A Better Format for Talking About Design
John Falcone and Chase Goulet on building a new kind of design event, one made for slower, deeper conversations about creativity, AI, and community.
Hey, what's up.
Text, Code, and Image Generation. All have creative dimensions.
But AI Image Gen encapsulated the coming “end of designers” most.
Of the 3 amigos, Image Gen may turn out to be the least valuable to businesses.
Sora’s hellscape of slop feels like the perfect caricature to put a bow on this thought.
From a business standpoint, it’s just as shaky: each video costs about $5 to generate.
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State of the Craft: Ever since ChatGPT’s image gen was released in 2022, Google search interest in it has fallen nearly 80%.
Double Diamond Interview
I met John and Chase at design events here in New York, for a period of time while running Toil, I was going to 2-3 events per week.
Consistently I would run into these two “oh hey again.” I became used to keeping an eye out for them to every event I dropped into.
And that’s why it makes so much sense that they’re now running their own design event, Double Diamond.
Keep on eye out for these two, click through to read.
Nostalgia Marketing
Both Anthropic and OpenAI launched traditional ad campaigns in the last few months. Anthropic worked with Mother while OpenAI worked with a little-known shop called Isle of Any.
OpenAI’s campaign has a distinctly retro, analog feel and was shot entirely on 35mm film.
Anthropic’s “Keep Thinking” film goes even further back in time, evoking the 1970’s with a warm, approachable aesthetic.
What’s striking is these companies are supposed to be building the future, and neither could come up with a compelling vision for it.
Because if OpenAI’s Sora is any indication, the future looks fucking terrible.
Joining Graphite
A personal update, 2 months ago I joined the team at Graphite, a tech startup in the devtools space, working on the future of coding tools.
As a creature of the agency world, it’s a big change.
But weirdly a natural one, my focus on Web Design and Webflow has been bringing me closer and closer to code, Graphite is all about the developer experience.
Cofounding Toil Studio the past few years has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. And it was really hard to leave.
I’ve learnt a tonne alongside my two cofounders Danny Owens and Alejandro Rodriguez and I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved together.
I’m excited to cheer them on as they continue scaling Toil.
More Design Acquisitions
Earlier in the year I wrote a post about design-driven bets from markets this year. Here’s another one.
Visual Electric is a Sequoia-backed AI design startup known for its image and video generation tools. Perplexity just acquired them for an undisclosed amount.
Despite my dunking on these tools in the intro, its clear companies see a market for image-gen AI moving forward.
But its been interesting to see which players have committed to this space, notably Anthropic does not make an image-gen AI tool. They position themselves as the anti-slop AI platform.
Web Watch
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Oxide Computer
Simple, clean, and comfortable owning one color.
Thanks for writing this, it clarifies a lot. Your analysis on AI image gen’s busines value is spot on. The drop in search interest since 2022 really illustrates how the hype cycle works. It's smart to question the 'end of designers' narrative; human creativity is not so easily replaced. Very insightful.