I actually appreciate working with LLMs on design quite a lot, although I'm not a designer by trade so my situation may differ. I enjoy getting an image-generated mockup (that is usually top class), then letting an LLM implement it, then seeing where it doesn't feel quite right. Then trying to understand why it doesn't feel right. When I do the CSS myself, I iterate one component at a time and usually not get the 'find the 100 differences' feel. Animations are even more fun, you feel they suck, but you have to slow them down to understand what's really making them suck. Not claiming I can do good designs, but it helped me identify faster why some designs were bad.
Yeah I can see when you’re on a certain part of a learning curve how that kind of iteration can be really useful. “That seems good, let’s see it. Hm now I feel how this part is clunky”. I can imagine looping that way for certain kinds of things I don’t have a ton of experience with — animations will be a good one for me actually.
I see what you are saying and for very specific problems/explorations I do still reach for Figma. But the days of crafting static screens and multi-artboard flows are gone. It's better to prototype the entire flow/interaction directly than trying to reason about it 'statically'. LLMs have also opened up an entire array of new possibilities for e.g. combining meaningful 3D and taking a 'leap of faith' into visualizations/interactions that would simply be too costly to properly explore before
> But the days of crafting static screens and multi-artboard flows are gone. It's better to prototype the entire flow/interaction directly than trying to reason about it 'statically'.
I haven’t found this to be true but it could well come down to the type of design work I do. I’m usually working on new features for complex workflows within an already complex app. When I’ve tried to yolo designs with LLMs they never come up with elegant visual or UX solutions. They’ve been occasionally useful as a way to get something on the screen that I can work against — ie “well that’s clearly wrong in these 20 ways” — but at that point I usually then reach for figma so I can just do the damn thing myself.
Agree about the more complex design options it opens up, I just haven’t had call to do much in those spaces yet.
In writing and designing I think we often have a thought-feeling first: something inchoate that we can’t quite articulate yet. Getting directly to the medium itself — text or frames and layouts — is how we give shape to that feeling and turn it into a concept, insight or design.