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🤿 new way to design with AI

🤿 new way to design with AI

+ tips for designing a rocket ship

Ridd
April 04, 2025

Lovable has quickly become the go-to way I build my ideas with AI and this week we get to hear from their first designer Nad Chishtie.

We go deep into what it takes to succeed as a founding designer and all of the ways AI is shaping modern product teams.

Some highlights:

Nad’s tips for collaborating creatively with AI tools
How designers can be enablers instead of bottlenecks
How Nad balances Figma with new AI tools like Lovable
Why Lovable built and deleted a Figma-like layers panel
What it’s like at the fastest growing startup in European history
a lot more

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

🤝 WITH GRANOLA

As a designer I’m always talking to people (team meetings, design CRIT, user interviews, etc.).

So it’s super important to capture the ideas and feedback I’m receiving.

That’s why I never have a conversation about design without running Granola in the background. It’s like Apple notes but it transcribes my meeting for me 🤯

So when the meeting ends, Granola enhances the notes I’ve written and I can even ask questions or get tailored summaries from the call

It’s very quickly become a staple tool in my design practice

Every designer should be using this and if you click below you and your team can get 3 months free 👇

🎓 KEY TAKEAWAYS

3 highlights from my interview with Nad

1 — Be an enabler not a bottleneck

Too many designers operate in a waterfall mentality where things are either “designed” or “not designed”.

But when you’re growing at the speed of Lovable you can’t afford to position yourself as the keeper of all design decisions. So Nad is more than comfortable letting engineers carry things end-to-end when possible.

“My job is to enable higher quality decisions across the board rather than making all those decisions myself and then waterfalling them onto the team”

Nad Chishtie

This means Nad thinks of quality as debt rather than a bar to hit. When you’re the first designer you have to be ok shipping some features with “design debt” to be paid off later.

2 — Getting feedback uncomfortably fast

Nad stresses the importance of not falling in love with your ideas (a theme Sam from Granola echoed last week too).

Because they’re going to be wrong.

The times Lovable has “failed” have been when they tried to be too visionary. Now the focus is on reducing iteration cycles and getting feedback “uncomfortably fast”.

“How do we maximize our learning in the shortest scale possible? What that means is lots of rapid, scrappy experimentation and lots of being willing to be wrong”

Nad Chishtie

To accomplish this, Lovable puts a lot of weight on velocity of decision-making. Nad calls it having a high “clock speed” ⚡

“What stops you from making a 10-second version of that decision on the spot instead of waiting for a meeting next week?”

Nad Chishtie

3 — How to be more creative with AI

When I work with AI I’m often using adjectives that relate to interfaces (minimal, energetic, etc.).

But Nad’s advice is to break out of the UI design vocabulary.

“Say something like, make it more art deco, make it more Bauhaus, etc. Like, don't stick to the UI styles that you see on Twitter like glass morphic or whatever”

Nad Chishtie

He even talks about building color palettes by referencing Wes Anderson films 😅