Jarrad Grigg

All right. Hello, Petar. Nice to have you on. The first official episode of whatever this is. I haven’t got a name yet. but yeah, we’re seeing how we go. So I’d like to probably start with just doing a bit of an introduction from yourself. So for those watching, who are you? what do you do? and once we’ve gone through that we can start talk to talk about how AI is sort of impacting your workflows and your your sort of design career.

Petar Ceklic

Yeah, look, I’m Petar and I’ve been doing this sort of in this space since 96. Like even though I don’t look that old, I am actually pushing 50 nearly. So, um, yeah, because I keep saying I’ve been in the industry for 20 years and

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, because I think

Petar Ceklic

then I was like, hang on, I’ve started in 96, but 30 years almost sounds too much. You know what I mean? So like, you know,

Jarrad Grigg

Makes it.

Petar Ceklic

minor tangent aside, but I’ve, um, I remember when I first started doing web, design at that time, people, web was not really a thing. And so why did I choose this? I couldn’t tell you exactly why I chose it, but it seemed to be attracted to it. just being in, you know, did my own thing when I first started, like straight out of school, learnt a lot, but like anything too immature to actually be. to be planning the future, right? You sort of, you do your work, you sort of finish your work and then it’s like, okay, well, I need to find more work. And then you have a lull in your income. And, you know, that’s great when you don’t have a mortgage and all that, I ended up a couple of years in, ended up getting a real job and working for an agency. And in that agency created, a SaaS product, which it wasn’t called SaaS at the time, right? It was just like a product you sold on the internet. It like a timesheet product that was quite, I guess, you know, everyone needed timesheets at the time. People were doing it by hand or clocking systems. And then just developed that and just was one of those lucky opportunities where you got timesheets.com.au. And then ever since then, the SEO was always great, just I guess the domain and the actual age of the domain. So I helped develop that and I was there for like a long time, over 10 years. And just watched that sort of, you know, the two owners, you know, from doing websites and all that. I could sort of see that product is where I was at because as you know, like a project website, you you’ve got two or three months max. and then it ends and it’s started over with a new client. whereas product is always things to do, always new features to create. I was drawn to that and that’s how I sort of got into what I got into. But then after

Jarrad Grigg

You lost it.

Petar Ceklic

that, I sort of jumped around a few agencies and basically when COVID happened was made redundant and thought, okay, well now is the time to go freelance and. Like anything, I’m kicking myself why I didn’t do it sooner. But so it’s been what, five, six years since then, as busy as ever, sort of really focusing on SaaS apps and startups and all that sort of stuff. But yeah, that’s a quick intro of how it all started.

Jarrad Grigg

Nice. So yeah, I mean have you always been design oriented, like you said, you just kind of fell into it. Was it was it like was digital design something that you were kinda interested in and you were you you you you would you just get asked to do it and you just started to work through it. ‘cause I remember early in the early days when, you know, responsive websites started to come out and that’s sort of when I really started move towards digital design. but yeah, so t tell me about whether like Yeah. Is it something you’ve always wanted to do or did you just kinda fall into it?

Petar Ceklic

I guess fall into it in a way back then, you you, weren’t just a designer, you had to build. so, early days it was like literally tables and, you know, like doing it yourself. There’s like, I look, look at the designers now that are coming into it and there’s so much, there’s, there’s little, little barrier to entry right now. Back then you sort of had to like, like, I’m not a natural coder. but you had to, you had to do it like you would do the design and you’d have to execute on it. And,

Jarrad Grigg

Dreamweaver or whatever it was.

Petar Ceklic

yeah. homesite before that. And, yeah. And like, you know, you’ve got the 12 fonts that come installed in people’s computers and that’s what you’d use. you know, every sort of five years on there’s always a new thing. and like, thank God it’s got to a point where. We can choose any font we want. There’s no sort of limitations right now except your creativity. So to answer your question, sort of fell into it in a way. My first website was a scrap metal website and they had a massive catalog. So it was less design, more just like smashing out tables of product. And I got… quite good at HTML. Do I use it anymore? Not really, but it’s nice to have sometimes. yeah, that’s the kind of intro. then

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

where I really sort of finding my mark is when you’re working with teams that have developers and you can go, okay, what do I actually like in my role? And it was never any of the coding or any of that. So when I could actually just focus purely on design, it was actually really good. Because I’d often limit when I was doing the coding myself, I’d often limit the design based on what I could execute on, which is not nice, right? So you don’t

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

make it a little bit simpler. You wouldn’t have things off on the side or anything. Whereas when I could handball it to other developers that were doing it, I’m like, great, now I can make their life difficult.

