Vibe Design

Design is painting with the knowledge of the world.

I often say design is engineering desirability and painting with the knowledge of the world. Not a single field is left out of a designer’s brush: the centuries of art that have innovated our perception, the facades that decorate the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia, the fractals in nature defined by mathematics, and the physics of the particles that govern our reality and mystery.

What I felt re-architecting CoA inside out was being a designer with the keys to this world. For so long, I held visions in my head that were vastly difficult to produce, taking full engineering and design teams to make real. Yet everything from the logo, branding, marketing, writing, vision, and the code itself was done by me. One bridge between consciousness and reality.

At the same time, the road wasn’t easy. Just six months ago, when I first explored building with Claude, I gave up on it from a design perspective. In the past year, context windows have 10xed, and will most likely 10x again. My ability to create with Claude has simultaneously improved. Now I am writing tens of thousands of lines of code a week, good code, while creating the vision I see for myself and for the companies that trust me with theirs. Good design with the right mind, vision, and direction behind it can make real what was impossible without decent engineering capacity. I could not have done any of the work here just four months ago with Claude. Last year, I would have needed at least 1 more designer, 2 engineers, and probably a dozen trade-off conversations.

Below I explore how I reconstructed our digital identity, from logo to website. At the very end, I also provide an appendix on ways you can design better with AI, and some pitfalls I still find across Opus and Fable from a design perspective.

My hope is that over time, design and engineering act as the mechanisms to unlocking creative potential at scale as their barriers to entry reduce over time. Even though, if I were the king of AI, I would do many things differently, I am optimistically realistic.

Largely because the people I have met through my journey, from junior designer to one who has built $1B+ portfolios for 100M users, were all driven with sincere purpose to build a better world. I believe in that, and CoA is a reflection of this belief to me, and why I helped found it.

Scaffolding creativity.

The ethos of design sits at a cross-section of function and form. The function for us as a growing company is to cut through the noise. So much of AI has been what I call “slop.” A lot of forward sales and marketing promised the world and delivered little. Companies and “experts” put entire cultures on guard.

While many jumped to market, we went to learn. Just two people at CoA maxed out eight Claude accounts a week for six months. We were building complex applications and prototypes across case law, federal spaces, digital pathology, and many more. We were working at the inflection point where AI was actually traceable and helpful versus performative. Dancing on that edge with purpose and creativity was what I wanted to replicate. This inspired the form, and a high bar for the visual ethos:

A company as a story

The goal was not just to communicate what we did, but to create a clear line of visual and narrative storytelling laddering up to our identity as multidisciplinary leaders and practitioners building on the edges of AI. You see this in our logo (more on this later) and how it repeats in cinematic form across the entire page, serving as the connective point between customer and value, and between an idea and broader possibility.

Architected by research, driven by insight

We also wanted to titrate six months of intensive product and AI experience and deliver that in packaged ways to help people do the same. I designed “From the Model,” an insights platform with field notes, hard lessons won, and case studies. Not just from us, but from leaders across our network.

Product as art

Design is engineering desirability. It’s multidisciplinary by nature, intersecting emotion, human psychology, technology, and perception to change human behavior at scale. It is also intensely data-driven. To be desirable means: functional, usable, efficacious, wanted through time, and consistently chosen. One cannot measure any of these without data. From my vantage point as a consumer and designer, many products and services missed the mark. They often used once-true complexity and difficulty, and “do you really trust this” fear, to hit the baseline market tolerance. Now the cost of reaching that baseline has dropped dramatically, especially as model differentiation becomes cheaper. For example, cheaper models can now do a majority of everyday tasks at a fraction of the cost.

CoA’s aim is different. We want you to love what you use, we want you to remember it, and then carry that bar to other services in your life. To me, that is not just data; it is art.

A prompt is a creative brief.

You would never tell a designer “make me a logo” and expect the one in your head. You would hand them a brief: who it is for, what it must do, the look you are after.

Working with AI is the same job. The model executes, and ultimately it will only create the quality you give it. No vision, no taste, no reference, and you will get slop. The designs in this guide were not drawn by hand, and they were not generated by luck. Each one started as a written brief that names real things: a flower’s geometry, a craftsman’s construction method, a camera’s aperture. The more precisely the brief points to your vision, the fewer revs or prompts it will take to get there.

The value proposition of AI in design is that iteration is nearly free, exponentially faster, and can be made and tested without being an engineer. A direction that once took a week of comps takes minutes, so you can explore ten directions and kill nine.

The designer’s job shifts from pushing pixels to describing worlds, and the designers who thrive are the ones with the largest vocabulary of real things to describe: mathematics, architecture, typography, nature, machines.

The differentiator is now judgment, discernment, and creativity. The designer still has to say no, wield the chisel ruthlessly until the quality bar is met, cut the fluff, and steer the direction.

A Harmony of Nature and AI.

