One Designer + AI. Hundreds of Deliverables. — Vincent Wendy, AI Engineer

Alright. Hello everyone, hope you guys are having a good time at the conference. So, before we start, how many of you are actually designers? Like a product design. Hey, one hand. And another. Okay. And how many— I assume that the rest of you are engineers.

Is that correct? Yeah, pretty much. Okay. So, today's talk is a non-technical talk, but more of a real-world experience: how I created the design for AI Engineer, this conference, and our other past conferences as well, and how AI has helped me.

And so, the talk today is "One designer plus AI," which is me as the designer, and hundreds of deliverables. Alright, let's start. So, my name is Vincent Wendy. I am a senior creative designer at AI Engineer. And at AI Engineer, it's a very small team, so we only have around 12 people to 15 people at the moment, and everyone has been doing their own thing, and I think AI has been, like, has been a really helpful way to, like, helping everybody doing everything.

And at, if, for even at this scale, we have a problem, obviously,right? And the problem is the scale problem, or I would call the challenges. And how to overcome it, it's basically automation, and we get to that in the later part of this talk.

So,

when I prepared this talk, we only expected 6,000 attendees, and now it's 7,000. Well, good for us. And then we have 140 sponsors, more 140 plus sponsors, and then 300 plus speakers, 600 plus sessions, and one designer. And everybody needs every design,right?

Like, every single thing needs design. Sponsor needs assets, speaker needs graphics, you need signage so you don't get lost. And this is basically what we do, what I do. So, from stickers, do you like your swag, your stickers?

Well, I hope you do, because I create that design too, and to a landing page, speaker announcement, track mascot, all the stuff that you see, most of the stuff that you see here, from a signage to a digital signage, landing page, everything is a deliverable.

And

a thousand details means a thousand ways to fail,right? Because

missing sponsor logos is going to be a huge issue, and speakers that have a wrong schedule are also issues,right? And it seems impossible to handle that many kinds of deliverables, but, yeah, meet my design team. So, it's me and Devin, GPT, and Figma.

Andright now we are at the stage where tools isn't the, like, it's not a problem anymore, but having a real problem is our advantage. So, for example, when someone asks me, "What inspired you when designing an AI Engineer?"

I don't know the answer back then, but after I think about it, it's actually a problem that inspired me to, like, designing this AI Engineer. And we'll get to that in the later part of this talk. So, have you guys seen the talk by Simon Willison, like, in 2025?

Yeah.

Yeah. And it's pretty interesting,right? He asked to, he asked every LLM to create a vector file, which is basically a pelican riding a bicycle. And it is basically to test, and I tested again, and it's still doing this for the basic model.

And it's not usable for me as a designer. But as a designer, we have to think outside the box. And we could simply ask ChatGPT, "Create a still image, like a PNG, for a pelican riding a bicycle," and then I can factorize it on Figma.

And we can ship that now. So, we have to think outside the box here, regardless of the capabilities of the LLM. And so, how to solve this scale problem,right?

Basically, five things. So, foundation first, reusable designs, automated workflows, validate output, and also remove frictions. The foundation is definitely the core part that we need to set upright. Like, the design system, typography, colors, components, like, other stuff. And once this is set up, like, for example, when we create the website, it's all set up within this thing.

And, yeah, this is just an example. Like, we have the colors, primary, and then also the accent colors, the typography, and also the tagline, all the other stuff. And also, have you guys, are you guys familiar with the atomic designs?

So, yeah, my previous background is I'm a product designer, so I'm pretty familiar with the thing where we need to create a user-centric design and also, like, atomic designs,right? Where we create the smallest part possible and then combining it into, like, basically LEGO pieces, and then into deliverables.

And this is pretty useful in my job deskright now. So, once we set up all of those foundations, we basically need to create, for example, we use Devin a lot. At the office, we, everybody uses Devin. Everybody, like, abusing Devin, for example.

Yeah. And

so, in this case, I just need, "Hey, use this desktop typography and this mobile typography," because we know

cloud or, like, any other LLMs love to, like, throw in some random font size,right? And if we don't define it, it just delivering us slope, like the previous slope. And, yeah, typography, color, and stuff. And, and then it comes to reusable design.

So, once we set up itright, like, the website has the branding to it, all the other teams on the AI Engineer, like, for example, the marketing teams can create everything, basically. Like, they can create an email design based on that.

They can create a flyer, a document, just based on the website, because it's already defined, like, it's defined early. And, yeah, once you get the design, you can just rinse and repeat. For example, the mascot, it all has the pretty much the same design, and it's rinse and repeat.

And if you're already defining those things, you can basically, like, create one design that works for all. And this is the part that I'm most interested to talk about, which is the automated workflows. Before, for example, if you take a look outside the room, there's a schedule,right?

The schedule for each and everyone. So, we used to do it manually on Figma, but now we use Devin for it. And

let me show you.

Hey. So,right now we just pull the latest data. I just ask Devin, like, "Hey, I want this room at these days," and then we can just export it, download it to PNG, and the data is accurate, and then we can just ship it to the flash drive and then put it on the screen.