Jarrad Grigg

You’re much better than me at this, so I’ll just I’ll push you a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, cool. So through that natural kind of iteration of like working with people, you kind of figured out what you what you actually enjoyed, you know, it and and and I guess we’re probably naturally more good at as well. that’s really cool. And then like the product side of things is just something, as you say, through experience learning that, you know, a website is sort of a two year pro you know, it gets done. Generally it just sits there for a couple of years and then the client might redo it. after a couple of years, but like an app just always gets worked on, right? So I I think as well your your move to freelance has sort of been a little bit of an inspiration for me and for many. So just to see from afar sort of the success you’ve been having has been great. and you know for for people watching at home, Peter and I have known each other for some time. and more recently, we’ve been chatting a lot about AI and and how the technology can be sort of used. in the design space. And I think you really get it. you seem to pick it up really, really quickly. and you you you share with me almost every other week some new idea that you’ve got. You you built it out really, really quickly, right? So I kind of want to talk a little bit about your now that you’re in freelance and you’re in product specifically, how you’re using this technology now to sort of improve your own workflows. and what was that kind of journey like of first first sort of playing with it and then seeing what it can do and then moving towards you know, having not built anything, you know, l like a a production app to then having one, you know, how did that feel and and and how do you start to think about the technology? Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

Yeah, to answer your last question, so I’ve helped design and develop, I’ve helped design many apps for clients.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

So I never thought I’d actually be able to execute on my own, right? Because at the time, there’s a big barrier to entry was the actual coding of it. always wanted to get something on the app store especially, like considering, you know, helped many clients do that. So then when I started playing with Claude, I was like, actually, this is actually really easy. like, I mean, you understand coding way more than I do. So I’m on bypass or permissions, just go. Because initially it’s asking

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

all these questions. It’s like, I don’t know, you know better than I do. Like, you know, it’s asking, should I do this? I’m like, look, bypass or just go. So far so good, but then again, I don’t know what it’s doing. It’s not like I checked the code, but so, I mean, that’s one thing and we can speak about the app I developed over a weekend, but how I’m using it for my day-to-day work, like it’s integrated, it’s, you know, when Claude went down a couple of weeks ago, it just felt, you know, like thankfully you can go to another. you can go to OpenAI, right? But if they all went down, it’d feel like I’m hamstrung, you know? Like it’s speeding up what, yeah,

Jarrad Grigg

Just that in front of your now. Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

it’s speeding up everything I do. Not to mention that my written English is pretty bad. that, for one, it helps all my written communication, right? So specifically how it’s helping. I think it just feels like you’ve got someone in the room to check over your wireframes. Am I missing something? Is there something I’m not thinking about? It’s just those sort of questions that, you know, I worry that it’s making designers or people using it a little bit lazy because whilst we could think about those things and we could get to the end point where we’re both happy with or we’re all happy with, I just feel like it speeds up that whole process, right? You get to somewhere. where maybe it would have taken a couple of days. They’re much quicker, it’s maybe an afternoon and you’re sort of like really happy with it. And plus you’ve got other sort of considerations that you probably wouldn’t have thought of. So,

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

you know, for everything in the process, like from research to wireframes to even like, you

Jarrad Grigg

Steven Maps.

Petar Ceklic

know, like design patterns and how should I handle this, it just feels like you’ve got someone on your shoulder going, look, have you thought of this?

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, okay. Yeah. So I mean I I know the feeling, right? You you start using the technology and then it’s taken away like, you mean I have to use my hands? Because it’s it feels it feels like it slows you down for sure. Now are you using it as like a sort of companion to chat too? So you talk about research, you talk about what else am I missing? Is that something where you’re you’re just you’re just chatting with Claude or you’re just chatting with GPT? Or are you giving it additional context somewhere? Are you setting up any sort of structure or project? with all your research in one place, like what’s kind of a practical workflow that you would use that gets good results?

