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I remember a time when designing felt like speaking a secret language, a series of precise clicks and drags that, while powerful, felt more technical than fluid. Over the past three decades the evolution of design interfaces has been a journey from pixels to objects to conceptseach step abstracting away technical complexity and bringing us closer to pure creative intent. For years, the drag-and-drop interface has reigned supreme, democratizing design in ways we could only dream of before. But we’re now at a fascinating inflection point where the very nature of designing is evolving and giving way to something even more profound. Consider how a marketing manager can now type, “Create an Instagram story that captures the energy of our summer product launch,” and watch as AI generates multiple design directions in secondsthen continue the conversation to refine colors, adjust messaging, or explore different moods, all while collaborating with teammates who can contribute feedback in real-time. AI isnt just saving time on edits, it’s ushering in a paradigm where intent becomes the primary input, and natural language is the key that unlocks your first draft. This shift liberates us from the minutiae of technical execution, allowing us to focus on the truly visionary and strategic aspects of our work. This is what the researchers at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business call “generative synesthesia.” The harmonious blending of human exploration and AI exploitation to discover new creative workflows represents a fundamental shift in how we approach creativity. Analyzing datasets of over 4 million artworks, these researchers showed that text-to-image AI significantly enhances human creative productivity by 25% and increases the value of creative work by 50%. Beyond Text Boxes and Chat Interfaces To the Human as Creative Director While conversational interfaces are powerful starting points, the future of creative collaboration with AI goes far beyond text prompts. When you’re working with design, art, or music, it’s quite hard to think of the words to describe what you want to see, hear, or feelparticularly if you’re not skilled in those fields. Thinking of words for something you can’t even describe? That’s frustrating. We’re already seeing this evolution in action. In design products today, you can click on individual elements within an image and AI automatically recognizes what you’ve selectedwhether it’s a background, a person, or a specific objectand offers contextual editing options without requiring any text description. This automatic element recognition is just the beginning of more intuitive design interactions. That’s why I believe we’re moving toward hybrid experiences that blend conversation with direct manipulation. In practice, this might look like pointing at a section of your design and saying aloud, “Make this area feel more energetic,” while AI understands both the visual context of what you’re indicating and the emotional direction you want. You might start with natural language to establish direction, then use visual references to refine style, then return to conversation for iterations. The interface adapts to how creativity actually worksfluid, non-linear, and iterative. Consider a workflow where you upload a reference image, circle the part you like with your finger or cursor, and simply say “Apply this mood to my brand colors.” AI instantly understands the visual element you’re referencing and translates it into actionable design changes. These augmented tools let people work the way they think, not the way software traditionally demands. With these improvements to the way we interact with software, more people can now become creative directors while AI handles technical implementation. When AI can generate a dozen design variations in seconds, humans can focus on the higher-order creative decisions: Which direction best serves the vision? How does this connect emotionally with the audience? What story are we trying to tell? This shift mirrors how other creative industries have evolved. Film directors don’t operate cameras, they focus on vision, storytelling, and creative direction while specialized teams handle technical execution. AI is becoming that specialized technical team for visual creation and opening up a whole new world of possibilities for the 99% of the world who havent been able to access it before. The result is a new kind of creative leverage. A single person with a compelling vision can now execute ideas that previously required entire teams. But more importantly, the barrier between having an idea and seeing it realized becomes almost transparent. AI as Augmented Creativity The most important paradigm shift for designers and anyone embracing visual communication will be the shift from design tools to design intelligence. Instead of simply assisting with a starting point or end refinement, teams will be able to leverage AI as an intelligent thought partner thats versed in what truly works. Imagine how a tool thats trained on a vast database of brand assets will shape future design workflows. When coming up with a new campaign you can accelerate the foundational work of gathering existing brand assets, successful competitor strategies, and audience response data and verify your visual directions against that. Or rather than spending hours debating color palettes, AI will be able to instantly generate variations based on proven effectiveness for similar brands and audiences, using insights like “layouts with this visual hierarchy achieve higher engagement in B2B contexts” or “this color combination consistently builds trust with healthcare audiences.” This intelligence will extend to scaling tactical design decisions. Instead of designers manually crafting numerous layout variations, they can use their tool of choice to generate multiple compositions based on successful patterns from their previous work or industry peers. When selecting typography, ather than scrolling through countless font options, AI will recommend specific typefaces that have performed well for similar messaging and audiences, explaining why certain letterforms communicate trustworthiness while others convey innovation. The Collaborative Promise of Design Intelligence There’s a desire to view creativity in black and white terms: either it’s AI-generated or human-made. But work exists on a spectrum, with varying degrees of AI influence, from completely human-generated content to fully automated production. Those tight collaborative loops will ultimately shape how we work in an AI-powered world. The skills we need will evolve as well. A skill that a select few of us deployed yesterday now becomes crucial today: editing. As AI generates vast amounts of content, the human editor’s role is to fine-tune outputs, ensuring messaging is on-brand, culturally sensitive, and emotionally engaging. The editor’s experience and understanding of the audience plays a crucial role in transforming AI-generated content into something that truly resonates. As AI continues to evolve, I see a future where every person has unprecedented creative agency and where having an idea and bringing it to life becomes part of the same fluid, joyful process. This future is where the tools we use are as intuitive as thought itself.
