My AI Design Workflow That Doesn't Ship Slop

I sit down with Meng To for his second appearance on the pod to dig into design md, Google's newly open-sourced format for capturing the soul of a design and porting it across every medium and tool. Meng walks me through a live demo of how he uses design md alongside skills, HTML references, and tools like Aura, New Form, Codex, and OpenClaw to ship landing pages, motion design, slides, and mobile mocks that actually feel custom. We get into the design drift problem with one-shot prompts, why taste is the real moat for builders right now, and how he runs four products as effectively a team of one while iterating a thousand-plus prompts deep. If you build with agents and you want your work to stand out from the sea of purple-gradient lookalikes, this one is for you. Timestamps 00:00 – Intro 04:00 – What design md actually is 07:17 – Examples: one design DNA across slides, promo videos, motion 09:31 – How to create design system 14:05 – The importance of taste and design 18:28 – Variant, remixing, and skills as ingredients 21:36 – Live demo: creating a landing page with design md and HTML 24:36 – Thoughts on Google Stitch 25:41 – Being fast and at edges is an unfair advantage 29:29 – Midjourney parallels and the queuing flow state 31:44 – Walking through skills (skeuomorphic, 3D, lasers) 34:07 – Now everyone is a designer 36:47 – The full design workflow 38:50 – Iteration versus remix 39:24 – Judgment per minute as the new craft 41:06 – Solo building vs building a team 44:34 – Taste is the moat 48:25 – Building a second brain for design inspiration 50:41 – Closing thoughts Key Points Design md is a portable blueprint for typography, color, spacing, and effects that you attach to any prompt to keep design consistent across web, mobile, slides, and motion. One-shot prompts collapse on page two; a design system carries the soul across every medium and tool you switch into. Skills work like ingredients (lasers, skeuomorphic, 3D, copywriting), and stacking them on top of design md is what separates custom work from generic vibe-coded output. Taste is the real moat right now, and you build it by surrounding yourself with great design and using every product in your niche. Iteration (90% of the time) keeps a product evolving; remix (10%) takes the same DNA into a new medium or category. The shift in craft is from moving pixels to making judgment calls per minute, with agents handling the mechanical work. The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/ FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND MENG ON SOCIAL Aura: https://aura.build X/Twitter: https://x.com/MengTo

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

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  There's a way to create beautiful designs, beautiful websites, beautiful apps, beautiful motion, and I just learned about it. And it's through this thing called Google MD. It's using skills and the entire process of this is what we explain on this podcast. I had my friend Meng Tuo, who's one of the best designers I know, come on and share his entire workflow to how to create jaw dropping, beautiful designs that by the end of this episode, you will become a designer. You're going to be able to create better design than 99.99% of this planet. And what does that mean? That means that your startup, your idea, your app is going to have a higher chance

• 0:42Greg Isenberg?

  of getting people to install it, to buy it, to share it. And we all can use that. So enjoy the episode and I'll see you in there.

• 0:59Greg Isenberg?

  Meng, welcome back. Second time on the pod. By the end of this episode, what are people going to get out of this?

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Google just came out with design.md. And this is one way to create a blueprint to take one beautiful design, whether you made it or not, and then spread throughout all the formats and the mediums for your startup idea, right? So you can turn a beautiful design system that is created by a master in their craft, like a designer, and then you can turn that into motion design, a landing page, different sections of the landing page, mobile design, and so on. So a lot of people struggle right now with, you know, this idea.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  You know, they start really strong with one shot and then suddenly they get into the other pages and they suddenly have something more, more generic. So this is what we're going to be learning. I'm going to teach you all the tricks, remix, iterate. What is the design system, typography, colors, all the things that people struggle in design.

• 2:10Greg Isenberg?

  Perfect. In your world, I feel like a lot of people are talking about DesignMD. In my world, not that many people are talking about it, but they want to be able to create jaw-dropping, beautiful designs, even if they're not a designer, because they're, you know, we're using agents now, we're building startups, we're taking ideas out of our head. But, you know, we don't want a purple vibe-coded website or app. We want something that's beautiful, that's consistent. And so I'm excited for you to explain what DesignMD is. I'm excited for you to explain how you can actually get inspired by other designers and use some of their systems to create something of your own.

• 2:53Greg Isenberg?

  Meng, thank you so much for being generous with your sauce and tactics and tips and tricks. There's no one I look up to more than you in this regard, so thank you.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just want to mention something before we start. People don't realize how hard it is to get the right distribution, the marketing. And I want to thank you, Greg, because, you know, remember the first time I came to your podcast, I started with a $3,000 MRR and it shot up to $15,000 MRR just by going through your podcast. And obviously, there's a ton of value over time. So, you know, to those who don't know, like going to, you know, Greg's podcast is like the bucket list, like the number one thing you want to, you know, reach towards to. And yeah, I prepared presentation, you know, slides and all that stuff. Because like, you know, Reply just introduced slides and, you know,

• 3:48Speaker 01

  we started doing, you know, hyper frames, we started doing remotion. So I prepared all of this. As a designer, I feel very strongly about this. So let me just share my screen. First things first, I realize a lot of people are vibe-coding their apps, they're vibe-coding their startup marketing and so on. Everything I do today, including this tool that I'm showing you, which is my own Notion with slides. is vibe-coded and I made it by myself. So I also want to say that all of these images are all generated using the context of the title

• 4:31Speaker 01

  and I'm using the new GPT image too. So with that said, you know, I prepared the slides and I want to go through one by one. What is design dot M D? So, but first of all, you know, I just want to also preface on what we're going to be discussing. You know, the things that I want to teach everyone about design and how we get there. And then we're going to end with a demo. So these are the kind of five main points I want to, I want to go through. And then we, we're going to get started. Design, as I mentioned before, design dot M D is just open source and I can find the tweet right here.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  They have a 10 minute video, you can watch it. Essentially what it means is that just the same way, a lot of people are using agents dot M D or skill dot M D or soul dot M D for those who are using Claude but or in, in this case is, is open cloud now. So basically this is for designers. And if you want to take the soul of the design and you want to bring that to the agent and you want to bring a design system, the colors, the typography that makes a design beautiful. Well, you port it and you put it all into an M D file.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  And then you put it into your prompt as an attachment and then boom, you have a beautiful design. So this is what design dot M D and you will see extremely efficient ways to use this across multiple medium, not just web design, but also, you know, like, you know, like motion design nowadays and slides. So, you know, for example,

• 6:26Greg Isenberg?

  Quick break in the pod to let you know about a Free workshop I'm doing that answers some of your biggest questions. The first is, in the AI age, what are some categories that are ripe for startup ideas? I'm gonna outline a bunch of those different categories, the ones that I think the most opportunity is. Second is, there's a million AI tools out there. Which are the ones that matter when I'm trying to build a business? I'll walk you through that. And lastly, how do you actually build a business with some of these AI tools? So I'm actually gonna show you live how I do this with my idea browser.com team. And I can't wait to see you there. It's this Thursday at 12:00 PM Eastern.

• 7:06Greg Isenberg?

  And if you go to the show notes, if you go to the description, you can click a link RSVP and learn a few things. I hope it'll get your creative juices flowing and I'll see you back at the pod.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  I'm gonna give you just some quick examples of what I created. So for example, when you have a design, right? You can sort of like take one design and using whatever medium, like whether it's React or HTML, you can create like a nice promo video or you can create like a slide. And this is all using the same DNA, which is the design.md. So as you do this, for example, this is a slide and this is a promo video. You can see that this is two different approach to a design. And this is the result.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  And if you want, there's a ton of resources that allows you to save those design.md. So one of them, obviously I create them myself, but they're totally free. You can just download them. Right now, my internet is super slow. So here you can see, we have a lot of these design systems. And it's essentially just one file. You click here, you download it and it contains all of this visual stuff. Typography, colors, spacing. And if you look at the, you know, the Markdown itself, if you've used Markdown,

• 8:39Speaker 01

  it's essentially a structured text with tables, titles and code. And you can, if you read through all of this, you have the weapons. And the arsenal to essentially prompt efficiently. And you can sort of commit this to memory and then it becomes your design. So it's very simple. You add all of this to prompt, right? And then it becomes the HTML or the design dot M D. The HTML is more like the sort of finished dish. And the M D file is more like the recipe. The skills are like the ingredients.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  So you put it all together and it becomes your design, which is what I just showed earlier.

• 9:32Greg Isenberg?

  And that's a big deal because, um, you know, why, like honestly, why I wanted to have you on the pod is, you know, it's such an advantage to, to having scroll stopping design. Like the video you shared, like the, the, the MP4 there that you shared, like that was, that was beautiful.

• 9:57Greg Isenberg?

  And so I guess my question is, like, how do you, if you're not a designer, coming up with these, systems yourself, like from scratch is really hard. So how do you, what's the process for, for, for finding, you know, for finding brands and identities that resonate with you?