Petar Ceklic

Yeah, with Claude, I basically set up a project for every one of my clients, give it as much context before I start chatting about it so it just knows if there’s any briefs or anything like that. And any of the research I’ve already done, I feed that in. then every sort of element I’m looking at, if I’m at a component-based, I’ll create a new chat for that. And so I’m keeping all my chats quite clean for each of my clients. So then I can go back and go, look, this is the component. If I need to work on it again, I jump in onto that one. And all the while, it’s obviously got the full context of the project. So I guess it’s a practical, like every designer is different. Some people name their layers, some don’t. I find it’s good to be neat with setting up a structure within. Like any tool can work, but it works better when it’s structured, especially for this sort of stuff.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. I think you’re right. Yeah. And it’s good that you’re a said you you you’re sort of setting it up as a project, right? And you’re you’re you’re putting in everything. You’re doing the manual groundwork first, and you’re meeting with the client, you’re understanding their problem and their need, and you’re the one collating all of that and then feeding it into the agent as a I guess a a co working companion, right? So it needs to have everything there in order to be effective. So that’s that’s kind of interesting. yeah, so you’re you’re using it sort of just to guide you through and you’re still doing all the groundwork there in Figma. So I I guess a a a blunt question, do you think Figma is dead? Do you think design programs are sort of gonna go go away? or do you feel that, you know, this is just the next evolution in terms of how we do our work?

Petar Ceklic

Look, if you listen to design Twitter, yeah, Figma’s died. Like, you know, it’s died

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, it’s

Petar Ceklic

three times in the last six months. I would argue that a lot of designers are using it less, right? But I don’t know, like, I just feel like there’s always gonna be a need for hand-designed elements and products, et cetera. Yeah, I’ve used so many products that are completely generated by AI and they just don’t feel right. But yeah, to your point, like I’m in Figma every day still. It’s

Jarrad Grigg

I see.

Petar Ceklic

something that’s my main sort of tool. Yeah, but I’m also like every meeting I record, I put that into Claude, right? And it’s got full context

Jarrad Grigg

It’s

Petar Ceklic

of all the meetings and… So then every time I’m meeting with a client or it’s a standup or we’re looking at a component, it’s always got a good understanding of what’s going on. So then when I ask the question, it’s not just going on, generally speaking, this is what you should use for this component. It’s got the full three or four meetings before that. like what I’m most like is just give me a rough couple of wireframes of potential sort of like solutions to this. And sometimes they’re pretty good, but they’re never perfect. And that’s that whole element of

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, I I think

Petar Ceklic

like, you need someone in the seat. Well, will it be perfect in a couple of years probably? You know, but.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, that’s a that’s a good point is is will the I’ve I’ve had people say this to me, well surely the model capability would just get good enough eventually that it will do it all anyway. And and my argument back to that is yes, but then you s the the the designers just have to get better, right? And you you will have the models get more capable, which means that more people will have access to that level of quality. And and you’re seeing this across to your point, you’re seeing this across the quality of what gets generated now. You know, you have the borders on the left hand side, you have the little pills with the dots in them, the same metallic fonts. You know, you you see all the trope of the design capability. And that’s on a UI level. And I I agree with you. I th I think the where it’s where they’re really bad is actually good UX. and I’m the same as you. I’ve tried every tool out there, every single time a new design tool comes up, I give it a go. And I just cannot get them to think properly about UX. so yeah, I I I use it like an iterative supportive tool. So, you know, whether you’re using Figma, pencil, paper, magic path, whatever you know, if you give them context, they’re good at sort of throwing things on the board and and showing you ideas, but then you really have to spend time thinking it through and and and designing it properly. So yeah, I I kinda think that I don’t think these things I don’t think design is going away and I just see to your point of how you’re already using it is it’s really supportive. You know, it’s a great thing to bounce off. And also it’s good to hear from you that you’re you’re capturing all of your meanings and everything you do as context too. I do the same. And yeah, I I share that with other people. It’s like you really need to just capture it all and store it all and give your agent that kind of context. and then when you start to work like that, everything just gets a lot easier. So that’s really cool.

Petar Ceklic

Yeah, I mean, you know how it is. You’re also like a leader in the AI space, right, say. But what I’m saying is when you see other people use it that aren’t in our field and I just, your mom and dads or your siblings, and I watched my brother do a prompt and it’s the bare minimum, right? Like, tell me like three or four words.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. It’s like a Google search.

Petar Ceklic

And it’s like, that’s shit. I’m like, well, you didn’t tell it any context. when are you going to Europe? What do you want to know? Like, it’s just like anything. The more context it has, better. And that’s why I love using Whisperflow, like, not typing prompts anymore. Because you speak to it more naturally like a human, right? And you generally throw in more words, and generally it’s quick to do. And like, my prompts have just gone, like, they’re huge now. And the output is awesome.

Jarrad Grigg

And

Petar Ceklic

But yeah, so Whisperflow for just for having more context and because everyone can type relatively quick, but I can certainly speak it quick. And Whisperflow, yeah. I was just gonna say like,

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, I’m I’m with you.

Petar Ceklic

or even the little terms, right? You railway, like all the little tech terms, it’s got that inbuilt, like, and you say it once and you correct it, and it’s like, okay, I’ll remember that for next time.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, it’s a great tool. and it’s great if you’re a freelancer and not working in an office environment. So y if you’re working with others

Petar Ceklic

Yeah, that is a problem.

Jarrad Grigg

and everyone’s talking, it’s yeah, I I I haven’t quite worked out how to do that yet. but yeah, I I agree with you. It’s it’s easier to speak than it is to type. And it just kind of shows that natural evolution of this being like a coworker, right? You know, when you’re using, you know, Hermes or OpenClaw or whatever it is, whatever your kind of agentic system is, the the the better you set it up, the the more it can do. And you become more confident in just sort of talking with it and and letting it do its thing. So okay, great, cool. So the other thing I I really wanted to sort of do was the the way you went from you go from an idea to actually producing something. So I’m really keen to see like dive into a project and sort of share this the process from like having an idea to actually getting something out. Cause I think a lot of designers probably get stuck in that mode of like I’m a designer, I just designed the thing in Figma or whatever the graphics program is, but how do I use this tech now to actually break out of that and design systems and flows and the entire product itself? Like I I have that designers need to be builders now. they don’t need to be developers, but they need to be builders because If you build things, you see the edge cases. You see all the little things that go wrong that you you oftentimes forget in Figmar. You know, you might design a few happy flows and maybe one or two error states. But then when you actually use the product, you know, you’re like, miss this, this, this, this, and this. and so I I I think it makes designers better to be to be builders. And you’re I think you’re a perfect example because you’ve got so many great things you create now. so I’d love to see that if you could share something with us.

Petar Ceklic

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

And like you mentioned that designers need to be builders. I don’t think it’s even that. I think it’s like, it’s so much more rewarding because for 90 % of my career, it’s always like, it feels like it’s half the job. You’ve done the design, you hand it off. If it’s a good developer, it gets an okay execution. But you

Jarrad Grigg

Execution.

Petar Ceklic

you don’t have control of that. And I’ll

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

be honest, most of time it’s not executed the way you’d want it to be executed. for me now to be able to go, you know what, I can build these things and I can get it exactly right. It feels so good. It feels so good to do that. So just as an example project, I guess to encapsulate this, had always traveling since like every two months we’re going somewhere. And so like I’ve just got a note in my Apple notes. to just remember all my packing stuff, right? There’s a template I use and then every trip I go on, always seem to like, there’s always one or two products you add or remove. And so I’ve had that in my notes and I thought, well, this is a good project, seems small enough to create an app out of. And so then I really wanted to do it over a weekend, give myself a limited amount of time because I don’t know, I’m one of these people that seems to… do better with less time than like this infinite block of time where I can just do whatever I want. So

Jarrad Grigg

No.

Petar Ceklic

I had the idea of, well, why don’t I just digitize this and make it something that is available on the App Store? I just do want to make, I intentionally didn’t want to make any money out of it. I just wanted to be a completely free project. So, should I share my screen now? Let’s probably see how this works. well… can’t see you Jared, just so I can’t see your responses. So

Jarrad Grigg

That’s okay.

Petar Ceklic

I guess like anything, I just like to start off with a few ideas of color scheme, whether it’s dark or light or have some bit of pop color. So like anything, either design Twitter or Dribbble, just get a few screenshots. then because I use the app on the Notes app, I sort of had an idea of what I wanted. I really wanted to celebrate the idea of like, know, going on a trip is exciting and I really want to sort of count down the time to it because to me that’s, that’s the fun part, right? Is every day you wake up, it’s like, many more days? So that was,

Jarrad Grigg

It’s

Petar Ceklic

these are the early ideas for it. You you’ve got your travel passport stuff, your sort of airport arrows, et cetera. So I thought about Orange, but Anyway, so these are the sort of initial ideas, like whether we have an emoji for the country, et cetera. But as you know, you progress. I’m a messy designer in terms of my boards, so they’re always not laid out great, but it’s just the way I work. But then, yeah, I started thinking about

Jarrad Grigg

Design is best on this should that’s good.

