My Current Design Stack
My design tools have changed a lot this year.
So I thought I’d take you behind the scenes of creating the new Mostly Working visual language.
The first 90 seconds are in Figma. The other seven minutes are in a canvas playground I built to push my explorations further with AI. It has tools for giving feedback and capturing key decisions, which feed a ‘source of truth’ Jonny and I use for new assets.
The whole experience has got me reflecting on my own design process. The tools and methods have changed a lot, but the core mechanics haven’t actually moved much. It’s ultimately still diverge, then converge.
Diverge: get the widest range of options out. AI is great here for pushing an idea further than I might take it alone (or at least, much more quickly), and for surfacing directions I wouldn’t have thought of.
Converge: the opposite. I’ve found AI really useful for auditing what’s there for overlaps and inconsistencies, then reducing it all down to a single coherent direction, guided by a real-life hovering art director. In this case, me!
What’s felt most natural is how much it resembles a design crit. I give the same feedback I’d give another designer, just to Claude, which goes off and makes the changes.
That source of truth is a brand kit that regenerates itself when something changes. We originally went live with a light blue and navy palette, but after a week living with it the light blue felt too Facebook and the navy too Monzo. So I nudged the whole palette one dial over and everything updated dynamically to the lilac-esque vibe it now has.
Figma’s still useful early on, when things are open-ended and conceptual. But closer to production, code really is the material to work with.
And while I’m here, last call for seats at the Mostly Working Summit, Thursday 22 October at Monzo HQ. We’re finalising places and letting everyone know by the weekend. Sign up if you want to be in with a chance of joining: