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

Joel Unger, design director at Atlassian, shares how AI is transforming the way he designs Trello and other products. He walks through real-world workflows using tools like Midjourney and Cursor to prototype complex interactions, re-create brand assets, and explore creative directions faster than ever. You’ll hear how AI is helping designers focus on higher-level thinking, communicate better with developers, and push creative boundaries—all without replacing the human touch. What you’ll learn: How to prototype complex UI interactions using AIA workflow for re-creating animated brand assets without motion design toolsHow to leverage image generation tools like Midjourney to explore design directions and create mood boardsHow to use Cursor to re-create animated SVG assetsWhy AI frees designers to operate at a higher level of creativityHow AI improves designer-developer collaboration by showcasing interactive intentWhy embracing AI is key to staying ahead in the evolving design landscapeThe limitations of current AI tools and where they still fall short— Brought to you by: • ⁠Paragon⁠ https://useparagon.com/HowIAI—Ship every SaaS integration your customers want ⁠• WorkOS⁠ https://workos.com/?utm_source=lennys_howiai&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=q22025—Make your app enterprise-ready today — Where to find Joel Unger: Website: https://joelunger.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelunger/ — Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Intro and Joel's background (02:46) Trello's new productivity features (04:24) Traditional design process limitations in Figma (05:22) Using Cursor to prototype interactive panel systems (07:39) From prototype to production: collaborating with developers (08:52) How Joel used AI to prepare for the podcast (10:50) How AI saves designer time for deeper thinking (11:23) Last-minute logo animation using Cursor (13:50) Using Midjourney for character design exploration (14:56) Creating a mood board for Taco: the Trello husky mascot (16:49) How AI is changing design thinking and workflows (18:18) Lightning round and closing thoughts — Tools referenced: • Confluence: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence • Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/product/ • Trello: https://trello.com/home • Figma: https://www.figma.com https://www.figma.com/ • Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/ • ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/ • Midjourney: https://www.midjourney.com/ — Other reference: • Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/ — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Claire Vo?

  How do you think about design differently now than you maybe did before?

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Initially, I was a little anxious, like, is this thing going to take my job? But you quickly find out what the limitations are and that your thoughts and prompts are the only thing driving it. And all it really does is accelerate getting those ideas out of your head faster. Sigma is maybe 10% of the job and a lot of the rest of it is just thinking about the problems. It's even greater with AI. You can get right into the gnarly parts of the problems right away.

• 0:35Claire Vo?

  Welcome to How I AI. I'm Claire Voe, product leader and AI enthusiast here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we're speaking with Joel Unger, design director at Atlassian, who has spent the last decade building great products we all know and love, like Confluence, Bitbucket, and Trello. Joel answers the question, are designers really going to code? With a resounding yes, showing us how he takes his Trello prototypes, puts them into Cursor and builds interactive specs his engineering team can use to build awesome experiences. Joel is an inspiring combination of designer and engineer, and you'll learn so much from his workflows on how to build products, brand assets, and even illustrated puppies. Let's get to it.

• 1:20Claire Vo?

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• 2:02Claire Vo?

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• 2:46Claire Vo?

  Hey Joel, so great to have you here. Before we jump into the demos, and I'm really excited about what you're going to show us, I know there's a lot of changes happening at Trello. So tell us a little bit about what you're working on right now.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would love to. And I'm going to demo exactly what I've been using Trello for in preparation for this podcast. So traditional Kanban-style Trello, I'm sure you're familiar with it. Cards on a board. Recently, we've been pivoting Trello to become your personal productivity powerhouse. And what that means is you can now quick-capture anything from third-party apps, like from Slack, email, voice capture, notes, right to an inbox. And so that means on-the-go, all week long, I've been having these thoughts about what can we talk about on the podcast and sending them to my inbox from my phone, dragging them into columns, and it's really helping me get set up.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  In addition to that, I have been using Planner, the new feature that lets you not only capture your tasks, but plan time to get them done. So you can see, there's a lot of surfaces that have to play together. And one of Trello's principles is tactile. How can we have drag-and-drop interactions between inbox to planner, planner to boards, boards to planner, et cetera? And this isn't a traditional like sidebar toggle system where you can just like pop in and out inbox or planner. There's not really a center to this view anymore. It's all of these can be up beside each other at any time.

