🤿 left the Wii on all night

Imagine it’s your first day as a designer at Perplexity...

In your first meeting the VP of Design hands you the keys for their all-new AI browser, Comet.

Well that’s the story for Escha Vera.

So this week’s episode is a deep dive into her design process and what it looks like to use AI like an artist. 👇

We go deep into:

• How to use AI as a creative (not a slot machine)

• How she designed Comet onboarding experience

• How she reimagined the Perplexity design system

• Creating generative invite codes using multiple AI tools

• What it means to “productize” AI without leaning on chat interfaces

• + a lot more

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

🤝 WITH FRAMER

Framer just went from a web builder to a true design tool with their latest release.

They just launched Design Pages, which give you a freeform canvas to explore in and all of the tools that you might need (including vector editing!)

That way you can experiment and play without having to think about responsiveness.

And then when you're ready, you can turn any iteration into a web page with a single click.

No imports, no copying and pasting.

Design Pages are a game changer and you can start using them today, just click the link to get started 👇

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS

My takeaways from chatting with Escha

1 — What it means to use AI as an artist

Too many people treat AI as a slot machine: type a prompt, take the output, move on.

That’s automation, not art.

Escha does the opposite:

Using AI as an artist involves lots of experimentation and chasing “happy accidents” as Escha calls them.

The best designs are constantly stitching tools together, running loops, throwing paint at the wall, etc.

Don’t settle for that first output.

2 — Defining the UX beyond the pixels

What inspired me most is how Escha contributes to the emotional layer of Comet (really going deep on how it feels not just how it looks).

A few examples:

She created these beautiful planets to open the Comet onboarding flow by remixing some of the textures from the brand team inside of Perplexity Labs.

She then worked with a producer to score custom music (using Suno to express her ideas). Her goal was to make the Comet unboxing feel like a “Nintendo 64 startup screen” (the track is called “Waking Up Before Everyone Else at the Sleepover, and the Wii is Still on” which I freaking love.)

She even trained her own models using Civit and Fal to generate unique invite cards for every user 🤯

This is the type of designer I want to be when I grow up… someone who exists outside of rectangle land and pulls on every creative strand imaginable to ensure people feel something while using my product.

3 — AI as a second-class citizen

People really liked Vitaly’s “Beyond Chat” episode, and Escha hit a lot of the same chords (especially when talking about her time as the OG designer of Descript).

She says they intentionally treat chat and prompting as “second-class citizens”.

The main flows leaned on familiar UI (sliders, dropdowns, buttons, etc.). Meanwhile the prompts were generated invisibly in the background. And if you wanted to tweak something it felt more like “custom instructions” rather than the core UX.

This is harder to pull of with a perfectly open-ended product like Comet. But Perplexity has done a lot behind-the-scenes to tackle the “blinking cursor problem”. One thing that stood out to me is how they manually mapped zero-suggest to popular domains.

People don’t want to be prompt engineers ✌️

There’s a lot more in the full episode. It’s definitely one of my new favorites so I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did 👇

Meet the Dive partners 

I made a list of my favorite products and asked them to come on as sponsors of the newsletter/podcast. They said yes 🥹

The #1 way to support Dive Club is to check them out👇

Framer​ → How I build my websites

Genway → How I do research

Granola → How I take notes during CRIT

Jitter​ → How I animate my designs

Lovable → How I build my ideas in code

Mobbin → How I find design inspiration

Paper → How I design like a creative

Raycast ​ → How I stay in flow while I work

Thanks for reading! I'm working hard to bring you the best design resources on the planet 🫶

If you want to go even deeper you can always:

☞ Read all ​ideas​

☞ Watch all ​episodes ​

☞ Learn ​advanced design tactics​

P.S. if you were forwarded this email you can ​subscribe here