My AI Design Workflow That Doesn't Ship Slop
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Taste becomes the real moat
Meng To argues that baseline design quality is high and generic, so builders now win through taste, fast judgment, and distinctive creative choices.
I sit down with Meng To for his second appearance on the pod to dig into design md, Google's newly open-sourced format for capturing the soul of a design and porting it across every medium and tool. Meng walks me through a live demo of how he uses design md alongside skills, HTML references, and tools like Aura, New Form, Codex, and OpenClaw to ship landing pages, motion design, slides, and mobile mocks that actually feel custom. We get into the design drift problem with one-shot prompts, why taste is the real moat for builders right now, and how he runs four products as effectively a team of one while iterating a thousand-plus prompts deep. If you build with agents and you want your work to stand out from the sea of purple-gradient lookalikes, this one is for you.
Timestamps
00:00 – Intro
04:00 – What design md actually is
07:17 – Examples: one design DNA across slides, promo videos, motion
09:31 – How to create design system
14:05 – The importance of taste and design
18:28 – Variant, remixing, and skills as ingredients
21:36 – Live demo: creating a landing page with design md and HTML
24:36 – Thoughts on Google Stitch
25:41 – Being fast and at edges is an unfair advantage
29:29 – Midjourney parallels and the queuing flow state
31:44 – Walking through skills (skeuomorphic, 3D, lasers)
34:07 – Now everyone is a designer
36:47 – The full design workflow
38:50 – Iteration versus remix
39:24 – Judgment per minute as the new craft
41:06 – Solo building vs building a team
44:34 – Taste is the moat
48:25 – Building a second brain for design inspiration
50:41 – Closing thoughts
Key Points
Design md is a portable blueprint for typography, color, spacing, and effects that you attach to any prompt to keep design consistent across web, mobile, slides, and motion.
One-shot prompts collapse on page two; a design system carries the soul across every medium and tool you switch into.
Skills work like ingredients (lasers, skeuomorphic, 3D, copywriting), and stacking them on top of design md is what separates custom work from generic vibe-coded output.
Taste is the real moat right now, and you build it by surrounding yourself with great design and using every product in your niche.
Iteration (90% of the time) keeps a product evolving; remix (10%) takes the same DNA into a new medium or category.
The shift in craft is from moving pixels to making judgment calls per minute, with agents handling the mechanical work.
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The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/
FIND ME ON SOCIAL
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/
FIND MENG ON SOCIAL
Aura: https://aura.build
X/Twitter: https://x.com/MengTo
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