• 4:25Claire Vo?

  So you're adding a lot more features and those features take space. And you're trying to figure out the configuration of all of it and build what if you're not watching and you're only listening is a quite beautiful product. So how did AI help you get to this great end state as a designer?

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't start in AI. Of course, I use the traditional design tools. I jumped into Figma and specked out like a ton of variations of like, how can inbox planner and board all fit together on a screen, be responsive and be configurable in any sort of which way the user wants to have them up. And it took a while and I think any designer is familiar with this process. Like you see specs that outline pixel values and widths. It's a bit tedious, but at the end of the day, you get your message across to your developers and it gets built to spec.

• 5:23Claire Vo?

  But it doesn't seem like this, this got you where you wanted to go with the product.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  No, not quite. So we launched to beta. We got great feedback. People were finding the panel system intuitive, but they wanted more control. They wanted to resize these panels and customize like exactly how they fit on their screen. Cause we found users had ultra wides or really narrow or they were docking their Chrome browser to the side. So we kind of had to immediately respond to this feedback and say, okay, how do we allow users to drag and drop? And that is where Figma falls short.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Now, what I did was set up my developer environment in Cursor and get all the tricky parts out of the way. And eventually, it was set up and could just paste a picture into the chat and say, "Okay, start from here. I have a three-panel system. I want to make it drag and drop." So I'm in Cursor and I paste in my image from Figma and say, "Okay, build me a three-panel system with a toolbar to toggle on and off panels." Guess what? Spelling doesn't matter. There are no rules. Ill-intuitive, fine.

• 6:41Claire Vo?

  My favorite feature of AI products is spelling doesn't matter.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  So it's going to go off, read the entire system and get it done.

• 6:51Claire Vo?

  Great. So then it's building out this code for you. And then what do you get on the other side of this as a designer that you found so useful?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  It's pretty nuts, but if you have the right libraries to start with, it'll just do it. It takes a little bit of knowledge on your end to go search for what it is that can actually achieve these results. But once you're there, like, you're set.

• 7:14Claire Vo?

  And what decisions did this help you make?

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Right, really nuanced responsive design choices that I would have never encountered in Figma. Like, as you can see, dragging and dropping means you can literally have this in any layout. It's really nuts. So what happens when you drag from the side all the way to the left? And you have three panels open? Like, I don't know. Like, let's go try it out.

• 7:41Claire Vo?

  I see how useful this is just from a user experience testing perspective. Did you hand this code to your engineers? Like, how did you actually take it from this to what we saw earlier, which is this beautiful production, you know, production experience?

• 7:55Speaker 01

  I'm pretty close to my dev team and I knew that they couldn't actually use this code. Like, they need to write unit tests. They need to actually assure quality at an enterprise scale, which is a completely different ask from a prototype. But it got the conversation started. And I could start to tell them, like, "Okay, look, the min-width needs to be this." Men widths need to stack. And now, if you drag it past this breakpoint, it needs to collapse all the way to the edge. And instead of just like describing this, I could show them in a loon video, and it was instantly understood.

• 8:30Claire Vo?

  And is this, is this in the product now?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  It is in the product. So, there we go. A little different.

• 8:37Claire Vo?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  And just shout out to my developers. They caught things that I didn't even catch, right? So what happens when you actually toggle off all these in a close full screen? Can you drag from the edge anymore? No. So there's always work to be done.

• 8:52Claire Vo?

  Now that I see podcast prep up here, I'm also going to call out a little last minute AI use case that you told me you did before we started recording. So tell us how you used AI to prep for your AI podcast.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  You sent me kind of a run sheet of the topics we would go over. I pasted them in the chat GPT and said, okay, voice mode, let's prep. And off we went.

• 9:17Claire Vo?

  Amazing.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Really great to just have like that live feedback.

• 9:21Claire Vo?

  How, how did you feel like it did?

• 9:23Speaker 01

  I think it missed a few points.

• 9:24Claire Vo?

