Ikon Eco

Hot take for designers experimenting with AI + legacy systems: You don’t have to pick one AI tool and hope it integrates perfectly with your design archive. If you can get to the code, you can make it work. I’ve been testing different AI platforms for strategy and prototyping. What I realized: You can use any AI tool you’re comfortable with to think, prototype, and generate UI — as long as it outputs code. Then: 1. Copy the generated code 2. Paste it into Figma Make 3. Let Figma rebuild it using your UI/style library 4. Edit, refine, and share inside your real system That means: • Strategy can live anywhere • Prototyping can move fast • Your design system still governs the final output AI becomes a thinking partner. Figma stays the system of record. For teams sitting on years of legacy designs and wondering how to bridge that with AI experimentation — this is a practical path. #DesignSystems #AIforDesign #Figma #ProductDesign #DesignOps

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The industry changed. How we work, what companies expect, even what "being ready" means. But here's the thing: You don't need another course or bootcamp. You need practice with real designers who get it. That's why we built Practice Round. Free mock interviews, case study workshops, and honest feedback from designers who've been where you are. Join the 70+ designers already practicing together → practiceround.co

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Most designers say they want impact. What they really want is proof. At scale, I had to formalize proof. I once built a quarterly UX strategy using Jared Spool's Persuasive Metrics to connect design decisions to revenue. A 2% reduction in onboarding friction translated into six figures in retained revenue. That was the language the room spoke. Dashboards. Quarterly reviews. Attribution models. Impact had to be quantified before it was believed. Now I’m at a tiny startup. Last week, a customer Slacked: “Magemetrics saves me days on campaign reports.” Following the rebrand, a prospect opened the site and said: “Okay. This feels serious.” These calls felt different: less explaining, fewer objections, more trust. No attribution model. No presentation. Just behavior changing in real time. Here’s what’s different: In enterprise, proof arrives as numbers. In startups, proof shows up as decisions. Enterprise feedback arrives filtered and quarterly; startup impact is immediate. Doubt slows deals. Confidence speeds them up. Immediacy forces clarity. You take fewer performative bets. You stop optimizing for presentations. You design to remove doubt. Because you’re not defending slides — you’re shaping what happens next.

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The classic design process is evolving and fast. For African tech innovators, this is a wake-up call: the way we build products, design interfaces, and solve problems is changing globally. Leveraging AI, thinking beyond traditional processes, and embracing new design archetypes could be the key to creating world-class products from Africa. 🌍✨ Tech is no longer about following established playbooks, it’s about adapting, experimenting, and innovating faster than ever. #AfricanTech #Innovation #Design #AI #ProductBuilding #FutureOfWork

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This hit close to home. This quarter we've been actively rethinking our design process. Removing rituals, pulling back on some discovery activities, and prioritizing speed and learning over craft and critique. It can be uncomfortable but it's the right direction. This episode puts a lot of it into words.

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A lot of this reflects my own personal view of how the design process is changing, and its effects on the archetypes of designers needed for the next chapter

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I’ve been noticing a familiar theme popping up lately — especially in design communities: “AI tools aren’t quite there yet.” “They slow me down.” “They look impressive, but fall apart in real workflows.” Honestly? That frustration makes sense. Most AI tools today are still assistive, not autonomous. They’re brittle at the edges. They need context they don’t yet understand. And they often require more judgment — not less — from experienced designers. But I don’t see this as a failure of AI. I see it as a leadership moment. The real opportunity right now isn’t pretending the tools are magical. It’s understanding their limits — and designing workflows that account for them. Used well, today’s AI can: • Accelerate exploration • Reduce mechanical effort • Surface options faster • Create space for deeper thinking Used poorly, it becomes noise, rework, and false confidence. That’s why I’m optimistic about where this goes. The tools will evolve. The models will improve. But product teams will only benefit if we evolve too — in how we frame problems, define quality, and decide when humans stay firmly in the loop. This isn’t about replacing craft. It’s about protecting it while the tools catch up. And that’s a future I’m genuinely excited about.