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Right, so, you know, coming back to the slide, right? Oftentimes, you know, people, they one shot something. They saw like a beautiful prompt. Oftentimes it's bigger than the code. They copy and paste that they have no idea how it's done. And they also have no leverage on how to change it. So the first screen is not the hard part. So, you know, right nowadays, you kind of feel like you're the one who's always like telling AI what to do. And you don't have control. And the question is, like, how do you solve this problem, which is a design drift? Okay. You you you start something, you're kind of satisfied with it, but then you get into the other stuff and it becomes completely different.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  So that's that's why we need design dot M D. And, you know, you don't want to end up something like this. You want to to end up with a system, a process where you can bring, whether it's a screenshot, an H T M L, a design dot M D, or all of those ingredients and recipes. And back to your question, Greg, there's a ton of resources that share all of these things, but design dot M D is new. Most places, they share templates, right? We all know, uh, you know, like you go to a template.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  And obviously, I'm taking my mine as an example, but you can go to any of the templates that you find on V zero, lovable, um, you know, all of these other places, Framer, Figma Community for for people who are more familiar with designs. And the problem with those is that they are highly closed behind the techniques and the rectangles and the pixels of Figma or Framer of Webflow. But, you know, then how do you tell that to an agent? And that's the big question. So nowadays, you can go to new communities that share the actual blueprint, which is a design dot M D.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  So, for example, I want a design that looks like this, that has this animation, that has the blue color, that has these systems of, uh, you know, beautiful typography and selections and buttons that, you know, I don't want everything. I don't want the whole template. I just want something to start with that I can tell my A I to start with that and then be consistent across the board. Now, if you only provide

• 13:01Speaker 01

  A portion of it or something too specific. The AI tends to sort of like take that too literally. But if you provide something more like a foundational system, like a process, agents dot M D and what and whatnot, then you get something that gives more flexibility to your system when you're going to be working on new designs or new mediums or, you know, you want to be consistent across the board.

• 13:31Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. Yeah, I mean, when I see this, like, first of all, this is gorgeous. But what I would want to refrain from is like, to your point, duplicating that and just creating the same cookie cutter website, you know, because there's, I'm sure you see this all the time, like, you know, you come across a website, it's a Shopify, it's a WordPress, it's a framer, it's whatever. And you're like, I've seen this website before, right? I've seen this website, but it's another brand, right? And that like cookie cutter doesn't work anymore. And it's the same reason, like, you know,

• 14:13Greg Isenberg?

  you go into a downtown core city and like all the buildings look the same, right? And you feel like this like homogeneous cityscapes that that are existing now.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I fully agree with you. Everything is so high, like the baseline is so high nowadays, but also the baseline is also very generic. What used to be wow, five, 10 years ago now is generic, which is funny because like if you look at the purple gradient, everyone was like, wow, purple gradient, I want to use that. But nowadays, if you see something with, you know, purple gradients, you just run. So. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that we have evolved so much and humans have a way to solve new problems and to adapt. And I think that's the real intelligence. And so I think the question nowadays for me is how do you deal with taste? Right?

• 15:09Speaker 01

  How do you design something? How do you make ultra quick decisions? Right? To take something, whether it is the ingredients, the recipe, the secret sauce. For me, the secret sauce is the design. Right? Because, you know, you don't want people to run away from your landing page. You don't want them to, to, to, to look at your brand and like, oh shit, this feels like, you know, just like the 1,000 startup that I've seen over the past week. So if you, if you focus on design enough, right?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  If you find these systems that you can bring to your own system that is flexible enough, then you can create something way more powerful. So I like to think of design dot M D like a design memory. And this is great because it, it, it can transfer between platform. So if you're working in lovable and you like what you've done or in cloud design, and then you wanna move it to Figma or you wanna move it to, you know, to cursor or to, you know, nowadays I use Codex a lot. I know a lot of people use Cloud Code,

• 16:34Speaker 01

  but you can totally do all of that stuff because you can carry this, this design out M D and then you can commit it to memory by telling your A I, your agent to remember that. I mean, I do that all the time. Remember this, remember that. And I think agents nowadays are doing a pretty good job at, you know, trying to remember the workflow that you've just done. Right? Because that workflow is unique to you. Like a lot of things that I make nowadays, I'm sure it applies to everyone out there who is making their own apps. Uh, first of all, for me, when I make apps, I look at what is the mode?

• 17:16Speaker 01

  What, what is something that I can do with my app that Notion cannot do or Figma cannot do? For me, that mode right now is the fact that everything is local. So for example, this is all local. And because it's local, it, it generates these MD files across folders and nested folders that I can just open in Codex and open that folder and, and tell my, my agent, "Look, I have a Greg Eisenberg podcast. I want you to prepare all of these screens. I want you to prepare, you know, 10 sections or 10 notes or do research."

• 17:57Speaker 01

  And it has all of that knowledge and it can create all of those files in one single go, which I think is such a big mode nowadays, right? You can't like, sure, some tools can do that, but one, you have to deal with tokens. You have to pay for them. You cannot run locally and you don't have your own workflow embedded into it. But nowadays you have something like OpenClaw or Codex or Cloud Code that can do all of that. And it's so scary how good it is.

