You can't describe your way to great design

Great creative work needs a canvas, not a conversation

Words by

Viggy Madhav

Illustration by Tomasz Opasiński in Adobe Firefly

Many creative tools built on AI right now ask you to do the same thing: Describe what you want. Type a sentence. Wait. Evaluate. Type some more.

We've dressed this up as a new way to create, but it's really just a slower version of giving feedback to someone who isn't in the room. The work worth doing, the kind that requires feeling, instinct, and a hundred small experiments, can't survive that loop.

I’ve spent fifteen years designing creative tools at Adobe, most recently leading design for AI-powered creative workflows, and I've come to believe that the tools we're building right now fundamentally misunderstand what creative professionals actually need.

AI powered creative tools in the market today

Look at what’s in the market today, and you find two shapes of creative tools, built for two very different problems.

First is the editable-but-constrained tool. These include Lovable, Figma Make, and even Claude’s new design capabilities. They produce clean, o...