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So much recent focus for design teams has been handing off efficiently to developers, and collaborating on production, ideally via a design system. But this is downstream of the creative process, where we should see design and dev increasingly working together on concepts and prototypes. It's therefore encouraging to see more creative workflows becoming formalised, that allow prototyping to sit with creative devs and then feed back into design. This Claude Code to Figma example is just another sign that design and dev are moving closer together. #ExperienceDesign #DesignSystems #DesignDevCollaboration #AIinDesign https://lnkd.in/e39_EAHn

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Why does it feel like designers are more focused on mastering technical workflows and endless AI tools than actually designing?

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The rise of the super IC and the key capabilities expected: 1. High business acumen 2. High emotional intelligence - influence & partnerships 3. Quick learner & AI fluency 4. Vision 5. Fast I would argue that these are also key characteristics expected from every leader you hire. A great article by Tom Scott about the changing landscape for hiring designers. #design #superic #productdesign #ux

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🚀 🤖 How AI creates a paradox for Designers / UX'ers. Stop holding onto processes that aren't serving us. 🎙️ 🎧 Full episodes w/ Andrew Dunbar: https://lnkd.in/dPAPPVQg

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This is super interesting and especially relevant right now. AI is reshaping product design, development, and engineering at an unprecedented pace. Many of the assumptions and practices we relied on are being disrupted, and we need to adapt quickly.

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Such a great post, sharing lessons learned by Akshan Ish. For anybody interviewing for senior design roles, or just presenting a great story, take a look. There aren't many resources helping senior / principal / staff designers prepare for interviews, so sharing 10+ experience from both sides of the table, is gold. https://lnkd.in/d4XprbS2

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The design process is definitely not dead, but designers need the skill to work through it faster than ever before. If you are working as a designer in an established organization with a really great design system in place, then you will find your job looking a lot like how Jenny describes: 40% ushering front-end work, 40% jotting down a vision (in code or Figma), and 20% fixing front-end PRs that were yolo'd into prod. But the design process is still there, just condensed: 1. User research is... trusting what the model believes is a user need based on the data you feed it: Gong calls, your data warehouse, etc. 2. The "double diamond" convergence/divergence method is... just happening at a faster clip because you can have 5 design agents thinking about ideas simultaneously before you pick one... and then go deeper again. 3. Prototyping is... just building and encouraging Claude to make the right thing, making slight tweaks in staging rather than in Figma. 4. Iteration and learning is... another PR from another agent. AI has made code free, but design debt isn't cheap. It's easy to use a box that spits out the next logical token to produce a UI that looks like everything else. The hard work is imagining our world as it could look with AI existing at all.

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The Template Trap: How Template Culture Is Dumbing Down UX Overreliance on frameworks as universal solutions rather than adaptable starting points undermines critical thinking and threatens our field's intellectual rigor. @segibb #UX #productDesign https://buff.ly/4ARMuks

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We’ve laid off too many junior designers and focused hiring too much on seniors. You can understand why: seniors are efficient, autonomous, and high-output. But there’s an insidious problem: when you don’t train junior designers mentorship collapses and the pipeline dries up. In 10 years there will be no one left ready to fill those senior seats. Short-term optimization = Long-term pain. You can read more from my recent newsletter article: https://lnkd.in/g-DgFMau

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Loved this. Jenny's perspective on general trends in how design work is moving aligns fairly closely with my own experience and what I'm seeing. I loved that she called out that Figma is still valuable (and faster) for many design tasks than jumping straight into prototyping. Just like persistent chat and UIs won't completely go away, I don't see a "drawing" tool going away, even for designers comfortable with code and AI prototyping tools. (Side note: I've been using hand-drawn sketches to illustrate ideas, and it's worked surprisingly well.)

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This is a great, short read from a trusted resource, Adam Kinney. What stood out to me was “Traditional design systems — Fluent, Material, Carbon — were built for a world where you knew the content at design time. That world is gone. 💨” So true.

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Edit: Andy’s exaggerated head nods included, this is worth listening to. One thing to call out is that while Des describes CRUD, the broader point these days is that a designer, even an AI designer, does benefit from understanding this pattern.

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