Category:
E-Commerce
Good news for Donald Judd fans: The renovation of his Marfa, Texas, architecture office is now complete. The two-story brick building built in 1907 looks almost exactly as Judd left it when he died in 1994, but now it features environmentally conscious building methods, some contemporary and some traditional, including energy-efficient windows, rooftop solar, and a passive cooling technique called night flushing. Designed by the Houston-based architect Troy Schaum of Schaum Architects and the Donald Judd Foundation, the project illustrates how historic preservation and honoring an artists legacy intersect with the realities of climate change. This is a locally responsive based system of conservation, Schaum says. [Photo: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation] A Desert Town Dedicated to Art and Architecture After moving to Marfa in the 1970s, Judd purchased 22 buildings in the small Chihuahua desert town and transformed them into spaces to live, work, and display art. Among them are a former military complex turned residence and galleries for his large-scale pieces, an adobe house for his paintings and collection of antique Swedish and Shaker furniture, and an old Safeway for his art studio. Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas. 1993. [Photo: Laura Wilson/courtesy Judd Foundation] As the towns economy declined and more spaces went up for sale, he purchased them in order to realize his vision of a city where art was everywhere and accessible to anyone. This is what led him to the 5,000-square-foot, brick building he renovated into his architecture office in 1990. As with most of his architectural work in Marfa, Judd exercised a light touch with his renovations. He sandblasted paint from the exterior, removed anything inside that wasnt original to the building, then brought in tables and desks he designed. The ground floor storefront became a place for him to display architectural drawings and models and receive clients (his architecture studio was in a former bank building across the street); the second floor held apartments. [Photo: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation] This was an office with no telephone, no fax, no computerjust a place to look at things on tables, says Flavin Judd, Judds son and the artistic director of the Judd Foundation. While most of Judds work in Marfa was about the town itself, he used this space for European projects he had hoped to build, but never realized like a train station in Basel, Switzerland. Its a very simple space and it was right next door to the office where his assistants were, Flavin says. The interior wall is brick and you don’t really hang art on a brick wall, so that would indicate the building needs to be for something else. And using it as an office makes a lot of sense. Historic Preservation with Contemporary Considerations In the years after Judds passing, the building deteriorated. The structure was boarded up and had a leaky roof that led to significant interior damage. The brick facade had cracked. In his will, the artist left instructions to maintain his properties as he had left them and to open them to the public. But the Judd Foundation recognized that for the long-term health of the building, and greater sense of environmental responsibility, they couldnt just reconstruct everything exactly as it was. Instead, they interpreted what low-impact design means in the context of today. We’re basically just continuing in a certain sense what Don was doing, says Flavin. The overall kind of ethic for both us and Don and originally was being responsible to past energy spent on building something, to the planet, and for the future. [Images: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation (photos), John Chamberlain/Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society, New York (artwork)] The initial work involved retracing Judds steps, then figuring out where to go from there. Fortunately, Schaum and the Foundation had a lot of historic documentation of the building to work with, including photographs from the artists archives as well as from the state of Texas and Marfa Public Library. Schaum was familiar with the building. He visited the town for the first time in the 1990s and began working with the Judd Foundation on other restoration projects in Marfa in 2013. But working with Judds architecture in the context of restoration led him to more intensely study what made it unique. One of the first things he noticed was how Judd treated the bricks as distinct forms. In addition to sandblasting the paint from the facade, he also raked the mortar between the bricks. You see a shadow between the brick instead of seeing mortar between the brick, Schaum says. The facade is a series of individual elements of brick sitting next to each other with a shadow in between, which is, in my opinion, a very Judd way of thinking about composition and assembly in that you have one part sitting next to another. Then, inside Judd had removed plaster from an interior wall to reveal the brick behind it. He left the tin ceilings and wood floors as they were. [Photos: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation] Judds practice was one of restraint, of erasure and revealing strategies that opens up the building rather than adding a lot of things to a building, Schaum says. This conceptual underpinning informed Schaums interventions. So how do you restore something without covering up that or without getting in the way of that very subtle revealing that Donald Judd was engaged in his architecture? Schaum and the Foundation decided to keep as much of the original architecture as they could, working with masonry consultants to repoint the brick to Judds style. But the realities of Texass climate becoming warmer each year led to some modifications. They kept the single-pane storefront windows because of their distinctive hardware and because integrating double-paned glass would have been too big of a departure from the original building. They then applied a low-e coating to block heat from the sun. They also reconstructed the damaged