• 18:27Greg Isenberg?

  A hundred percent. So what, you know, you mentioned, uh, you know, Claude Design. You mentioned, you know, all these different platforms. You know, we're talking about Google, so Google Stitch is another one. Like, can you show us how we can, how we can go from, you know, MD file plus HTML to creating something?

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Sure. First of all, I just wanna start with sort of like, you know, getting the MD file, but also focusing on the design aspect. For me, it's really important, but not everyone's gonna do that, but I think it makes sense to start with that. So for example, you know, I don't know if you know Varian. Varian is also very good. Yes. Varian.com. You know, I like tools like this because they allow me to get into the sort of creative stage, which I think is incredibly important. And essentially, what you wanna do is just to remix, you know, click one button, remix, click one button, remix. You find something that you like, you remix, and so on and so forth. So that's why, you know, for me, as someone who built Aura,

• 19:40Speaker 01

  I also find it incredibly enticing. So I go to community, right? And I find something that I like, and you know, I just remix it really quickly. In one click, I have a bunch of skills. Like I mentioned before, skills are like ingredients. And you know, if you go to some of these skills, you're gonna see that some of them are so, so powerful. And this is your mode in design, because you don't wanna look generic. You don't wanna have purple gradients. So the only way to do that is, for example, you create a skill for lasers. Okay, so I know it sounds funny, but whenever I create a landing page with lasers, everyone clicks on it. I don't know why,

• 20:23Speaker 01

  but people love it so much because they love special effects, right? You go to a movie, what, you know, you wanna see special effects, you wanna see, you know, the Avengers kind of, you know, doing these grand things. So that's the mode, right? Like nowadays, just having the typography, just having the colors is not enough, unless it's a secondary page, or unless it's something that is very serious. But if you're talking about a landing page, or a promo video, or, you know, a slide, you need a mode. So, yeah, you know, like remix super fast, blah, you know, like...

• 21:00Speaker 01

  You're gonna remix this, click one button, you know, and then do that until you're happy. Once you're done with that, with that flow, then you get into the prompt, right? So each skill has a prompt, so you can copy this. And anything, all of that stuff, like DesignMD and Skills are free. And this is not why you should be paying money. You pay money because of tokens. You pay money for the finished results, such as a template and sort of like the whole sort of automation and whatnot. So, you know, you're gonna go to a template, you know, like, I don't know, let's go to this one.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  And, and then you're gonna download both the HTML and the DesignMD. The reason why I'm saying HTML is that's, you know, DesignMD may not hold all the information that, that you need to create your first result. It does hold sort of like the typography, colors, the foundation, the spacing. Some of them, including my own, holds also the WebGL, which I find... For those who don't know, WebGL is the animation that powers the laser, right? Without WebGL or 3GS, which is for 3D, you don't have any of that stuff. You only have the typography and some of the reveal animations and some of the rules.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  So that's why these two elements here for me is really important. And that's what gives you these beautiful animations that makes your site a lot more unique. It goes from, you know, zero to 50 or 50 to 80 real fast. And so, yeah, I would download the two of them. And, you know, back to here, so we already had the demo, so I might as well show you guys. On Aura, you can go to DesignMD. This is where you're gonna find all of this stuff. The design and then you you take something that you like and you add it to your prompt. So the same way that I download design dot M D and H T M L, I add it to my prompt.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  And now I'm ready to to tell what I want for my landing page. So for example, I can say something like, OK, create a landing page for my startup called, you know, I don't know, like Aura. And I know, really original. So and then it's going to be a chat app that is, you know, that that is using A I and that ships stuff to people to their email, whatever. So let's see what it does. OK, so now we have the design dot M D. We have the H T M L and then we we're just going to create it.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Let's hope for the best, but you know, it's this. This obviously you don't have to use Aura. You can just use whatever tool that you want. I just wanted to show you that that's essentially what you're supposed to do. You download the two files or just a design of M D, however you want that to be. And then you start creating your your page through that system. And from there, you can generate more, you know, elements, more sections, more, because you have the design dot M D always with you. And also you can bring that to another platform. It's not specific to one platform.

• 24:36Greg Isenberg?