And it was, like, impossible before, because the friction is just too much between the designers and the developers. We cannot make things like pixel perfect, because once we tell the designer, "Hey, this is the design," and then, sorry, the engineers that created the design, for example, "Hey, I need this to be delivered," and then they don't create it pixel perfect, it's a lot of feedback loop,right?

But with Devin, we just say, "Hey, can you make this more accurate? We can just connect it to MCP, and then if it doesn't work, we can just always, like, give a spec sheet or something that can be defined, like, what's the spacing, what's the font size, etc."

And

this is what we do for the speaker announcement. So, we have 300 plus speakers, and it's impossible for me to, like, handle one by one,right? So, we create this thing, which is called. Which you can also access to speaker announcement, and you can also try it yourself, like this one, for example.

You can select itright here, and then you can also change your name. Well, that, yeah. For example, this, you can change the name to whatever you want. And we also have the landscape mode, which can be also loaded.

If the speaker also has the headshot and all the details, it will automatically export. And we also have the trading cards, which is surprisingly pretty popular. And we have a different theme, and this is all pixel perfect. Right, for example, this one.

This is inspired by TBPN, so,

yeah. And how do I deliver this in pixel perfect? Let's jump into it. So, the process here is, before, when I started my career as a product designer, it used to be just, "Okay, we need to research, we need to build product," like, design thinking in general,right?

And then feedback loop and stuff like that. Butright now, it's, it's just outdated for me. Like, in my case, we just go to Slack, Figma, and then send it back to Slack, because Devin, our Devin, lives in Slack, and then ship all the things that he needs.

Like, for example, if we can connect the MCP or also the spec document, which is, for example, the spec sheet like this, which is a plugin in Figma, if you're interested. It's free, and it's basically gives an annotation to the PDF.

And, yeah, all designers don't name their layers, so, yeah, this is just, like, some random frame three, frame four. But the LLM will get it. And it's basically defining all this spacing, all this font size, and then all the colors and stuff.

It's definitely going to help you develop a pixel perfect product. And

we also have just recently, like, today, have a photos, which we have to create the thumbnail for each speaker,right? And then we ask Devin, like, "Hey, who is this person?" And, yeah, it kind of did. Like, I make a Tinder kind of, you know, detection if this is the same person or not, and I think it's pretty accurate.

It's Jason Liu, yes. And then we can use this to, like, for context, like, before, when we create the thumbnail, we have to search all the codes that photographers have and search it one by one, and maybe by time, if possible.

But now we can just, like, "Oh, this is Jason Liu, download that photo," and then we can paste it into the thumbnail,right? And it's pretty amazing. I mean, the world that we live inright now is actually, like, the state for me as a designer is already at the peak, because what else can you ask for,right?

I mean, we already have things to automate, we already have things to create the design fast. Basically, all you need is a problem. Because once you have a problem that worth solving, you can basically solve anything. And back to my talk.

I got sidetrackedright there. Yeah. And then, yeah, and this is also the amazing thing that we test. So, as you know, we have, like, hundreds of sponsors,right? Like, 140 plus. And as you can see on the, at the lobby, we have the banner with all the sponsors.

And I basically tell Devin, like, "Hi, could you compare, could you check if there are any missing logos in this graphic?" And the accuracy is 100% based on the test that I do. So, which is pretty wild. And we use the same thing for the

t-shirt that you got for your Slack. And, yeah, surprisingly, Devin knows how to, like, visualize things,right? Like, how to detect things visually. And that is very surprising, because as a human, we can, like, give errors. "Oh, turns out there's one sponsor that is missing."

But with this kind of thing, we can, like, double-check. So, human plus AI, combine it, well, you got your own QA team. And then remove friction. So, this is just the way of thinking. So, as a designer, we have to think as a user, not as a designer,right?

Because every user has its needs. You can walk through the, for example, the map plan here. So, basically, I'm imagining myself as an attendee to go to the registration, go to the, see the wayfinding and the QR code, and then all the stuff.

Basically, everything needs to be connected so you guys don't get lost and know how to find your rooms and other stuff. And the real job is handling exceptions. So, for example, oh, I have, yeah. For example,

there is a schedule update,right? And when we create this thing, it doesn't have an edit button. And then one morning, it just, "Hey, this schedule needs to be updated," and we don't have those edit buttons. I could just ask Devin, "Hey, can you add me an edit button?"

And then it did. So, we can change everything now and then ship it to PNG and replug it to the screen, which is pretty convenient,right? And those exceptions,right, it's not possible before when we have to do it manually and stuff.

But now it's just got easier. And

so, the takeaway here is that to solve the scale problem, you have to actually think small. Think all the smallest thing possible, think everything that can go wrong and will go wrong, and then try to solve it before.

And also, like, yeah,right now, basically, you can automate everything. And

at this moment, having a problem is actually going to benefit you, because that's going to help you ship a better product, going to ship things that are good. And, yeah, I think that's all that I can share. Hope my talk has some benefits to you.

And, yeah, that's all. Thanks, guys.