How to thrive as a designer in the age of AI
A conversation with Charlota Blunarova on the ever-evolving future of design
The role of the designer is undergoing a profound transformation. As AI redefines creative processes, maintaining the essence of quality and authenticity poses both a challenge and an opportunity.
We asked none other than Charlota Kolar Blunarova, independent brand designer, co-founder of WE3.co, and design partner at IDEO CoLab Ventures, for her thoughts on how technology is evolving design and what the future looks like in the age of AI.
Conversation Outline
How AI is transforming the design process.
The importance of taste in branding.
Shifting roles of designers with advancing technology.
You recently tweeted, “In a world with scarce attention and many choices, taste sets a business apart. Knowing what to make is as important as the ability to make it.”
I’m curious, what inspired you to post this and how has this impacted your work?
It’s only going to become easier to produce images, video, music, software...
AI has only increased the content volume, making it even harder to stand out. Generating visuals is easy, but the real challenge is maintaining brand consistency and ensuring every piece aligns with the core message.
This is where taste comes in—it's about connecting deeply with your target audience. Ultimately, taste is about communicating shared interests and values. That's why working closely with those who understand the audience is so important. It helps ensure that the brand remains authentic and compelling in a crowded market.
Taste is not a domain of creatives, though. People in marketing, sales or community managers cultivate a sense of what’s tasteful for their audience too. A creative director or strong-opinionated founder can help push the boundaries, but it’s in a company’s interest to have a shared understanding of what feels “on-brand”.
Software is becoming part of the taste conversation because it’s easier to create and we spend more time using it, raising our standards for tools that align with our identity. From choosing Mac or Windows, we now select between Linear or Jira, Figma or Sketch, and email apps like Hey, Superhuman, Gmail, and more.
For example, my mom, an accountant, was invited to a pompous launch of new accounting software. It has a pink, cute, and feminine UI, probably built on the insight that this is a female-dominated profession. But she and her colleagues hated it, feeling it downplayed their rational, numbers-driven job. This shows how crucial it is for software to align with user identity and job nature.
However, I admit the current conversation in the tech industry about taste being a differentiator makes me feel uneasy. I’m a designer; but do I even have a taste?? Algorithms can shape what we see and like. Does Pinterest show me specific images because it recognizes my taste? Or have I been fed with this style of fashion/graphics/furniture by an algorithm for so long that I started liking it? It's tricky to pin down true preferences and believe in your taste profile.
One of the things I really admire about you is how you dive into a new technology head first. You recently blogged about how you use AI in your branding work. What do you wish more designers knew about AI?
I hope designers see AI not just as a tool for replacing workflows but as a way to expand their work. Instead of asking how to do things faster, think about what new possibilities AI opens up for you. For me, generative AI has been a game-changer in art direction, especially for concepting and moodboarding.
AI is fantastic for design generalists, though I get it can be daunting for those specializing in tasks that are at risk of being automated.
For me, it's crucial to embrace new technologies. I aim to build my skillset in a way that's hard for people to describe. It might not look great on LinkedIn; but if my job can be summarized in a prompt, there’s a risk of being replaceable. My goal is to go broad on design generalist skillset and niche down on topics I'm passionate about (web3, AI tools, VC, architecture, fashion, femtech).
How do you think a designer’s role evolves as AI becomes easier to use?
AI workflows make me faster by taking over tedious tasks like upscaling images, retouching, creating placeholder text, etc. With less time spent on pixel-pushing, I can focus more on the strategic "why" behind the design. This deeper dive into strategy allows for a more thoughtful approach to the brand narrative and messaging.
Refinement is still crucial, especially with AI-generated assets. While anyone can run a prompt, it takes a skilled eye to curate the results and decide what’s worth publishing. The role of creative director is now more important.
In your post you mention that you often use AI-generated images because it’s more a cost-effective way of creating a library of differentiated assets that they otherwise couldn’t produce.
That feels like a huge unlock for startups on low budgets! Can you share some examples of AI-generated image styles you’ve created for clients and the process you used to create them?
