The Truth about AI design tools

Hey there, it’s Shane.

In this edition of Design for Builders, I want to share my experience of how I use AI to unlock more creativity for building and designing products.

If you’re a designer, it’s about tools that will speed up your workflow. If you’re a builder without much design experience but love exploring design ideas, it’ll help you speed up your experimentation.

Let’s get started.

Okay, so we all know that lately, no one's truly cracked the UI design AI tool yet. I’ve seen a couple of promising companies like Variant AI, which hasn’t come out yet.

When it comes to designing an amazing-looking, functional product design, I’m excited to try Figma’s new Figma Make, which was announced at Config this week.

But I'm specifically talking about more visual design, the thing that people are calling craft. There’s a couple I’ve been using a ton!

• Midjourney v7 has been great!

• Flora is awesome for creative exploration

• ChatGPT image gen has been an unlock for a ton of great ideas

• Gigapixel has been awesome for image upscaling

The secret weapon for design exploration

A client recently came to me wanting an "enterprise-like" logo combining an "r" and a question mark.

Old way: Sketch 50 concepts. Refined 10. Present 1. Hope they like one. Iterate from there.

Flora is an AI visual ideation tool. Think of it as a cross between Figma, Midjourney, and a moldboard, but with actual structure and access to every image, video, and text model, even ChatGPT’s insane image gen.

The Flora way:

• Generated multiple question marks + R shapes using different AI models

• Connected reference images to blend the best elements

• Found a winner, exported it

• Vectorized and styled it to match their brand

The client loved it. What would've been days of exploration became a single, focused session.

Why texture exploration will never be the same

For another project, I needed to explore different materials and textures for a house icon:

Flora generated tons of variations with different materials in minutes. You can specify "transparent background" directly in the prompt.

No more rate limiting. No more waiting. Just pure creative flow.

The secret sauce: Visual connections that spark new ideas

Here's where Flora gets wild; it lets you connect seemingly unrelated visual references.

1. Imported Pinterest finds or Cosmos references

2. Had Flora describe images when I was drawing a blank on prompts

3. Connected multiple sources

4. Used the results as jumping-off points for production-ready assets

5. Connect them to a video model like Luma Ray 2 or Kling 2.0 for amazing video assets
   

   

Brand-specific styles

Here's where Flora gets interesting: you can create styles, which are trained models on a variety of images.

They have tons of pre-made styles you can browse through. But you can create your own styles to define your brand vibe.

How it works:

• Feed Flora a collection of images that capture your brand essence (the more the better)

• The tool trains a custom style based on these visual references

• Now you can generate assets with a consistent brand style across different models

I recently did this for an app’s brand assets. We trained a style on their existing photography and texture elements, then generated a complete set for a new direction.

The beauty is in the consistency. Once your style is defined, you're not starting from scratch with every new asset. Your brand vibe lives within the experience.

Why this matters for you right now, as builders, we're constantly balancing speed with creativity, and AI tools help:

• Compresses days of ideation into hours

• Bridges the gap between references and fresh concepts

• Streamlines the jump from exploration to production

• Gets stakeholders excited with actual visuals, not abstract descriptions

Should you try it?

If you’re building a product and need to get visuals faster, this is one of the best tools I’ve used lately.

You don’t need to be a designer to get value. But if you are a designer, especially one who works on brand visuals or early-stage concepts, Flora helps you go faster.

— Shane

P.S. Only taking on 2 more design projects this quarter. If you need help with app design, book a call here