Visual Electric's Colin Dunn on the Designer Evolution

Key Concepts

• Minus One to Zero Phase: The period before a startup officially launches (zero to one), involving idea exploration, validation, and co-founder search.
• Market Risk vs. Execution Risk: Market risk involves building a product for which no demand exists, while execution risk pertains to the ability to build and deliver a product effectively.
• Design as a Differentiator: Leveraging design to gain a competitive advantage in established markets.
• Viability, Desirability, Feasibility Framework: A design thinking framework used to evaluate business ideas.
• Co-founder Dating: The process of finding and vetting potential co-founders, emphasizing chemistry and shared vision.
• Working with the Grain of Technology: Designing products that align with the natural evolution and capabilities of underlying technologies, rather than fighting against them.
• Generative Models: AI models capable of creating new content, such as images, text, or video.
• Brand Marketing Content: The creation of materials used to promote and communicate a brand's identity and offerings.
• Full-Stack Designers: Designers who possess skills beyond traditional design, often including coding or creative direction.
• Taste Gap: The difference between an artist's aesthetic vision and their current technical ability to execute it, which can be closed through practice and iteration.
• Generative Brands: Brands that leverage AI to create personalized and dynamic marketing content.
• Vibe Director: A conceptual role for designers in the future, focusing on setting brand constraints and guiding AI-generated content rather than direct manipulation.

Summary

This discussion features Colin, a designer founder, sharing insights into his entrepreneurial journey, particularly the "minus one to zero" phase of building Visual Electric, a tool for creatives. The conversation delves into the lessons learned from previous startup experiences, the process of co-founder selection, the evolution of Visual Electric's vision, and the future of design in the age of AI.

The Minus One to Zero Journey and Risk Assessment

Colin begins by defining the "minus one to zero" phase as everything preceding the "zero to one" launch of a startup. His early entrepreneurial experience includes a web design business with his twin brother in high school. A more formative experience was at Aspen, a startup where he learned the critical lesson of being conscious of the types of risks taken. He categorizes risks into market risk, execution risk, and regulatory risk. At Aspen, he felt they took on significant market risk by building a product that didn't replace an existing one. Drawing inspiration from Apple's strategy of entering large, established markets where design can be a differentiator, Colin advocates for focusing on problems with low market risk but high execution risk, where design can be a winning factor.

Idea Exploration and Co-founder Dating

When exploring ideas for Visual Electric, Colin applied a design process, using the IDO framework of viability, desirability, and feasibility as constraints. He sought individuals to represent each aspect of this framework: an investor for viability, a customer representative, and technical co-founders for feasibility. This involved a "co-founder dating" process, where potential technical partners unknowingly served as the feasibility component. His goal was to make rapid progress by continuously gathering feedback from these individuals and integrating it into his design process for iterative improvement.

Regarding co-founder dating, Colin likens it to romantic dating, emphasizing chemistry and a strong click. A key heuristic he used was the willingness to give away half the company, indicating a genuine belief in the partnership.

Evolution of Visual Electric's Vision

The vision for Visual Electric has evolved in tandem with the advancement of generative AI technology. Initially positioned as a design tool for creatives, the broad use cases of AI at the time made it difficult to pinpoint a specific customer. As foundational models improved and capabilities emerged, the product's specificity and features could be refined. This maturation of technology allowed Visual Electric to more confidently define its customer and workflow.

Lessons from Previous Design Roles

Having worked as a founding-level designer at multiple startups and with designer CEOs, Colin has learned to temper a purely design-led approach. He expresses weariness of unchecked design-led teams, recognizing that a strong design mentality can sometimes steer a company in the wrong direction. He emphasizes the need to challenge personal design preferences and align them with broader market values. While UI, product feel, and user experience are important, they must be balanced with business function and feasibility. He advocates for "designing with the grain" of technology, rather than inventing for the sake of it, finding a groove that allows for rapid iteration.