Absolutely! For Espresso, a crypto infrastructure company, we created a retro-futuristic visual world. The technology of a sequencer is complex and intangible, and I wanted to avoid the tech cliche of visualizing it as a 3D diagram of rectangles stacked on top of each other. Inspired by the brand name, we visualized the sequencing process as robust, espresso machine-inspired complex machines facilitating transactions.
Using Midjourney, I started with references of retro-futurism in movies and photos of retro espresso machines. I used the /describe function to generate key words and crafted prompts based on those. It involved a lot of back-and-forth and serendipitous discoveries. I played with adding words like symmetrical, op-art and stuck to BW treatment to make sure there are few consistent constraints across the images that result in an ownable visual language. Generative AI can be tricky when you have a specific image in mind, so it’s better to have a general visual world concept you want to achieve and start from there. Mine was to make abstract technology concepts tangible. For example, visualize node validators as people in scifi uniforms in interiors inspired by Oscar Niemayer’s architecture. It’s kinda weird but stands out.
After generating the images, I upscaled them in Topaz AI and retouched and color corrected them in Photoshop. I also created prompt templates for the Espresso team to expand their image library without me. But this was a year ago—there are many new tools and workflows now!
Another example - for an AI health startup called Onno, I did a quick brand sprint. They wanted illustrations as part of their visual language, so I quickly generated several styles and added them to mockups to help them decide on a direction. The speed and flexibility of AI tools were incredibly useful in giving them a clear visual direction quickly. They are now looking to hire an illustrator to create custom art for their app.
Of all my friends who are designers, I feel like you touch so many interesting things: You’re an independent designer, founder of a design collective, and partner at IDEO CoLab Ventures. It feels like this kind of career wasn’t possible 5 - 10 years ago.
Tell me more about how you think about your career portfolio. What motivates you? How do you think about what projects to take on? What does a “day in the life look like” navigating these different endeavors?
At this stage in my life, if something doesn't 1. Make me money, 2. Make me better, or 3. Make me happy, I don't make time for it. I cycle between diverging and converging phases. Diverging means exploring, learning, and testing different jobs and opportunities. Now, I'm in a converging phase, saying no a lot and trying to focus.
After leaving IDEO, where I worked as a design lead, I intentionally built a patchwork career, combining various roles and dividing my time among them. Working as a brand designer is within my comfort zone—I’ve honed these skills over the years and feel confident delivering great results. However, my role at IDEO CoLab Ventures stretches me. My role is to support our portfolio companies with brand design and storytelling, but also being active in collecting signals supporting our investment thesis. Developing an investor mindset, learning how to do a proper due diligence, and forming a thesis are all new to me, but I have experienced colleagues to observe and learn from.
At WE3, I’ve spent three years learning how to build a distributed collective of creatives and tackle Web3 and crypto projects together. A good day looks like three hours of focused designing in the morning, then taking a call with a founder interested in design services, scoping an incubation project, sending a few emails, read materials on a tech topic I need to understand, and joining our weekly call where we talk about potential investments. I’m comfortable going from very tactical tasks (like designing a website footer) to strategic ones (like creating brand architecture for a company with multiple crypto products).
I strongly believe that people can prototype their careers to find the most fitting route for themselves. In fact, designers know all about the research and prototyping tools we use in our work - we can use them to design our careers too! For example, interviewing people in roles you think about working in, creating career prototypes, futuring…
What advice would you have for other creatives who are interested in taking equity on projects?
When equity is in play, does it change who you work with? Does it affect your client-consultant dynamic? How do you think about structuring these deals?
For an individual, equity is a nice bonus and worth asking about! But mentally assign it a zero value. Make sure you also get paid something upfront to minimize risk.
We created WE3 because building a meaningful equity portfolio for one person is tough. Our design collective brings together designers interested in new tech and Web3 to work on projects for cash and equity, sharing the potential upside together. This takes time and we are yet to see how successful we were; some companies we’ve helped have shut down, while others are still building.