I was at the National Gallery of Art’s research library, flipping through architectural books, looking for what would express an intersection of AI, nature, growth, and art. On the way out, I stopped by a lesser-known fountain there, surrounded by beautiful bushes and hydrangeas. As I was admiring the spiraled patterns of the flowers, fractals came to mind.

The beautiful sets that describe the repeated spirals and patterns which govern so much of the natural world around us. There was one I stumbled upon in university called the Fermat spiral. When dots are plotted along it in a Fibonacci spiral, it generates the self-replicating fractal patterns of a sunflower. The rule was written down by Helmut Vogel in 1979.

I did a very rough sketch of how I wanted the logo to look. The mathematics were set, and I knew I wanted a certain level of density while maintaining a spiral pattern across sizes and mediums. On the creative side, I also wanted to embody how our company is growing a dozen ideas at once, thanks to the accelerated cycles of creating with AI. I decided to represent these as the amber seeds scattered along the spiral in yellow. Each one represents a seed that may flower. When the logo is displayed in a digital space, like at the bottom of our Who We Are page, the logo “breathes” through a subtle pulse animation to reflect breath and life.

Below is the prompt I ended up writing, and the result.

A homepage that opens like an eye.

The challenge was making the iris abstract enough to be implicitly understood and intricate enough to evoke a feeling of depth and immersion. Over my travels this past year, I found a new appreciation for Islamic and Moorish architectural symbols.

Their geometric repetition gave me the idea of what a human iris would look like with isometric patterns arranged in circles outside the pupil. This circular layering would also follow a spiral element similar to our logo, and would allow an easy application of motion as independently rotating disks. From a depth-of-field perspective, each ring would rotate on its own timing, with intricacy going up as you get closer to the pupil. The pupil would be white, with lower opacity on the immediate rings to provide a halo effect for our tagline, “We Make AI Real.”

Marketing, brand, and creative will know that simple is not easy. This tagline came to me while consolidating months of what I’ve learned making an AI-native company. Quite honestly, it came from the frustration I had with the quality. There was so much AI slop and low-grade content. Other companies, even larger ones I won’t name, were charging their clients more for AI while passing on their deculturation overhead. Everything I learned is antithetical to this idea. AI makes bolder ideas and grander visions more efficient over time, especially when properly titrated within the context of what is right for a company’s culture and its competitive reality.

We are in the latter camp. We wanted to see problems through the eyes of those working in them and find ways to keep AI accountable and truly assistive, and to provide more efficacious results. In the center of the rotating disks is the encapsulation of that intent: “We Make AI Real.” Below is the prompt that generated the final iris.

Crafting Identity.

I see product as equal parts desirability (design), data (technology and business), and art (identity and differentiation). One of the biggest frustrations I’ve had as a designer was the art. Historically, there wasn’t a lot of appetite at enterprise scale for animations, movement, and high-quality renders due to complexity and cost.

While Fable was out and available for use before the credit lock, I wanted to push the model as much as possible on one of the most technically complex components of design. As an avid art collector myself, I drew on a large body of styles and landed on dot illustration. Three reasons: first, the style matched our identity, which lives in dotted space; second, there is a mathematical exactness to it; and third, it was one I could therefore approximate through the language of AI.

Even on Fable I went through maybe a dozen-plus iterations. It generated bare-minimum blobs that looked like paint drawings, dot densities so sparse I couldn’t make out the objects, and uses of color that were imaginative but nonsensical. Being too declarative created small derivatives of ideas that didn’t work; being too general gave Fable too much leeway. So I deconstructed the end result into the elements of art and design: style, direction (animation and rendering, like a director), tone, color, image, spread, density, motion, and end vision.

To tackle these dimensions, I sketched out a small storyboard. It begins by taking an abstract version of our logo and overlaying a triquetra, then placing the amber seed in rotation along it, in the movement of an atom. As you scroll, that turns into the sun and life, as we land on our principles. The sun then springs life into people guiding AI; life zooms out again into enduring mountainscapes; and back into people as we authentically solve meaningful problems.

The result was a beautiful expression of who we are, in stillness and in motion, at rest and at work. Below is one atomic beat of that storyboard — the mark becoming the sun — in the verbatim prompt that produced the three frames beneath it. I’d encourage you to explore the full page, especially on a larger screen like your laptop or desktop.

Power to the creators.

Every design in this guide came from a conversation, and every conversation started with the world: a flower’s arithmetic, a craftsman’s compass, a camera’s blades. The AI supplied endless skilled hands. The direction, the references, and the words came from a person.

This is what vibe design means to me. You take the knowledge amassed through your professional and creative life and put that against “teams” that can make increasingly higher-quality outputs if guided correctly.

I remember in my 20s, I would wake up at 4 am and read and write for 3 hours. I subscribed to learning everything I could: physics, math, medicine, biology, finance, systems theory, organizational psychology, design, space, and so much more. People asked me why. I said I have no idea. Only that I love learning. The world is large, and I want to understand it, and people, as much as possible.

Finally, I have an answer, as I turn my ideas into as much beauty and good as I can. Power to the creators.