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How I AIA designer’s guide to AI: Why this designer switched to Cursor | Joel Unger
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Designer uses Cursor and Midjourney to prototype, animate, explore
- Design director Joel Unger (Atlassian/Trello) shares how AI shifted his workflow from static specs toward interactive prototypes and rapid asset iteration.
- He demonstrates using Cursor to turn Figma concepts into working UI prototypes (e.g., resizable, draggable multi-panel layouts) that enable clearer engineering conversations.
- He also shows a time-sensitive brand update: recreating an animated logo by converting an old animated GIF into an animated SVG with AI-assisted code.
- Finally, he uses Midjourney as an exploratory “mood board” generator to help a team converge on a consistent illustration style for Trello’s mascot, reinforcing that AI accelerates thinking and iteration rather than replacing design judgment.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasAI makes interaction design testable earlier than static mockups.
Unger found Figma insufficient for exploring real drag/resize behaviors; Cursor-enabled prototypes let him stress-test edge cases (min widths, breakpoints, collapsed states) quickly and concretely.
Designers can use code prototypes as “interactive specs,” not production code.
He emphasizes engineers still need enterprise-quality code (tests, scalability), but prototypes accelerate shared understanding and unblock decisions about behavior and constraints.
The biggest time savings is reclaiming time for problem-solving.
Unger frames Figma as “maybe 10% of the job,” with most value in thinking; AI speeds the “get ideas out of your head” phase so designers can focus on gnarlier problems sooner.
AI-assisted asset work can rescue last-minute deadlines.
When a logo swap revealed an old animated GIF, he used Cursor plus an SVG source to recreate the motion as an animated SVG, avoiding a manual After Effects rebuild.
Midjourney is strongest as exploration input, not final brand output.
For Trello’s mascot Taco, he used image prompting to generate variations that serve as a mood board, helping the team decide on concrete style-guide attributes (fur, brows, paws) before final illustration.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesFigma is maybe ten percent of the job, and a lot of the rest of it is just thinking about the problems.
— Joel Unger
With AI, you can get right into the gnarly parts of the problems right away.
— Joel Unger
I knew that they couldn't actually use this code... [but] it got the conversation started.
— Joel Unger
All I had to do was describe it, say, 'Dance the little animation up and down.'
— Joel Unger
It’s more like a mood board... take it the next step, actually get out your tablet pen and draw it for real.
— Joel Unger
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