  And what's your take on Google, Google Stitch? I haven't I haven't gone deep in it.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Right, so for me, honestly, as someone who builds a startup using tokens, you know, it's it's really unfair, to be honest, because they they're they're able to give all of these stuff for free. And I just realized, you know what, like, I spent almost half a million dollars in token for my startup right now, right? It's it's insane. So, yeah, you can do basically the same thing. I don't know if this is the correct one, but you know, like, create the landing page.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  For Aura and you know, you're gonna select web and you're gonna select a 3.1. Now, what makes it different is that it has an infinite canvas. Oh, I don't know what's going on here, but it's also doing stuff differently. And this, this concept of like attaching Design MD, which I feel very strongly about, is still like new to a lot of platforms. So as someone who works in AI, your mode is basically you have to be new. You know, you have like, I don't, I'm sure anyone can relate, but you always, when there's a new model that comes, you have to talk about it.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Otherwise, you're kind of losing a lot of that sort of edge that you have all over all of these companies. So the same way with tools, you, you know, and the same way when you build a startup, you have to utilize all the best technologies and tools. And in this case, we're using a design that MD, it's recreating exactly that foundation that we saw on Aura. And you know, it's going to create the same consistent design, whether it's from here or on Aura. Uh, in this case, I use two different designs, so that's why we have two different designs.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  But if, you know, in this case, I'm using Auraless and the other one, I use the one that I, I click earlier. But you know, here I can just say, you know, create the footer and it's gonna create like add the footer and it's just gonna create the footer. But you can see the design using this technique gives me exactly what I want. It also, uh, you know, it also adapted to my, to my design, to my brand, to my copywriting. And then from here, you can use skills, right? Like, for example, I love to use skills like, um, if you go to skills, copywriting skill.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  So this is going to improve your copy by a hundred percent. You know, it's going to look at your text and it's going to make it so much better. So, uh, skills, design dot M D, H T M L, uh, all of these things, if you merge all of them and blend all of them together, you create something really, really powerful. And, you know, to visualize all of this, uh, you know, this is a new tool that I built, which is called New Form. You know, you can sort of like in one click, I turn this, you know, which is a motion design, right? I go to prompt and I have all of these skills that I already saved.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  And then I can just click, oh, I want laser. I'm going to click on laser and it, you know, I can just create another one and another one. So I loved the idea of queuing, which is why we have a different products is because like queuing is such a powerful idea that I use all the time. Nowadays I create like three, four products at the same time. I have like multiple chats with sub agents on, on, across all of them. So that's why, you know, I, I wanted to create something way more focused on the creative aspect. And on top of that, we also have the remix type. Again, all of these are prompts, by the way, like I'm, I'm not like, you know, keeping anything behind closed doors. You don't have to use my tools at all, but you know, I just wanted to show you visually

• 28:47Speaker 01

  how, how it is like to turn something into mobile, right? Or, you know, if I go here to mobile, you're going to see that I have turned my designs into mobile design.

• 29:02Greg Isenberg?

  Beautiful.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, if you look at this, it's hard to tell if this is made by a human or by A I, but I can guarantee you a hundred percent that this was made by A I. And from here I can just say, okay, I want a slide deck. Okay, I want, you know, a motion design. I want the hero section of, you know, and then I'm doing six design at the same time, which is so good, so good for the creativity.

• 29:29Greg Isenberg?

  It kind of reminds me of how Mid Journey works.

• 29:34Greg Isenberg?

  You know, on Midjourney, you kind of, I haven't used Midjourney in like a year and a half, maybe, but like that, that concept around you can like generate multiple things. And what's really cool about this is like you get into this flow state of like, okay, I want this, I want that, I'm gonna queue this up and it's really fun.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  I, I agree, like the, the concept of queuing is not new per se. I'm, I'm just saying, you know, a lot of the things that we do, see here, it just transformed into mobile. And a lot of the things we do can just be transferred so easily because we have this, this concept of like skills and design dot M D, right?

• 30:14Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  So, you know, one of your guests, for example, was talking and he's, he calls himself like a, a skills maxi, which I find it really funny because I totally agree, like for me, I don't put anything in my agents dot M D. Because I have my design dot M D, which I use per project. And then I have my skills, which I use per workflow. And if you only change the agent dot M D, oftentimes, you know, first of all, it costs a lot more tokens, but also it's too general, like it doesn't apply to every single workflow out there. So here I, I added the laser and here I turn it into a slide. You know, like, again, it's so, so fun to queue and to sort of like expand your creativity

• 31:00Speaker 01

  across all of this stuff. So you have something like oral lovable visor, which allows you to chat and sort of like evolve into something, into a product. But I think what people sort of underestimate a lot is the design aspect, which is, you know, how do you come up with new sections that are unique, right? How do you, uh, you know, work on the creativity? And how do you learn about all of this stuff? Because if you don't learn this stuff, you know, you're, you're just focusing so much on the chat and you're just chatting, chatting and then giving commands and the AI do all the work for you, then you're not making any decision or at least you're not making the best decision for your product.

• 31:44Greg Isenberg?

