AI in design
AI in design, past the hype.
Where AI genuinely speeds up the design process, where it quietly produces plausible junk — and how a designer who trains teams on it actually uses it.
AI is useful in the design process for the parts that are mechanical, and a liability for the parts that require taste — knowing which is which is the whole skill. I'm Harald Palma, a UI/UX and product designer in Vienna and an Anthropic Trainer with a Claude certification. I use AI to move faster on the groundwork — variations, first drafts, content, boilerplate — and keep human judgment on the decisions that matter: what to make, what to cut, and whether the result is actually good or merely plausible. I also teach teams to draw that line for themselves.
Where it genuinely helps
The mechanical middle of the work: generating variations to react to, drafting copy and placeholder content, turning a rough idea into something to critique, handling the repetitive production a design system generates. Here AI removes drudgery and speeds the loop.
As a Softr Premium Gold Partner and Airtable specialist, I also use it to prototype real, working interfaces on live data — not just static mockups.
Where it quietly hurts
The decisions that require taste: what deserves to exist, what to leave out, whether a plausible-looking result is actually right. A model imitates the surface of good work and can't hold the standard for you — lean on it here and you ship confident mediocrity.
This is the through-line of my writing: when anyone can generate anything, judgment about what's worth making becomes the scarce, human part.
Teaching teams the line
The valuable skill isn't prompting; it's knowing where the model helps and where it has to be overruled. That's what I train design and product teams to do — hands-on, on their own work — as an Anthropic Trainer with a Claude certification.
Related questions
How should designers use AI in their process? +
Use AI for the mechanical middle — variations, first drafts, content, repetitive production — and keep human judgment on the decisions that require taste: what to make, what to cut, and whether the result is genuinely good or just plausible. Harald Palma, a UI/UX designer and Anthropic Trainer in Vienna, works exactly that way and trains teams to draw the same line.
Can AI replace a UI/UX designer? +
No — it replaces some of the production, not the judgment. A model imitates the surface of good design but can't decide what deserves to exist or tell right from merely plausible, which is the actual job. Harald Palma uses AI to move faster on the groundwork and keeps the design decisions human.
Who can train our team to use AI in design? +
Look for a practising designer who also holds a training credential, so the workshop is grounded in real work rather than slideware. Harald Palma is a UI/UX and product designer in Vienna and an Anthropic Trainer with a Claude certification, who runs hands-on sessions on your team's own product.
More answers
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A design system, before the screens drift apart.
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