Manifesto
On the future of design
To everyone who makes things look right,
Something has changed in how things get made. A sentence turns into a screen. A brand can start on a phone, on the way home. Making used to be the hard part. Now the hard part is choosing.
We think design is splitting in two. The drawing is going to agents, and it’s already on its way: the layouts, the resizes, the twentieth version of the same banner. What stays with people is the part that was always the real job: knowing what’s worth making, and knowing when it’s right.
Today
For now, that means working side by side. The agent is fast and has no taste. The person has taste and not enough hours. Each needs the other, and the tools haven’t caught up. Designers paste screenshots into chats, and agents describe designs they can’t actually draw.
Tomorrow
The balance will shift. Agents will make most of the pixels, and people will make most of the decisions: what the system is, what the brand stands for, what ships and what doesn’t. Being a designer will become less technical and more creative.
That future needs a different kind of place to work. Not a chat with a canvas bolted on, or a canvas with a chatbot in the corner, but one surface where people and agents work on the same thing.
What we believe
- 1Making things is easy now. Knowing what’s worth making is the rest of it.
- 2Taste doesn’t scale on its own; systems do. A design system is how one person’s judgment reaches a thousand screens they never touched.
- 3One canvas, no handoff. Whatever a person can do, an agent can do too, in the same file.
- 4When drawing is cheap, critique is the craft.
- 5Bring your own agent. The best one will keep changing, and your tools shouldn’t change with it.
- 6The designer isn’t going away. The job is moving up a level.
Kite is our attempt at that place: a canvas for the years in between. First you design next to your agents. Then, mostly, you direct them.
The Kite team