  Um, can you quickly go back? I'm just curious more than anything, like the skills section of new form, I think it's called.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:52Greg Isenberg?

  Like it's, what happens when I click there?

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Yes, so you have access to, right now we have sixty-three skills about I'm adding more every day. So for example, you have a skill for skewmorphic design. For those who don't know, skewmorphic design is kind of like the realistic design that Apple used to use before the flat design. And it's a prompt, it's just a prompt. And you can copy this prompt and you can just tell your agent to use, you know, to use this skill. And then to apply that, so for example, you're gonna have something a little bit more embossing. You know, something like, like this design, for example. You know, it has some of these, you know, shading and stuff like that. A lot of people still love that. I love that when it makes sense.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  So for example, if you do like a DJ app, you might want something with a little bit more realistic. You want a button that is lickable, as Steve Jobs says, well, yeah, you need a skewmorphic design, right? And we also have a skill for, you know, for the 3D.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  So you know, this, this little globe here that you put, well, that's 3D. And then you can move that on top of the text, which makes it look really nice. So a lot of, like, every skill can be anything, you know, it can be like a batch design. Like this one, and you can have, you know, all of these are also copyable. So for example, if you only want just the colors, you can just copy the colors or you just want the typography. So not only do you learn how to sort of like add to your arsenal, all of these keywords that you need. What is font smoothing? What is sound font? What is system font?

• 33:36Speaker 01

  What is a body font? Or what is the secondary color? What is a secondary button? So all of these things are really useful when you, you know, chat with your AI agents. And you know, sometimes I condense it into just one word, okay, fix the spacing, fix the gap, you know, fix this, fix that. And it's just so powerful to learn all of this stuff because it's all part of the designer dot M D. And it, it holds so much richness to how you can manage your design.

• 34:07Greg Isenberg?

  And it must be cool for you because you've been, you know, you've been teaching designers for years now. And these are, you know, mostly, I mean, trained designers. Now, anyone.

• 34:21Greg Isenberg?

  Is a designer.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  That's such a good point, honestly. You know, when, when I first started, nobody was using, like, most designers were not coding. And nowadays, everyone is coding, including non-designers. You know, before, like, ten, twenty years ago, everyone was using Photoshop, and then Sketch, and then Figma. But nowadays, everyone is a designer, and everyone is kind of like downloading a template on HTML or a design dot M D. And then suddenly, they have the most beautiful landing page. Sure, they one-shot it. Sure, they don't know how to change it or make it better. But they still have an amazing one-shot, you know, one-shot prompt.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  But what I want to teach here is the whole workflow, so that you don't end up with just a one-shot shot thing. And how do you, you know, can you guess how many prompts that I use to build these products? Just give me a number. How many prompts do you think I use? It's definitely not one-shot.

• 35:23Greg Isenberg?

  I don't know, a couple dozen, twenty, twenty-five?

• 35:27Speaker 01

  At least a thousand.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Yes. This is how obsessive one can be when it comes to creating. Yes. Like, I'm building four products right now, you know, Aura, New Form. Well, this, I don't really count it as a product. I have Dreamcut, which I'm gonna be revealing soon. It's a Mac app. And, you know, I'm also rebuilding design code from scratch. So four products all at once, and I'm not even including the side products like this one, which, honestly, I love using it just because I'm able to tell my agent to write everything for me.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  And I'm able to just generate these images, these YouTube covers, using a history of my portrait that I save into this. Because there's no tool that does this, right? Like, you build tools literally because nothing else is doing it. And there's nothing else that has a slider that says, okay, I want this to be exactly, or I want this to be loosely inspired. Like, have you seen this UI before?

• 36:32Greg Isenberg?

  I've never seen that, and I see a lot of products.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Exactly. And the only reason why we're able to kind of get there is because we're building something for ourselves, right? And

• 36:46Speaker 01

  It's such a powerful thing. So if you look at the whole workflow, right? You you start with a reference. Every every designer, every someone who starts drawing something, they always copy first. They always start with a reference, the designer M D or in in most cases, they're just taking like copying a prompt somewhere. And then we generate, we inspect, and then eventually using the designer M D you systemize. And then, like I said, you iterate. This is where I get like to a thousand iterations. And then you, you know, and then you remix it to turn it into more a medium such as the slide. You need marketing material, Instagram slides, promo videos, you need like intros, you need, uh, you know, something for your hyperframes or for your remotion.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Whatever it is, you're essentially remixing at this point because you're happy. Because you you've done a thousand iterations, you're happy with your product, you're happy where it's going. You you feel there's a soul to it. Because I think most people, what they tend to forget is that humans, they don't see the soul across the screen. We do, okay, we like we're innate to that. When you you you can feel, I don't know how how to say it, but Steve Jobs said it very well. When you use a product and when you really like take a magnifier and you look into it, you really feel the care that is put into it. It's not because we have A I that we we can just skip all of that care, right?