mahogany frames out of Accoya, a responsibly forested engineered wood to avoid using tropical hardwood. To further protect the storefront from the sun, they added a metal awninga detail that wasnt present during Judds tenure but had existed in previous years. Since the building is in a prominent downtown location and there are larger historic preservation efforts happening in the city of Marfa itself (the National Parks Service listed Central Marfa on the National Register of Historic Places in 2022 and designated a Donald Judd Historic District in the city this year), the design team deemed the addition appropriate. This [building] is from a time before air-conditioning when if you had big windows in the desert, they were shaded, Flavin says. You didn’t have plate glass, you didn’t have reflective glass, you didn’t have glass buildings. So that simply makes sense. [Image: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation (photo), John Chamberlain/ Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society, New York (artwork)] A Climate-Informed Approach The Judd Foundation experimented with passive cooling strategies to keep the building comfortable instead of relying on artificially cooled air. In the high desert, temperatures reach into the 90s during the day but drop down to the 40s at night. Using the buildings thermal mass and a technique called night flushingwhich floods the interior with cool air at night and vents hor air during the day with fansthey hope theyll be able to keep the interiors cool. Its an attempt to go back to 19th-century cooling methodswith an eye toward 21st-century apocalypse, Flavin says. [Image: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation (photo), John Chamberlain/Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society, New York (artwork)] The Foundation will use the upstairs apartments as accommodations, and they decided to install air-conditioning on that level just in case someone needs it. But downstairs, in the spaces that are reserved for Judds work, its all naturally ventilateda departure from conventional conservation practices that typically call for an environment that remains at a stable temperature. Working with the Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Schaum and the Foundation modeled four-hour intervals of indoor temperature to determine if the archival materials would remain protected even if there were swings into red zones that might negatively impact preservation. What we’re trying to do is end up in the red zone as little as possible, but not necessarily have perfect stasis, Schaum says. Its a shift in thinking that acknowledges were in a precarious environment. Hes also exploring what passive systems for museums hes working on in New Orleans and India could look like, predicting that the buildings might be affected by power loss due to storms and might have to be self-sufficient for periods of time. Looking ahead at where the climate’s going, its saying maybe a consumption-based model of conservation is not totally sustainable, Schaum says. And to cap the project off: The Foundation added rooftop solar to power the building. In a 1993 interview, Judd said that a good building should embody a certain wholeness, consistency, coherence, attention to the function, attention to what the building is supposed to be for, consideration for the people who work in the building or use it, he said. The restoration and adaptation of the architecture office keeps true to these values in perpetuity. What this work has taught me, and what I always say Donald Judds work teaches me, is a mature architects lesson, Schaum says. It teaches me about restraint and about care.
Category:
E-Commerce
Chipotle would like to be invited over for dinner. The Newport Beach, California-based fast-casual chain is going DIY mode with “Build-Your-Own Chipotle,” a takeout, digital-only menu item meant to feed four to six people. For Chipotle, the build-your-own meal is about delivering value and speed at a time when competition over consumer dollars for out-of-home meals is fierce and getting fiercer, and it benefits from a base emotion: guilt. The Build-Your-Own Chipotle meal comes with eight tortillas, two bags of chips, plus other toppings, as well as salsas, rice, and beans for about the price of six burritos. The chain says it can be ready to pick up in as little as 15 minutes. Customers can pick everything from their choice of protein to either guac or queso blancobut the BYOC meal is only available to order on the chain’s app or website. Building on what works The menu item aligns with Chipotle’s future plans to iterate on what’s already working. In the company’s July earnings call, the chain reported quarterly revenue of $3.1 billion, a growth of 3% year over year. But it also saw a 4% drop in its comparable sales and expects comparable sales to be flat for the rest of the year due to consumer volatility. In other words, the company is adding stores and growing, but existing stores are seeing sales fall. [Photo: Chipotle] The value of faster food at home Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright said on the earnings call that the company’s value proposition of a burrito or burrito bowl that sells for less than $10 before taxes and fees in most markets was something they would build on. “Going forward, we will roll out new and creative ways to emphasize our value proposition while improving the benefit of our offering through better execution, menu innovation, and amplifying our rewards program,” he said. The chain’s new offering might create increased sales from existing customers by convincing someone who orders Chipotle for lunch once a week to pick it up for dinner, too. But the strategy here is about more than just the price. The DIY model also might make this takeout meal easier on the conscience. Just as Betty Crocker saw cake mix sales rise after requiring customers to add an egg, Chipotle might be able to sell even more burritos if it offers some as BYOC kit ingredients instead of a ready-to-eat product. It doesn’t feel like fast food if you make it at home. It’s family dinner.
