view, or using them to avoid developing one. what are you trying to let someone feel, understand, or do? why this particular shape? what have you noticed that the existing tools don’t seem to notice? those questions don’t have answers you can borrow from a competitor’s roadmap. if we can make almost anything, deciding what deserves to exist becomes more important, not less. speed gives us more chances to exercise judgment. it doesn’t remove the responsibility. i don’t want a world where every person becomes a more efficient distributor of the same ideas. i want people to use these tools to go further into what they actually care about. to make things specific enough that we can feel someone behind them. what is the point of everyone being able to make something, if we all end up making the same thing?

We now have 150+ projects on builtbydesigners.com! @shedsgns and I just added 60+ more. Here are a few from the latest batch 👇

We now have 150+ projects on builtbydesigners.com! Head to the site to submit yours ✌️

💙

This site was perfect when you could discover real nerds posting experiments from a place of love. I miss finding super niche data visualization artists, optical illusion/color theory mathematicians, bots posting random satellite imagery crops, fractal generators.. it's just gone

this isn't convergence, it's been a playbook in asia for decades. korea ran it on the whole country: the police got a blob with big eyes in 1999, the transit authority put faces on buses, the national assembly BUILDING got a mascot, and ofc every app has one when an institution needs to be trusted faster than it can be understood, it grows a face 👁️👄👁️

fun fact: did you know the brush strokes on the Refresh website were hand-drawn?

i've been working in digital for a long time now and it's left me craving things that feel real, physical, like you could touch them that's what i love about our brand and website work for Refresh Refresh is a benefits and communication app for employees that plugs into whatever hr, payroll and insurance tools the company already runs and puts each person's benefits, perks and announcements in one place on their phone. most of their users don't have a desk, so that app is the only version of "hr" they'll ever see we thought the one thing employees actually touch should feel like it was made for people. so our brand team asked what people-made culture looks like outside an office. the answer was on the walls of London, Toronto, and SF where our teammates lives that inspiration became the foundation for the visual language. loud color, and brush strokes our brand designer Rikki drew by hand the strokes aren't for decoration. they scatter, then converge as you move through the site and the rest of the brand . which is what the product does, taking a pile of separate apps and landing them in one place the design still lives on a screen, it's still digital, but it feels like someone made it with their hands. that's the part i love so much kudos to everyone involved, so proud of this team 🤍

because things drawn by hand just FEEL better

Airfoil x Refresh Employee benefits usually sit in a long list of links or are spread across a portal, so most people never use them. Refresh came to us with a different idea: a guided journey. It means a system that knows your benefits, your health history, and your current stress level, and offers you what you need in the moment. In short, a system that is designed to serve the person. We designed the website around the same idea, so the site itself is a guided journey. Thank you to the Refresh team for trusting us with the creative direction and brand, full website design and copywriting, all the way through to engineering implementation!

Hand-drawn, not generated. Really proud of the team’s work on this!

These are my findings too. Well said.