• 38:12Speaker 01

  It just happens that that care is now residing into the prompting and the sort of the workflow, the club, the, you know, the open claw, you know, the things, the thousand iterations that I do. I've never worked more more in my entire life on more products on on like on more prompts in my entire life than now. A I is not making me lazier. A I is making me more work more. And yeah, you know, and you know, we we get into the eh eh expansion and then we export our product and it becomes like a final product that we can ship. So, iteration versus remix. This is a very important concept. Like I mentioned in my slider.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Iteration is when you're happy with the result and you wanna kind of like do small incrementations. And remix is when you wanna, you know, build a new product category, for example. So, I love the idea of iteration more and I use this, I would say, 90% of the time and 10% of the time. And then, yeah, I already did the demo. Okay, so, we can talk about what has changed for designers. So, what I believe is that everything is changing and we're doing a lot less of the moving pixels, moving rectangle and resizing things. We're doing a lot more judgment per minute.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  In fact, you know, for me, the agent is more like someone who's doing a lot of the sort of the moving pixels and the coding. And then, I have to make the right decisions. I remember the CEO of Amazon was saying like, if you make a really good, like one powerful decision in a day or a few powerful, then that change your entire business. And I think, you know, I agree with that. You have to make these extremely powerful decisions. And also, you have to make these incredibly small decisions as well, just because the AI is not intelligent enough to make the smaller decisions yet. But eventually, it's gonna get bigger and bigger. The decision is gonna become bigger and bigger. And then, you know, that's kind of what's changed.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  We're shifting our creativity and we're shifting to something that is more, you know, looking for a high level. I've never done more marketing in my life. I've never done more YouTube videos in my life or slides and promo videos. So, yeah, this is what's changed. We're now, everyone's like a creator. Everyone's like an Instagram filmmaker of some sort. So, this is, you know, I think this is what's happening. There are so many ideas that we can create. And, yeah, you know, I don't wanna get too deep into the slides. I wanna get to your questions, obviously.

• 41:06Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I think, you know, just your point around like,

• 41:10Greg Isenberg?

  you've never done more in your life. I think what's also interesting is like... You're a team of one, am I right? Is that correct? Like, is that, am I correct?

• 41:19Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm a team of many, but not because of what I'm doing right now. Right now, I'm kind of like a team of one. Like, all of these products I'm showing right now is me building them by myself.

• 41:31Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Uh, but the reason why I still have a team is because I started in the days of design code. And I build this team that I grew really fond of. They started from nothing. They haven't gone to school like myself. I have no, I haven't gone to school to study design. I drop out of college and then I learn everything on the field. I started my first job at eighteen and then, you know, started my, my first company at twenty-two. So, uh, you know, a lot of, like, everyone in my team started from nothing. And, uh, you know, I feel very attached to them, which is why I have them with me. But you're right, you know, like, all, like, all of these products, I started by myself. I work on them for a month, a thousand iterations, maybe more, some, some of them ten thousand iterations.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  And I arrive to a point where it's mature enough. And then we get to the team to, to build templates and videos and, and, and sort of like, uh, the material that expands on that. And, um, you know, I came across this, this quote, this fake quote from Steve Jobs on his, on his final, uh, you know, bed. You know, when, when he, uh, he was passing, but it's, it's a, apparently it's a fake one. But he was saying like, if you wanna go, if you wanna go really fast, you start alone. You start solo. But if you wanna go far, you need to be in a team. So that's what I think right now. Like, most of us, we start solo because we cannot go any faster, right?

• 43:02Speaker 01

  We, we're like operating a fleet of, you know, ten, twenty agents all at once. And that's great. But eventually you need to get people with you. You, you know, you need to be part of a mission and then you need to sort of, sort of like, uh, you know, make these videos that feel more authentic because people crave authenticity. They want real people. They want real craftsmanship behind all of these pixel at, at some point. Because, you know, the cracks are gonna show if you only use AI, the, you know, the whole way.

• 43:39Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I think there's I think there's two types of people. I think there's the first type of person, which is what you're saying, which is like, go build product market fit, start scaling, and then from there, hire a team. And the second type of person is the person who just loves being a lone wolf, you know, who just loves doing everything themselves. And I think what's cool about what you're doing, you know, you're essentially building a holding company of products as a one person business. Yes, you know, some of your businesses, you're scaling with, you know, with people and stuff like that. But, you know, the majority of it is being run by one person. And you couldn't do that a few years ago. And I think

• 44:21Greg Isenberg?

  more importantly than, you know, within the context of this episode, it's like, you're creating beautiful products. Like, these products that you're creating are stunning. They're nuanced. They look really good. And I want to end just with, you know, what, you know, in terms of building beautiful products, you know, we talked about DesignMD, we talked about Skills, we talked about a lot of these other tools, Variant, Aura,

• 44:48Greg Isenberg?

  some of the new tools you're working on. Is there anything else you want to leave people with in terms of how you can create jaw dropping designs?

