ISB AI Founders

Design with AI

Live survey · hands up, I count

Nine fonts, twelve colors, zero decisions

Design is not decoration, it's choosing, and choosing less. You already have taste: every time you like one app more than another, you're using it. Today you learn to name what you're seeing, so you can build it instead of just noticing it.

Same idea, two builds

Three things your eye already judges

Every "good" vs "half-good" you just felt comes down to one of these three. Watch the same app change, one dial at a time.

Dial 1 · Hierarchy

Dial 2 · Spacing

Dial 3 · Color

From noticing to building

Turn

Now the method for making it: three choices, made on purpose, one at a time.

Taste evolves · a real company

Design is three choices

Choice 1 · Type

Choice 2 · Color

The accent is the only color allowed to shout. It shouts once, at the one thing you want tapped.

Choice 2 · Color, continued

Choice 3 · Layout

Ask the room

Why this works

One font pairing, one accent, one skeleton means every future screen is a copy, not a new decision. That's speed.

Where professional taste comes from

Scroll it for 5 minutes tonight. Your taste levels up just from looking.

Now build one

You don't stare at a blank page and invent a font pairing from nothing. You ask for three, genuinely different, and you judge.

Copy this prompt · run it now

My product: [thesis]. My user: [person]. Generate 3 genuinely different visual directions: font pairing, 5-color palette (1 accent + 4 neutrals), and the feeling each gives. Then, for the direction I pick, write the instruction I should give my coding agent to apply it across the whole app.

Before you start the clock

If direction 1 and direction 2 could be the same app with a different button color, that's not three directions. That's one direction, twice.

Watch this once, then it's yours

What to listen for

A direction that makes the room go "oh, that one" on first read is the correct signal. Trust it.

Ask the room

Pick like a founder

Founders don't out-deliberate the competition. They out-ship them. Two minutes to pick, then it's final.

Make it real

Font pairing. Five-color palette. One adjective for the feeling. Small enough to fit in a sticky note, strict enough to hold every screen you build after this.

Example style card

From decision to codebase

Turn

Your style card is a decision. Claude Code is how the decision becomes real, across every screen at once.

Copy this instruction · give it to Claude Code

Apply the [Direction Name] direction across the whole app: [font pairing] for type, [accent + neutrals] for color, [layout skeleton] for structure. Don't change any functionality, only the visual layer.

Before you start the clock

You have 5 minutes. Grab the winning direction, verbatim, and hand it to Claude Code. Don't ask it to add features. Just the visual layer, everywhere at once.

What changed, what didn't

That's the test of a real design pass: zero functionality broken, and the room can't stop looking at it.

The ritual

Destination: THE WALL. Public, persistent, photographed tonight. The room walks by every team's before/after on the way to lunch.

Confess your sins

Go deeper · on the portal

Checkpoint

A style on a mood board is worthless. A style in the codebase compounds with every feature.

“Launch fast.” Today you proved it.

Next up

13:15 your product goes live at a public URL. 14:30 five cold strangers use it while you watch in silence. Every confusion they hit becomes tonight's fix list.