The Impact of Generative AI on Design Work

Colin acknowledges the feeling of approaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with advancing AI models. However, he admits to feeling "behind" in his own day-to-day use of AI for shipping code, finding AI agents like Devon to be not yet effective. He notes that many designers are transitioning to software development and away from Figma prototyping, a leap he hasn't fully made, possibly due to product design being a smaller portion of his current workload.

Designing Around the Co-founder Relationship

Colin views the co-founder relationship as a core element in designing a company. He highlights his strong working relationship with his co-founders, particularly Adam, who brings experience from building and selling two companies. Adam's unique combination of deep machine learning understanding and design-mindedness was a crucial criterion in the co-founder search.

Visual Electric's Differentiation and Strategy

Visual Electric's differentiator lies in building a product that works according to the creative process, not the technology's limitations. When the company started, visual AI was rapidly improving but lacked polished products, feeling more like tech demos. Visual Electric aimed to build a tool purpose-built for designers, starting from first principles. While initially a broad charter and R&D experiment, specific use cases have emerged, such as mockups. Mockups are crucial for designers as a storytelling and sales tool, allowing brands to be visualized in context (e.g., on an out-of-home ad or tote bag), adding life and impact. The core strategy is to bend the technology around the designer's workflow.

The Value of a Design Background

Colin's graphic design background, combined with his transition into software, has provided him with a unique perspective on the market. He believes the graphic design process, involving broad exploration, storytelling, and building brand identity systems, is not dissimilar to software design. Visual Electric aims to facilitate this process with AI assistance without being overly prescriptive, a lesson learned from past startups where over-prescription limited product adoption.

Surprising Use Cases and Future Evolution

Surprising use cases for Visual Electric include storyboarding, which feels like a natural extension of laying out elements on a canvas. The recent addition of video capabilities opens up workflows for turning storyboards into videos and stitching multiple videos together.

The future evolution of Visual Electric is envisioned in the context of brand marketing content. While acknowledging competitors like Figma Buzz, Colin sees a future where everything is generated, fundamentally changing workflows from layer-based, direct manipulation to more conversational interactions. The bet is on a future where pixels can be anything – text, 3D assets, video. The strategy is to design for this future, anticipating exponential technological improvement rather than being constrained by current limitations. The differentiation lies in building end-to-end solutions and unique workflows that benefit from advancing foundation models, with the "work around the work" being the lasting and durable aspect.

Design Hiring and the "Full-Stack" Trend

Colin observes a trend towards designers becoming more "full-stack," bleeding into adjacent functions. He cites Fee from Perplexity as an example of someone performing multiple roles, enabled by AI to produce a high volume of content. Similarly, product designers are increasingly able to output code and build components, a trend turbocharged by AI. For small teams aiming to stay small, the focus is on identifying where individuals can "flex" into other areas. For Visual Electric, a tool for creative directors, they seek expert product designers who can also flex into creative direction and art direction, providing double value through marketing content creation and deeper customer empathy.

The Bull Case for Joining an Early-Stage Startup

For individuals considering joining a startup like Visual Electric, the opportunity lies in working on novel problems and shaping the future of a product and industry. The appeal is the chance to contribute to something groundbreaking that cannot be found elsewhere.

Future Growth and the "Wave" Metaphor

Colin hopes for future growth by identifying a narrow, yet broadly useful, use case or workflow. He uses the metaphor of "being in the water to catch the wave," suggesting that Visual Electric is actively positioned to capitalize on emerging trends. He notes that visual AI is currently behind LLMs in terms of adoption and investment, but believes this will change. The goal is to achieve explosive growth by finding vertical use cases and workflows.

Advice for Aspiring Designer Founders

Colin took ten years to make the leap into starting a company, acknowledging a healthy dose of hesitancy. He emphasizes the importance of loving the problem more than the idea of building a company, as this passion is the fuel that sustains through challenges. He believes that as a designer, he has a unique point of view and perspective that is valuable in the current moment. He also suggests that learning is best achieved by "jumping in."

