A designer's guide to AI: Why designing in Cursor lets you prototype 10x faster, simplifies collaboration, and accelerates getting ideas out of your head | Joel Unger | How I AI (private feed for popufig@gmail.com) | Podwise
A designer's guide to AI: Why designing in Cursor lets you prototype 10x faster, simplifies collaboration, and accelerates getting ideas out of your head | Joel Unger
This episode explores how AI tools are reshaping design workflows, featuring Joel Unger, Design Director at Atlassian, who shares his experiences integrating AI into product development. Unger initially felt anxious about AI potentially replacing designers but quickly realized its limitations and ability to accelerate idea generation. He details how AI, particularly Cursor, aided in refining Trello's panel system by enabling rapid prototyping and responsive design testing, which Figma couldn't achieve alone. Against the backdrop of user feedback from Trello's beta launch, AI facilitated nuanced design choices, allowing for a more customizable user experience, and while the AI-generated code wasn't production-ready, it served as a valuable communication tool with the engineering team. More significantly, Unger recounts using AI to recreate an animated logo, saving considerable time and effort compared to traditional methods, and he also discusses using Midjourney for generating mood boards for character design, specifically for Trello's mascot, Taco. These cases reflect emerging industry patterns where AI augments designers' capabilities, allowing them to focus on higher-level creative problem-solving and interaction design.