  Yeah. What point?

• 9:28Speaker 01

  It didn't give me a lightning round question. And so context windows too short.

• 9:33Claire Vo?

  Too short. Okay. And it wasn't, it just wasn't as charming as your human host.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Uh, undoubtedly, undoubtedly.

• 9:40Claire Vo?

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• 10:24Claire Vo?

  comes in. Work OS gives you drop in APIs for enterprise features, so your app can become enterprise ready and scale up market faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor are already using Work OS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at workos.com. Start building today.

• 10:51Claire Vo?

  Who was the benefit of this, this work? Your engineering team, you, did you save time? What's, what was kind of your takeaway from doing this prototyping this way?

• 10:59Speaker 01

  I mean, my time, right? Like, it's so valuable to be able to spend it doing like the thinking part of the work. You always kind of say like, you know, Figma is maybe 10% of the job and a lot of the rest of it is just thinking about the problems.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  It's even greater with AI. You can, you can get right into the gnarly parts of the problems right away.

• 11:24Claire Vo?

  Speaking of saving time, you have another design use case for us that came out of a last minute, pretty big ask of the team. Can you talk us through what you did there?

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Just two days ago, I think. There was an ask to replace logos across the products before our new team launch in April, and we're approaching a code freeze for that event. So it's down to the wire. And I was like, okay, no big deal, right? Like a simple asset swap, we should be able to handle this. And I roll my mouse over the logo and remember, oh, shoot, it's animated. And we're the only product that has a sort of Easter egg that animates the logo on hover and on page load. And I love it. I'm a sucker for these little micro interactions. So I inspect the code and I think, what are you, little animation logo? It's an animated GIF. Oh, no.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  And like me, I, who knows how old this is? Like, am I going to be able to track down the files? No. And old me would have just eaten the cost of After Effects license and recreated it by hand. But I thought, okay, wait, I have the SVG. I know SVGs can be animated. Can I throw this a cursor? I threw the vector art in there just to get a little start and.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Ask it to do a clipping mask and it could do that. And then I said, okay, here's the image. Can you make these little bars go up and down? And it interpreted all this crazy math, like I can't even read this stuff. Like this, this is robots B. All I had to do was describe it, say, dance the little animation up and down. And I did have to find exactly how many milliseconds the animation lasts. So I put a GIF in an online tool and it told me, but really that's it. And the rest was just fighting with cursor. We're saying, oh, no, you get a few pixels to the left, a few pixels to the right, et cetera.

• 13:20Claire Vo?

  Yeah, that's, that's true designer work there saying not only do the pixels have to be perfect, but the frame rate has to be perfect. So show us what you got.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  So hero moment, I show up to the chat and drop these and it's live.

• 13:34Claire Vo?

  They're so cute.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Animated SVGs and it's exactly what we needed.

• 13:39Claire Vo?

  And so you got it in last minute ask, and you didn't have to sacrifice hours and hours and hours to artisanally crafted animated bars.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Exactly right.

• 13:51Claire Vo?

  Amazing. Okay. And then I'm wondering if you can show us one more demo, which is a little bit around generating even more creative assets using one of my favorite tools, which is, is Mid Journey. So I'd love to hear a little bit about how you have used Mid Journey. What are some of your prompts and tricks? And actually, how are you getting this into the organization as well?

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Mid Journey is amazing. I've been tinkering with stable diffusion and the like for years now. And one of the most powerful things you can do just to get started is kind of like an image mask, you throw a black and white image at Mid Journey and it will just generate all sorts of fun variations of that thing. And you can prompt it, say like, oh, company logo in a swamp as an aerial view of an island. It's really fun.

• 14:41Claire Vo?

  So what you're doing here, just so I understand is you're taking a kind of black and white vector style image of your logo. You're dropping that into Mid Journey and then you're prompting it to do something really cool with that.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 14:55Claire Vo?

  So who is Taco?