Disagreement with Conventional Wisdom

Colin disagrees with the conventional wisdom that startups should not invest heavily in their brand early on. Visual Electric invested significantly in its brand, working with Manual, a classical graphic design agency. This was not only a strategic move for a tool targeting brand designers but also a personal passion. The brand aims to make graphic designers feel "seen" and has proven to be an asset.

The Case for the Graphic Designer ICP

Colin "steel-manned" the case for the graphic designer as the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), addressing the concern that AI might automate graphic design. He reframes the argument by suggesting that AI will rearrange jobs, and initial adoption often comes from those currently performing the work. He draws parallels to Cursor for engineers and AI recruiters for recruiters. He posits that in a future disrupted by AI, the core job of a designer or creative director will remain: telling compelling stories and composing cohesive elements that resonate with people. The way this is done is changing, and Visual Electric aims to be at the forefront of this evolution, betting on the durability of taste and human curation.

Communicating with Machines Through Imagery

Colin suggests updating the phrase "an image is worth a thousand words" to "an image is worth a thousand tokens." He believes that pictures convey far more information than language, and Visual Electric, being built by visual thinkers, aims to move beyond text-based human-computer interaction.

The Future of Brands and Brand Guidelines

Brand guidelines are seen as a relic of a bygone era, with AI models likely to replace them. The trend towards individualized and personalized content is significant. AI enables localization of marketing content, allowing for changes in backgrounds, clothing, and even actors. In a world of generated and individualized content, designers may need to let go of maximum control, becoming "vibe directors" who define brand constraints and boundaries for AI to reform itself based on context and audience.

Avoiding Abuse of AI Tools

While safety controls are in place, often inherited from model providers like OpenAI and Google, societal awareness of AI is a stronger defense against misinformation. People are becoming more skeptical of what they see, similar to the evolution of Photoshop. The application layer also has controls to prevent abuse.

Designing for Creative Directors vs. the General Public

Visual Electric is designed for creative directors, not the general public, evidenced by its infinite canvas interface, which is not consumer-friendly. The company avoids competing in the commoditized consumer space where AI image generation is a feature, not a standalone company. Instead, it focuses on specialized, deep workflows for customers with distinct needs.

Generative AI and Brand Success

Brands that succeed with generative AI are often "forgiving of imperfection" and flexible enough to support the variance in AI generations. Perplexity is cited as an example, with a general vibe and font but not rigid brand guidelines, allowing for serendipity.

Creativity, Taste, and AI

Colin believes creativity is about connecting two existing ideas in a new way, a process similar to how humans and AI models learn. AI lowers the barrier to technical ability in art creation. The "taste gap" – the difference between one's aesthetic vision and execution ability – can be closed faster with AI by accelerating the pace of iteration and exploration. He views AI as creative in the same way humans are, but the human element of curation and prompting makes AI-generated art more interesting.

Future of Visual Electric: Beyond Images

Visual Electric envisions a future where generated pixels can be broader than just images, potentially including SVGs and text. The strategy is to bet on models generating a wider range of pixel types, rather than building features that are already available in legacy tools. This approach offers a differentiated path to competing with established design tools.

Open Source vs. Closed Source Models

While open-source models offer benefits like self-hosting and control, closed-source models currently provide superior quality. Visual Electric's allegiance is to the best quality, and they would be more excited to use open-source models if they matched current performance.

Design Founders Building for Non-Design Industries

The current technological landscape allows for designers to be creators across various industries by breaking down technical barriers. Designers with great ideas, vision, and the ability to create compelling experiences are well-positioned to succeed. The advice for non-designers to learn design involves developing natural instincts and training one's eye through extensive observation and practice, with reverse engineering and copying as effective learning methods.

Generative Brands and Imperfection

Successful generative brands are forgiving of AI's imperfections and flexible enough to accommodate variations. This often means a less rigid approach to brand guidelines, embracing serendipity.

Creativity as Connecting Ideas

Creativity is defined as connecting two existing ideas in a new way. AI can accelerate the process of closing the "taste gap" by enabling rapid iteration and exploration. The human element of curation and prompting is crucial for making AI-generated art compelling.