While AI empowers generalists, the baseline for design quality is rising for everyone. To truly stand out, companies like Eleven Labs are hiring niche specialists (e.g., WebGL, sound design) who can push creative boundaries far beyond what standard AI tools can achieve, creating true differentiation.
Eleven Labs, an AI audio company, justifies hiring a specialist sound designer by arguing they must lead in all aspects of audio. Their sonic branding isn't just background music; it's a complex, composed system, reflecting their product's core competency and creating a key differentiator.
To solve the problem of representing a non-visual product, Eleven Labs created a generative system. It uses the underlying data embedding of each voice to drive a real-time WebGL shader, creating a unique, visually representative "orb" for each of the 40 million voices on its platform.
Instead of a traditional design handoff, Eleven Labs built custom WebGL playgrounds for its "voice orb" project. This allowed designers to manipulate shader parameters with simple controls, take screenshots of desired aesthetics, and feed them back to the engineer, blending creative and technical workflows.
To keep designers engaged and attract top talent, Eleven Labs allows teams to step outside the core brand for projects like hackathons or summits. This provides regular opportunities to build entirely new identities, fostering creative expression and preventing brand fatigue.
To get buy-in for more creative, off-brand work, Nev Flynn's team at Eleven Labs started with a small, fast project—a hackathon website. Its success, demonstrated through high user engagement and signups, created the precedent and organizational trust needed to justify larger, more artful investments.
To empower engineers using coding agents, Eleven Labs is optimizing its design system for AI. This involves reducing component complexity (e.g., from seven button sizes to fewer) and creating an `agents.md` file that codifies product principles and specifies when to use certain components.
To solve brand consistency issues, Eleven Labs developed an internal tool for creating sales and marketing decks. It enforces brand guidelines through rigid templates but crucially exports the final product to Google Slides, allowing business teams to continue collaborating within their preferred, existing environment.
Their custom deck-building tool overcomes the limitations of Google Slides' API. It renders the deck in HTML, measures the precise width, height, and X/Y coordinates of every element on the page, and then passes this data to the API, ensuring a perfectly faithful recreation in the final Google Slides file.
To free up brand designers for high-impact work, Eleven Labs is building a system that intercepts routine asset requests in Slack. The system will parse the request (e.g., a Luma event cover), auto-generate the asset using a "drawing server," and reply in the thread, closing the ticket if the user approves.
To get an authentic signal of a designer's thought process, Nev Flynn skips formal presentations. Instead, he asks candidates to open their most recent working Figma file—no matter how messy—and casually walk him through their process. This reveals more about their real-world skills than a rehearsed case study.
At Eleven Labs, the ideal collaboration model involves engineers wiring up functionality and product designers handling the final UI polish directly in the code. This "last mile"—markup, interaction details, and pixel-perfect adjustments—is a safe entry point for designers and frees up engineers from work they often dislike.
At Eleven Labs, product design isn't about applying existing patterns. When the research team develops a new model with unprecedented capabilities, the designer's job is to invent a completely new interface. This requires the ability to discard classical UI conventions and imagine interactions from scratch.