Category:
E-Commerce
A client once confessed, At least half of every training dollar we spend is wastedwe just dont know which half. This is a sobering reality. In 2024, research from the Association of Talent Development found that the average organization spent $1,283 per employee on workplace learning. From university programs to leadership courses, and customized programs to team retreats, it seems weve tried it all. Unfortunately, much of that investment fails to deliver, or worse, backfires. Weve seen how this plays out. Whether that be mandatory DEI initiatives that trigger more backlash than inclusion, to mindfulness programs that only frustrate already chronically overworked employees, learning and development (L&D) programs can be a double-edged sword. In a reality where companies have constrained training budgets and AI looms over the future of work, leaders are under pressure to upskill their teams (and quickly). However, another “flavor of the month” workshop isnt going to cut it. So how do you create a training program that drives lasting change? First, we need to start by understanding why these programs so often fail. Here are six common reasons why, and what you need to do to get it right. 1. There is no strategic anchor Training without a clear link to strategic objectives is just noise. You should have absolute clarity on what skills and knowledge are necessary for your people to achieve business-critical outcomes. A pilots or surgeons training is life-and-death. Can you say the same about your emotional intelligence workshops? If not, start by defining the mission-critical skills your leaders must master. Everything else is a distraction. 2. Leaders arent walking the walk If senior leadership isn’t modeling the behaviors youre teaching, its going to create a credibility gap and kill adoption. If leaders preach one thing but their actions actually indicate otherwise, your training can do more harm than good. Thats why its important to ensure that leaders are active participants in training and the company holds them to the same (or higher) standards. Senior leaders need to model the way and visibly demonstrate desired behaviors, or they risk losing credibility. 3. Misdiagnosing the problem Training wont solve systemic problems. Mindfulness in an understaffed healthcare system wont cure burnout. Leadership workshops wont help if there isnt a clear strategy. Diagnose before you prescribe. Get to the root cause first, asking: Is this a skills gap or a systems gap? 4. Culture kills content Peter Drucker’s famous quote, Culture eats strategy for breakfast, applies here. If you dont align your training with performance management, promotion criteria, and daily operations, the old habits (which famously die hard) will persist. This is when culture often overrides training investments. To solve this, review and embed training goals into existing systems (like performance reviews and succession plans) so they stick. 5. Lack of clarity and consistency Employees need a consistent and coherent framework with clear applicability to their on-the-job behaviors. Switching between “radical candor” one month to crucial conversation only serves to create confusion if you dont incorporate them in your daily routines. So pick a framework and identify behaviors that you can measure, then stick with it and build it into daily practices. 6. No ROI on impact Measuring impact and behavior change is hard if you dont know what youre measuring. Without clear definitions and metrics, you cant see your training ROI. Understand before you launch what metrics will indicate program successis it engagement, retention, promotion readiness, improved team behaviors, customer outcomes? Get clarity, and start tracking from the outset. What high-performing organizations do differently High-performing organizations know that training is an ongoing system, not a one-off event. To do this, they align, act, and auditlinking training initiatives to strategic imperatives, ensuring these are delivering well and are well-embedded, and continue to measure training impact after completion of the program. With the plethora of information at our fingertips, its easy to be swept up in the latest workshop hype. However, when it comes to sustainable behavior change, there is no such thing as a quick win. If you want workplace training that works, you need to focus on consistent and intentional alignment. And over time, your organization will start to reap the results.
