State of Play

George Hastings is the solo founder of Unicorn Studio, the no-code tool that turned WebGL and shaders into something designers can touch and play with. 
But my favorite thing about George is that he built it alone, with no VC money, after years at IDEO and AREA17.
This conversation goes deep into deterministic chisels vs stochastic AI design and his advice to designers who want to build their own tools.
Get the UX Tools Newsletter (written by me)
Join 100,000+ designers for weekly insights on creative software and the people shaping it: https://uxtools.co
CHAPTERS:
0:00 — Cold open and intro
1:39 — The blank page and building your own inspiration
4:48 — Making things vs building products
6:15 — Falling in love with code: AREA17, CodePen, and the browser
8:12 — Open canvas tools and the tension with code
9:06 — Reverse engineering the happy accident
11:02 — Knowing when it's done
12:12 — A tool or a way of thinking?
13:46 — The chisel vs stochastic design
16:50 — Building at 90% agentic: you're the boss, check the work
18:37 — Why AI struggles with shaders
20:24 — An agent inside the walled garden
21:35 — Charging money and the long closed beta
22:37 — The pixel game, Khroma, and getting the building bug
25:47 — Solo, no VC: "I'm really just trying to be an artist"
26:58 — Advice for designer-builders: solve a sexy problem
28:03 — Selling the workflow, not the outputs
30:15 — Soul, special sauce, and letting the shaders go
32:47 — OpenClaw, MCP, and agents using your tool
37:19 — The controlled agent rollout
38:22 — Orchestrators and mourning the old workflow
40:51 — Outro: go play with it
LINKS:
Unicorn Studio: https://unicorn.studio
George Hastings on X: https://x.com/soulegit
FOLLOW ME:
Newsletter: https://uxtools.co
X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertom
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Jamey Gannon is a creative director and Maven instructor teaching designers how to control AI like a creative director.
She's running brand sprints, directing image models, and building her own tools while she does it.
This conversation covers whether you can actually teach AI taste, the inputs most designers miss when evaluating AI tools, why she took an "AI sabbatical" to get good, and the five-principle framework she uses to direct image models.
Want to become an AI Creative Director? Get 10% off Jamey's next cohort with promo code TOMMY here: https://bit.ly/4tJ9nF7
Get the UX Tools Newsletter (written by me)
Join 100,000+ designers for weekly insights on creative software and the people shaping it: https://uxtools.co
CHAPTERS:
0:00 — Cold open: AI is not magic
0:20 — The rise of AI creative directors
1:42 — Can AI learn taste?
4:30 — What most people miss about prompting
7:58 — Brand sprints, speed, and taste
13:01 — How AI fits into real client work
15:37 — A mood-board tool built with AI
22:00 — Jamey's daily creative stack
27:21 — How she found time to learn AI
31:08 — The one-click AI myth
38:39 — Visibility, distribution, and getting chosen
42:00 — The split between brand and product designers
46:04 — Pricing AI-assisted creative work
49:08 — The AI Creative Director framework
56:01 — Why being remembered matters
LINKS:
Maven (AI Creative Director course): https://bit.ly/4tJ9nF7
FOLLOW ME:
X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertom
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Kevin Espiritu runs Epic Gardening, one of the clearest examples of a creator-led media business that became much more than content: YouTube, commerce, products, books, and Botanical Interests.
This conversation covers why Silicon Valley is suddenly fascinated by new media, what Kevin learned from the old SEO and affiliate-marketing era, why creators over-optimize the wrong things, how Epic Gardening thinks about products, IP, TV viewership, brand deals, channel strategy, and what it actually takes to build media that lasts.
Get the UX Tools Newsletter (written by me)
Join 100,000+ designers for weekly insights on creative software and the people shaping it: https://uxtools.co
CHAPTERS:
0:00 Media is soil
0:27 Why new media week starts with Kevin
1:38 Silicon Valley discovers creators
3:26 From SEO hacks to durable media
7:03 True outliers are one-of-one
10:19 Why creators get platform-stuck
12:33 Products, IP, and real media businesses
17:25 Brand deals without draining trust
21:03 YouTube is becoming TV
23:22 Format experiments and channel strategy
30:31 Packaging before production
35:07 Scaling beyond the founder
40:03 Tommy's media company, live consult
45:30 Broad vs niche audiences
50:02 Raising money and the next creator companies
56:06 Cultural campfires
LINKS:
Epic Gardening: https://www.epicgardening.com
Botanical Interests: https://www.botanicalinterests.com
Kevin Espiritu on X: https://x.com/KevinEspiritu
FOLLOW ME:
X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertom
IG: https://instagram.com/itsdesignertom
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Tom Krcha founded Pencil.dev after years inside the design tooling cycle, from Flash evangelism to creating Adobe XD, which gives him a rare view of where AI design tools are actually heading.
This conversation covers why agents are best at the first 80%, why designers still need the last 20%, what a headless design tool means, how Pencil is building for swarms of AI designers, and why taste comes from still putting your hands in the work.
Get the UX Tools Newsletter (written by me)
Join 100,000+ designers for weekly insights on creative software and the people shaping it: https://uxtools.co
CHAPTERS:
0:00 Headless agents inside design tools
0:31 Why design tools are splitting
1:36 Tom’s path from Flash to Pencil
5:13 Stochastic vs deterministic design
6:16 Why designers still need the chisel
9:18 How Pencil started inside Cursor
10:19 Designer as orchestrator and final authority
12:05 Canvas, tweaker, and headless agents
14:16 What “headless design tool” means
15:52 Context as the portable briefcase
17:09 — Pencil as an agent-first canvas
20:53 Building tools that build tools
24:52 Why users create 50-artboard files
26:26 Agent specialization and subagents
27:35 Why vibe coding feels like Flash
29:38 Can agents create happy accidents?
31:17 The canvas as a crime scene
32:28 Does AI make you a better author?
35:06 What designers do with 60 agents
36:38 Pencil’s roadmap and the future of iteration
38:22 Taste comes from participation
LINKS:
Pencil.dev: https://pencil.dev
Tom Krcha on X: https://x.com/tomkrcha
FOLLOW ME:
X / Twitter: https://x.com/tommygeoco
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Hannah Ahn is designing healthcare in the exact moment AI is making it easier than ever to take control of our health.
She leads design and marketing at Superpower, a health startup building an AI layer across bloodwork, labs, genomics, and medical records. Before that, she came up through product management at Canva, which makes her a useful kind of design leader right now: practical, visual, brand-sensitive, and allergic to treating velocity like the whole job.
We talk about designing trust around health data, why Superpower rolled out Claude Code to the design team in January, how she hires for team composition, and why the most underrated signal in a designer right now is still love of the game.
Join 100k+ designers reading my newsletter:: https://uxtools.co
Come party with me at Config 2026 (June 25): https://luma.com/usxsrlu1
CHAPTERS:
00:00 Designing trust when AI touches your health
03:06 PM to designer was the practical path
06:41 How Superpower runs a five-person design team
10:34 Hiring for composition, not clones
13:55 Love of the game beats credentials
16:46 Rolling Claude Code out in January
21:47 When velocity starts producing slop
24:41 The 1% that makes people trust you
33:23 The junior ladder is breaking
36:31 Designers as architects, not prompt operators
LINKS:
Superpower: https://superpower.com
Hannah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahnhannah/
FOLLOW ME:
X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertom
IG: https://instagram.com/itsdesignertom
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco