How to use Cursor for interactive prototypes, sound design, and data visualization
Elizabeth Lin (guest), Claire Vo (host)
In this episode of How I AI, featuring Elizabeth Lin and Claire Vo, How to use Cursor for interactive prototypes, sound design, and data visualization explores designers use Cursor to prototype aesthetics, sound, and data visuals Elizabeth Lin shows how designers—not just engineers—can use Cursor as a creative partner to explore web aesthetics, rapidly generate styled pages, and iterate by re-prompting or refining specific issues one at a time.
Designers use Cursor to prototype aesthetics, sound, and data visuals
Elizabeth Lin shows how designers—not just engineers—can use Cursor as a creative partner to explore web aesthetics, rapidly generate styled pages, and iterate by re-prompting or refining specific issues one at a time.
She demonstrates a workflow for asking Cursor to suggest design movements, applying a chosen style (e.g., brutalist + Y2K), and using checkpoints to avoid getting stuck in unhelpful generations while saving screenshots of good outcomes.
Lin also builds a functional, sound-enabled digital piano prototype (hard to do in Figma), using simple “Cursor Rules” to scaffold new prototypes quickly and then interrogating the code/libraries just enough to expand possibilities.
Finally, she refactors an “ugly” finance dashboard into a cleaner data visualization by removing drop shadows, referencing well-designed products and Tufte, and using targeted prompts—then points to real-data prototyping (e.g., Notion-backed apps) as a major advantage of code-based prototyping.
Key Takeaways
Start by asking the model what styles it can implement.
Instead of arriving with a fixed aesthetic, Lin prompts Cursor to list design movements and describe their traits, which gives designers usable language (e. ...
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Treat generations as high-level drafts, then design-critique and iterate.
Lin prefers starting broad (“redesign in brutalist + Y2K”) and then applying a designer’s judgment to keep surprising wins (like hover effects or typing animations) while trimming excess.
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Use Restore Checkpoint aggressively to avoid bad rabbit holes.
When results drift, she rolls back and tries again; because identical prompts can yield different outcomes, restarting is often faster than incremental patching from a flawed base.
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Keep prompts short and tackle issues one or two at a time.
She finds “laundry list” prompts lead the model to forget items; targeted steps (remove drop shadows → fix background fill → simplify palette) produce more reliable progress.
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Improve “taste” by feeding strong references the model already knows.
Lin shortcuts explanation by referencing products (Robinhood/Cash App/Stripe), practitioners (Edward Tufte), or aspirational standards (“a top designer at Apple would approve”), which nudges layout, grids, and restraint.
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Codified habits (docs + rules) make creative work repeatable.
She keeps a prompt doc of what worked and proposes asking Cursor to generate reusable “notes/rules” that describe successful aesthetics, helping recreate a vibe later despite non-determinism.
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Cursor unlocks prototypes that traditional design tools can’t easily do.
Interactive sound prototypes (a playable piano with waveform changes and autoplay) and data-rich experiences (Notion-backed “personal Goodreads”) are far easier when the prototype is real code, not only Figma interactions.
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Notable Quotes
“Working with Cursor has really taught me that tools like Cursor can actually be extremely creative.”
— Elizabeth Lin
“What design aesthetics and movements are you comfortable implementing? List the styles and describe them to me.”
— Elizabeth Lin
“I always restore the checkpoint when I don't like something.”
— Elizabeth Lin
“If I give it, like, a laundry list of items, it'll, like, forget to do the last three.”
— Elizabeth Lin
“The biggest key is to broaden your sources of inspiration... like a K-pop music video... and see what it takes from it.”
— Elizabeth Lin
Questions Answered in This Episode
When you ask Cursor to list design movements, which ones consistently produce the most “usable” outputs for real products (vs. fun experiments)?
Elizabeth Lin shows how designers—not just engineers—can use Cursor as a creative partner to explore web aesthetics, rapidly generate styled pages, and iterate by re-prompting or refining specific issues one at a time.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
In the brutalist + Y2K demo, what specific follow-up prompts would you use to keep the glow/energy but remove the “extra” hover effects?
She demonstrates a workflow for asking Cursor to suggest design movements, applying a chosen style (e. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Can you share a concrete example of a “note/rule” Cursor generated that helped you reproduce a successful aesthetic later?
Lin also builds a functional, sound-enabled digital piano prototype (hard to do in Figma), using simple “Cursor Rules” to scaffold new prototypes quickly and then interrogating the code/libraries just enough to expand possibilities.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Your Cursor Rule copies a prototype folder and adds it to the homepage—what does that folder contain (framework, bundler, audio library), and what would you recommend for a designer-friendly starter repo?
Finally, she refactors an “ugly” finance dashboard into a cleaner data visualization by removing drop shadows, referencing well-designed products and Tufte, and using targeted prompts—then points to real-data prototyping (e. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
For the piano: what library/approach is Cursor using to generate sound, and what parameters most affect “pleasant” vs. grating results?
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Transcript Preview
Working with Cursor has really taught me that tools like Cursor can actually be extremely creative.
How do you teach an LLM to have good taste?
The biggest key is to broaden your sources of inspiration and help them understand what you're inspired by. I try to send, like, really random things, like the K-pop music video or, like, different pieces of art that it might not normally be inspired by, and kind of see what it takes from it, and that's been really helpful to generate things that are a little bit more different. Right now, there's nothing more fun than coming back to this page and seeing what it generated. I never know what's gonna happen. I've tried similar prompts before, and sometimes it does something completely different, and so it's so fun to use the same prompt over and over again to see what I get every time.
Do you keep these commonly used prompts in a document? Do you just know them? How are you keeping track of all these things that work and don't work?
If something visually works really well, I've thought about asking Cursor to generate a note or a rule that helps me describe it to it in the future, so it can reference that note in the future for a future project. [upbeat music]
Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we're talking to a Cursor power user, Elizabeth Lin, but she doesn't use it as a software engineer. Nope, she's a designer. She shows us how you can prompt Cursor to explore different aesthetics for your design, integrate interactivity and sound into your prototypes, and take a really ugly dashboard and make it look great. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Lovable. If you've ever had an idea for an app but didn't know where to start, Lovable is for you. Lovable lets you build working apps and websites by simply chatting with AI. Then you can customize it, add automations, and deploy it to a live domain. It's perfect for marketers spinning up tools, product managers prototyping new ideas, or founders launching their next business. Unlike no-code tools, Lovable isn't about static pages. It builds full apps with real functionality, and it's fast. What used to take weeks, months, or even years, you can now do over the weekend. So if you've been sitting on an idea, now's the time to bring it to life. Get started for free at lovable.dev. That's lovable.dev. Elizabeth, thanks for joining How I AI.
Yeah, I'm excited to be here.
One of the things I love about your work is you are teaching designers to use Cursor, not to code... Like, fine, code's a by-product, but really to design better, and I think that's such an awesome angle. So I would love you to just walk us through how you use Cursor and some of the tips and tricks that you're sharing with designers you know.
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