Category:
E-Commerce
When Stephanie Downs, cofounder of Uncaged Innovations, a biomaterials startup creating alternatives to animal leathers, learned about the tariffs earlier this year she was forced to add manufacturing outside of the U.S. Since less than 2% of fashion goods are produced in the U.S., all of Uncaged customers are overseas and now enduring a price hike. Like many startup founders, Downs has had to react and adjust operations and business plans based on geopolitical and economic shifts. Over half of small business leaders report negative impacts of changing tariff and trade policies as of this July, according to the WSJ/Vistage Small Business CEO Confidence Index. Just as the pandemic forced massive shifts across sectors, todays founders are navigating a new wave of disruptions: tariff uncertainties, declining federal grants, and changing customer behavior. The same index found that two out of five business leaders are reporting delayed orders, as well as longer sales cycles and a more carefully examined buying process. Downs has experienced similar challenges at Uncaged, with some customers canceling orders due to tariffs on materials shipping into China. Tack and shift These shifts arent always within a founders controlbut how they respond to them is. Companies that simply freeze in uncertainty often dont survive. Those that tack and shift their approach can manage though, and even take advantage, of the changes. At Golden Seeds, after two decades of experience investing in early-stage women-led companies, weve come to view this as swerving and its just as criticalif not more sothan the dramatic course corrections that pivots imply. The art of adapting isnt a one-time decision. Its a continuous process of listening, learning, and iterating. Its important to distinguish between the two concepts. Think of a swerve as proactive responsiveness. Its when startups pick up on early signalslike customer feedback, market shifts, or changes in funding sourcesand adjust accordingly. They are often smaller, tactical shifts that respond to new data. A pivot, in contrast, usually emerges when the product market fit hasnt been clearly determined or the product is no longer viable. Its a deliberate, and often high-stakes, decision to fundamentally change the product, business model, or target market. Why Swerving MattersMaybe More Than Pivoting Every startup swerves. Or at least, every successful one does. It might not be flashy. It doesnt always make headlines. But its the everyday work of managing a company: testing assumptions, talking to customers, analyzing sales patterns, and adjusting accordingly. Its also what investors are often really betting onnot just the initial idea, but the founders judgment and willingness to adjust when reality doesnt match the original vision. Failure to swerve can be fatal. Companies that rigidly stick to the original plan, even when its not working, tend to burn through capital and fade away. Remember, hope is not a strategy. If the company isnt making sales targets, find out exactly why. When the Pivot Is Necessary Still, sometimes swerving isnt enough. When a startup realizes the product isnt viable or the market has evaporated, its time for a true pivot. Take BentoBox, for example. Originally a marketing services platform for restaurants, the company saw opportunityand urgencyduring the pandemic. As dining rooms closed, restaurants needed digital tools for online ordering and payments. BentoBox made a do-or-die shift to become a payments and e-commerce platform, ultimately selling for over $300 million. Lark Health is another notable pivot. Initially a consumer sleep device company, it evolved into an AI-driven nurse platform treating millions of patients struggling with chronic conditions on behalf of health insurers, employers, and PBMs. That transformation didnt happen overnight, but it was a full reinvention that unlocked significant market potential. These examples highlight another common thread: successful pivots often come from companies that were already good at swerving. They were listening, learning, and adapting all alongso when the time came for a bigger move, they were well positioned to act quickly. Great founders and teams are constantly testing, refining, and asking hard questions. They sit in on sales calls. They ask why a customer said no. Is it a product issue? Is onboarding taking too long? Does it require too much manual intervention? Is it too expensive? They look for patterns in whats working and whats not. They make small bets, try new features, and critically, know when its time to either double down or switch gears entirely. They also know how to test demand. In hard tech, for instance, that might mean getting a customer to fund development of a new featurenot just waiting and hoping a sale materializes. That kind of resourcefulness and discipline is what gives a company options when the winds shift. Advice for Investors and Founders For angel investors and board members, supporting a startup goes far beyond capitalit’s about recognizing when a company is at an inflection point and helping the team navigate it with clarity and confidence. That means staying close to the business, asking probing questions, and encouraging founders to test their assumptions early and often. Swervesthose smaller, iterative shiftsshould be a regular topic at the board table, not just in times of crisis. This type of creative and adaptive thinking should be a part of every board meeting. Great investors and advisers recognize that swerving is simply managing a company, its not a sign of failure. And when a pivot becomes necessary, investors can play a critical role in helping leadership assess whether the product, market, or business model needs to changeand how to communicate that shift to employees, customers, and future funders. Great board members challenge, guide, and help founders course correct before the runway runs out. Ultimately, whether you’re advising a tactical swerve or leading a company through a full-scale pivot, the goal remains the same: stay aligned with the market, respond to what the data and customers are telling you, and keep moving forward. In the world of startups, and most specially in this current economy, resilience is importantbut adaptability is essential. The companies that endure and thrive are the ones that listen, learn, and evolveover and over again.
Category:
E-Commerce
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