At Perplexity, the design system lives in the codebase, not Figma. Designers contribute directly to the frontend, creating a single source of truth that eliminates drift between design files and production code, forcing a highly practical and collaborative process.
The most creative use of AI isn't a single-shot generation. It's a continuous feedback loop. Designers should treat AI outputs as intermediate "throughputs"—artifacts to be edited in traditional tools and then fed back into the AI model as new inputs. This iterative remixing process is where happy accidents and true innovation occur.
To appeal to the "layperson" rather than tech early adopters, Comet's designers made the core browser experience familiar, like Google Chrome. This reduces cognitive load, allowing users to focus their limited learning bandwidth on the novel AI features, even if it disappoints power users expecting a radical redesign.
To make the onboarding feel special, the designer moved beyond typical product flows. She commissioned a custom music track (titled "Waking Up Before Everyone Else at the Sleepover and the Wii is still on") and designed logo reveals inspired by video game startup screens to evoke nostalgia and create an emotional connection.
To create unique, on-brand invite cards at scale, the designer chained multiple AI tools together. She used Midjourney for initial concepts, trained custom models on Civit AI, then used FAL AI to blend models and variabilize prompts for generation. This demonstrates a sophisticated workflow beyond single-prompt image creation.
The designer initially felt her career stagnated from being the only designer at companies like Descript. In retrospect, this "lone wolf" experience was critical training. It forced her to develop frameworks and decision-making confidence without peer feedback, enabling her to single-handedly own the massive Comet browser project from day one.
Instead of a complex 3D modeling process for Comet's onboarding animation, the designer used Perplexity Labs. By describing a "spinning orb" and providing a texture, she generated a 360-degree video that was cropped and shipped directly, showcasing how AI tools can quickly create high-fidelity, hacky production assets.
Open-ended prompts overwhelm new users who don't know what's possible. A better approach is to productize AI into specific features. Use familiar UI like sliders and dropdowns to gather user intent, which then constructs a complex prompt behind the scenes, making powerful AI accessible without requiring prompt engineering skills.