Michael · Design Partner

I'm excited to announce my new venture: Port Studio Teams pay 4-5 figures every month to ship simple changes to their website. We're here to change that. We rebuild your site in clean code you own, and teach your team to ship it with AI. More below 👇

It's hard to charge more than your competitors when your product looks exactly like theirs. Design is one of the few things that can set you apart on day one, before the features do.

More from an experiment earlier this year

The best thing about designing with AI is that I can fix the small things myself. A misaligned icon, a missing hover state, a label in the wrong gray. Each one used to mean bothering a developer who had bigger things to work on.

A lot of support tickets are design tickets. 'Where do I find my invoices?' 'How do I undo this?' 'Did my payment go through?' Each one is a screen that didn't explain itself, and you're paying someone to answer it by hand, again and again.

Design tip: use fewer font sizes and weights. Less is more.

Agents are great at conventions and bad at exceptions. A table, a form, a settings page come out fine. The one screen in the product that should break the pattern is the one they flatten into another table.

AI has nothing to lose on your product. Its name isn't on the work, and it never hears from the users who got stuck. When you hire a designer, you're paying for someone who has to live with how it turns out.

Charts & details 📈

I don't have a design degree. In 6 years of client work, not one client has asked about it. They ask to see the work.

No founder wakes up wanting a nicer user interface. They wake up because trials aren't converting, or because a new customer's team can't figure out the product without a call, or because churn went up after the last release. Most of those are design problems. They just don't get called that.

Design tip: If you use a sliding indicator, keep the distance short. Slide within a section, fade across sections.

Getting good at designing with AI is mostly getting good at saying what's wrong. 'Make it cleaner' gets you nothing. 'The labels and the values are fighting, make the labels fg-secondary' gets you the screen.

You can't fix a confusing product with a polish sprint at the end. The confusion came from shipping fast without stepping back, and another week of fast fixes only adds to it. Quality has to be how the team works every day.

Agents, grouped by type. An old experiment.

Design with a user called Małgorzata Szczepańska-Wróblewska at least once. Most layouts are drawn around 'John Doe' and '$1,234'. Real data has names that wrap, five-digit prices and project titles someone pasted from an email. Better to find out in the mockup than in a support ticket.

Sundays are for side projects and walks

A or B?

If you start every project from the same, open-source component library, it will look like any other app out there. A small starter file you built yourself carries your own decisions instead, like the spacing you always end up with and the components you actually use. With agents it matters even more, because they build from whatever you hand them.