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like I said, your only mode is you being able to catch up with what is going on. Because if you look at everything that is legacy, that is already solved with all of these big companies that have millions and nowadays hundreds of millions in the bank to tackle on these big things. So as people who are starting new ideas, the only mode that we have right now is just, we can, you know, just click a button and we can say, we, you know, we found this new model, it literally cooked all the designers and whatnot. It's funny. I know, I know, we all hate it and it becomes a meme. But at the same time, it reflects a reality in which we are today, which is that

• 45:42Speaker 01

  That's how we survive as a species, right? We cannot compete anymore with the big companies and we have so many ideas in our head. And we can finally realize them with just a few prompts. At least to get to an MVP. And that is usually good enough to launch a product. And there's just so many ideas because of it. So for example, DesignMD just came out and I already built like a bunch of features. And I could totally build a startup out of that if I wanted to, right? QA, right? Design, memory. This is what's solved a lot by OpenClaw nowadays is when the idea is like,

• 46:24Speaker 01

  it has a whole memory inside your disk, inside your computer. You know, reusable taste marketplace. And I want to leave with one final thing, which is that taste is the real value here. And when I say taste, I don't necessarily just mean design taste. Obviously, design taste is very cool and is very powerful. And I think that's my secret sauce. But for a lot of people, your taste can be, you know, like if you look at Barista, the taste of going, of making so many cup of coffees every morning. You eventually knows exactly how to do it. Taste encoding, taste in building apps.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  You have to just be surrounded by good design, right? You have to look at good designs, not just be served by it, but also to look for it everywhere. You have to use every app in your niche. You have to follow every, you know, makers and creators in your niche. And niche is the key word here because you cannot compete anymore with people who are generalized. It's too difficult. Nowadays, we want authenticity, we want niche, we want taste. And if something looks like another thing, it kind of reduced the value by like almost 10 to 100x, in my opinion, right? Like nowadays, I see a website with purple gradient.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  I'm like, I don't want to, I don't want to even want to scroll anymore. And I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way when we see like a website that looks just like another one. So yeah, develop your taste, rinse and repeat. You know, follow what's going on and you know, get that to that mode that you have. And learn the workflow, like everything that I taught here. Get your designer MD, get the templates, learn about the skills and the prompting behind the skills. And then I think you're going to be doing just fine.

• 48:23Greg Isenberg?

  I love that. I also think a lot of us have second brains for our notes, our meeting notes, ideas that we have. But a lot of us don't have a second brain for design inspiration. So I think the idea of when you see something in the real world or on the digital world where you're like, this is really cool. Capturing that and putting it somewhere where you're like, you can, you know, when you're, when you're trying to create something new, you can refer back to your second brain for creative inspiration. What do you think about that?

• 49:00Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. I mean, I think whether you call it a second brain or your creative side of the brain, or you know, something that keeps you going because you know, we crave purpose. We crave to be praised and you cannot get, if you cannot get there, you know, you can not get to that purpose. If you don't somehow get excited by it and kind of explore something new and adapt to a new reality. And I think, like I said, taste is so, so important. This is where we develop that we make all of these micro decisions super quickly. In an instant, you can tell right away if a design is good or not, or if there's a care behind it or not.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  You know, you touch like a phone, like an iPhone and you're like, you feel right away. This is extremely high quality and you want to use this as your, you know, as your main daily driver. So yeah, you know, please use your, your, your creative brain, please use your second brain, please use your, you know, your taste. Every step of the way and don't, don't let AI do everything for you. And even if you do let AI do a lot of things for you, make sure that it's part of the workflow that you already mastered, right?

• 50:14Greg Isenberg?

  Meng, I appreciate you coming on. I'll include links where you can follow Meng to get some creative inspiration, as well as links for some of the tools he's working on that you can go and play with. Go check it out in the description, in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 50:31Greg Isenberg?

  I hope you come back on soon again.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  When Google or OpenAI and Claude come up with something new about design, I'll be happy to come on again. I'm super, super honored to come here. You're a good friend of mine. You also come from the same town as me. You speak French like me, or at least your family do. So it's always a pleasure, Greg, and thank you so much. This means the world to me.

• 50:57Greg Isenberg?

  I appreciate you, man. I'll catch you later.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  All right. Bye bye.