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Taco is Trello's cutie little husky mascot and he pops up for onboarding and empty states and is beloved by fans of Trello. Now, I was curious how.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Could I nail this illustration style if it was even possible in Midjourney? So I spent, I don't know, an afternoon just like giving it my best effort. Cute cartoon husky, clip art, blue collar, gray fur, solid blue eyes, et cetera. Like just, just to see, like, how close can you really get? And it's okay. I'll, I'll say like, it's not perfect, but what I found was that it didn't have to be. It's more like a mood board, right? Like this is something that you would put together and take it to the next step. Actually get out your tablet, pen and draw it for real. And I think we're going to have a design day coming up soon where the designers just jam

• 15:51Speaker 01

  on this stuff and redo our assets and, and decide what is like a style guide for Taco? Like, does he have black eyebrows or gray? And does he have a pink ear or like what's, was it pink paws or black paws? I don't know. We need to make these choices and make it consistent character clearly. And this is a great starting point for that.

• 16:10Claire Vo?

  Got it. So you use Midjourney, one, to test how consistent of a character output you could get. And from what you're telling me, mid. And but two, it creates sort of a mood board for your design team to then go actually articulate what are the design standards that we need around this illustration? And maybe if you come to an agreement around that, then you can loop back around to Midjourney and see if you can drive that character consistency in the outputs.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Exactly right. And you got to answer the really important questions, like how fluffy should the fur be?

• 16:44Claire Vo?

  You heard it here. Keyword in image prompting, fluffy. All right. So, you know, you shared us three very, very, very different features. We saw complex UI interactions that would have been really hard to prototype any other way. We see recreating brand assets with motion, which is pretty complicated. And then we see sort of more of the exploratory illustration work that's maybe an input into design work, not an output itself. So I'm curious, now that you've used these tools to do so many different things, how do you think about design differently now than you maybe did before?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Initially, I was a little anxious, like, is this thing going to take my job? And I think a lot of designers can resonate with that. But you quickly find out what the limitations are and that. Your thoughts and prompts are the only thing driving it. And all it really does is accelerate getting those ideas out of your head faster. So that was pretty eye opening to me is realizing how much more value I have actually after using these tools.

• 17:55Claire Vo?

  Cool. Yeah, I agree. I mean, this is a lot of great work. And what I say is it allows designers to sort of operate at the top tier of their craft, which is motion and interaction and brand and all those things that you want to do versus mocking up UI. Okay. Thank you for showing us all that stuff. It's really exciting. It's giving us a couple very specific things we can bring into our own design work. But let's hit you with a lightning round and then get you back to all these exciting launches you have going on.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 18:26Claire Vo?

  You showed us a bunch of tools. What's the number one AI tool you think product designers need to know right now?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  I'm biased, but I think you should jump into Cursor. And it's a little bit of a learning curve. So I'd say partner with a developer friend who can get you set up. But once you are set up, man, your speed just is 10xed.

• 18:47Claire Vo?

  Amazing. And so what is a design task that you thought AI would be good at that it wasn't?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  I think really simple, like responsive stuff was surprisingly hard. Like it can't see your browser. So you have to kind of like take a bunch of screenshots and send it what it looks like at various sizes. So that's interesting. And I think that problem will be solved very soon. Once the agent gets access to be able to like see the browser.

• 19:15Claire Vo?

  Okay. And then I saw you do what we all do, which is we argue with Cursor in the sidebar. What is your go to get Cursor unstuck prompt technique? Are you a yeller? Are you a pleader? Do you offer money? What is your style?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  It knows it has my money. Yeah, I call it an amateur, I think, sometimes.

• 19:43Claire Vo?

  Okay, so you neg, you neg cursor.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  I do, like, what is this junior tier nonsense? No, it can, it makes me feel bad because if you turn on thinking mode, it will say, user is angry at me. I should be like, you know, I should do my job better like that. Oh, no.

• 20:02Claire Vo?

  All right, this has been so fun. Thank you for giving us some practical applications of how you can use this in design. The products look great. The work is exciting and you're clearly having a lot of fun. So to end, where, where can we find you and where can we be helpful?

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, Joel Unger.com and also Trello. Go check it out. It's awesome.

• 20:23Claire Vo?

  Amazing. Well, thank you, Joel.

• 20:27Claire Vo?

  Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.