The relationship changes dramatically. You’re no longer a vendor; you’re a partner. This shift makes me more proactive and direct with founders. We create the scope together, focusing on what truly moves the needle. Equity deals also simplify engagements. You don’t waste time debating if an extra web page design is in scope or not; the focus is on what will have the most impact, and then you do it. So that means being flexible because with startups, the scope of what is needed evolves quickly. It’s hard to plan for, say, next 4 months of work.
Tell me more about your role at IDEO CoLab Ventures. How did you end up there? What’s your thesis? What kind of companies are you looking to meet?
IDEO CoLab Ventures is a hands-on investor and a great place for creative technologists, taking in the legacy of innovation and creativity happening at IDEO in the last decades. The fund invested in companies like Optimism, Goldfinch, NEAR, XMTP, Lens, Zora, many others… Our focus is on the future of the internet. We support founders and ventures that reshape commerce, coordination, and culture, making up the next internet economy. Currently, every part of the tech stack is being rebuilt—from infrastructure to intelligence to interfaces. We focus on emerging technologies like Web3 and AI, where we have deep expertise and a strong network.
We also invest in the form of Creative Capital. That means not being a let-me-know-how-i-can-be-helpful type of VC, but actually providing hands-on design work from strategy, product design, brand development, prototyping… to help founders get closer to product-market fit. Our goal is to support early stage ventures that align with our vision of the future and have the potential to make a significant impact. We work very well with technical teams who realize the power of design, storytelling and user experience, but don’t have that expertise in the team yet.
How do you think your background in design helps you approach investing differently than most who come from business?
Do you see an opportunity for more designers to become investors? If it’s not on their radar, why should they consider it as a potential path?
Designers have a unique advantage as investors, especially with novel technology like Web3 or AI. There’s a lot of uncertainty about how people will interact with these technologies. We have the technology—but now what? Designers understand human behavior and preferences, and can envision and prototype scenarios. For example, we might know there will be an AI wearable, but what should its form factor be? What will the user interaction look like? When and how will people use it? These are all design questions.
I like to think of venture capital as holding a hose and deciding which part of the garden of opportunities to water. Designers and creatives excel at visualizing preferred futures, and having that hose means they can not only envision the future but also make it happen. It helps shift the mindset from "I would like to work on this kind of project" to "I want to see this change in the world." Designers earned their seat at the table; now I hope they get to write checks too.
I find your work in web3 to be incredibly refreshing. In particular, your work on Lens & Espresso really seemed to break through.
What are some things you wished more crypto founders understood about brand & design?
Thank you! I worked on Lens early on with founder Stani Kulechov and his team, covering everything from naming to logo and brand identity. The big learning for Lens was structuring it as a decentralized, headless brand from day one. This means not policing the brand identity but equipping people with a toolkit of symbols and visual codes they can play with and meme. This approach resulted in a lot of fan art, memes, and projects, turning users and fans into brand ambassadors. Someone even got the logo tattooed!
Sticking to a few key symbols, like the flowerhead logo and green color, helped build valuable brand equity. In this case, brand toolkits released to the public are more effective than strict brand guidelines. The Lens in-house marketing team is doing a great job with organizing events and bringing fresh swag items to conferences, which fuels the brand.
I wish more crypto founders understood that branding helps articulate your value proposition and test it early on. Especially in crypto, where users are rightfully suspicious of everything, investing in looking credible and trustworthy from day one can help you reach your audience effectively.
About Charlota
Charlota Kolar Blunarova is a brand designer and co-founder of WE3.co, a distributed design collective. She invests creative capital in early-stage tech startups in her role as a design partner at IDEO CoLab Ventures. Previously, she was a design lead at IDEO, working clients like CHANEL, H&M, Ford, and Moncler. Charlota loves the thrill of working with founders to take their brand and product from a napkin sketch to launch; especially in the topics of web3, AI tools, FemTech, venture capital, and the future of work. Off-duty, Charlota indulges in experimenting with generative AI, arranging flower bouquets, and assembling complex LEGO sets with her husband.