Petar Ceklic

it. I was like, oh, this is a bit too strong, like the actual percentage packs. So then I got to… you know, progressing on and it’s still got it. It’s got some light mode ideas. I sort of was happy with this sort of texture with the sort of like passport-y

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

texture and the name. I love a misspelling for a name, you know, like short but it’s still misspelt, said the same, et cetera. I wanted to have an overall temperature for the period of time I’m there. So anyway, so… I’ve landed on something like this, using these bars instead of the sort of big strong, you know, rounded element. And so then, so keep in mind, this is all over a few hours on the Saturday. And so then, okay.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. And this is all this is all manual. You’re you this is your all manual exploration that you’re doing here. Yeah. Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

Correct.

Petar Ceklic

And so then I wanted to be a little bit more streamlined in terms of the actual, this is the money of the app, right? This is where most of it is. You’re in here. But I thought in my own notes, there’s always stuff to pack, but there’s stuff to prepare. So I wanted to differentiate them up top straight away, right? So packing stuff, he’s putting stuff in the bag, preparing is maybe getting money out, know, visas, all that sort of stuff. But then I also thought,

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

well, look, if you’re doing the flow and it’s a short holiday, you’re only doing carry-on, I wanted it to be somewhat smart and detect if you’re packing three pairs of shoes, hey, that’s gonna be a

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

challenge to fit that. So there were some smarts there. So I had this amount of screens and then I thought, okay, well, that’s probably all I need. I went into Claude, started its own sort of, of discussions etc and started plan mode and said look this is what I’m thinking this is all the aspects for it did a massive plan which like I hardly read but it sounded good on paper and then just said look go and then pretty quickly on.

Jarrad Grigg

So sort of fairly trusting in the the architecture of of what it was creating for you. And it’s it’s kind of a low risk app, right? Like it’s not this is just something that you’re you’re creating for yourself to experiment with, so you can have that kind of

Petar Ceklic

Yeah, but I never used these tools before, never used Xcode, I never used any of it. And it was asking all these questions that I don’t know about. And that’s the thing I love about AI, if you don’t know, you just ask it, right? Why would I use that method over this? So

Jarrad Grigg

This

Petar Ceklic

whether it told me the good information, I don’t know, but we ended up with something like this where, It’s very close to my design, right? This part I probably didn’t design, but this is all using that new sort of glass

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah sort of

Petar Ceklic

element. The weather is pulling for every country. Mostly on those days, it’d be hot and wet. You go in there.

Jarrad Grigg

So it inferred all those requests from the design, right? So did you tell it that it was is to do that or did it just look at it and say, I think this is what you mean?

Petar Ceklic

Yeah, it would ask how do you want to get the weather? Do you want to get, do you want to pay for weather and get it for every city, cetera? And like to me, no one’s going to trust my app’s weather. It’s just an indicative. So I said, look,

Jarrad Grigg

Degree.

Petar Ceklic

give me, download all the weather around the world. Give it indicative ranges, indicative sort of, you know, most days for that period, this. And I feel like that’s like, you know, if this is a commercial app, I might’ve. paid for an API for the weather to be absolutely current for that. I

Jarrad Grigg

If you

Petar Ceklic

figure, you like you’ve got to respond accordingly. And to me, that was an adequate response in terms of that weather element. But you can see that

Jarrad Grigg

Well.

Petar Ceklic

because it knows we’re going to Tokyo. So it’s done a lot of this other stuff where, you know, tourist

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

tax, power adapter, this is all sort of the generated because,

Jarrad Grigg

That’s all generated. It’s it’s created

Petar Ceklic

yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

because of Tokyo.

Petar Ceklic

So yeah, and I guess the onboarding is like, okay, well, straight away, just where are going? Let’s say it’s Bali. Dates, so this, I just want it to be super simple, right? So it’s assuming you’re gonna fly, of course. I don’t think many people would need packing assistance for not flying. Carry-on’s default, I guess, is a short trip. It’s sort of thinking it will. These are all sort of templates that based on

Jarrad Grigg

Stand

Petar Ceklic

the distance and the length of the trip. But you can turn on or off these other ones plus you can create your own. So let’s just go with the defaults. And then you may not like wearing hats, you can delete that one. So you can check each one is correct for what you do. So you may delete a few. You see this is a bug here. I’ve got two toothpaste. think about that. And then you basically said, look, do you your preparation tasks as well as a question? So you can skip that or you can add it as well. So then you got the insurance and all that sort of stuff to create. And that’s it. I mean, that’s the app demo in like a 30 second flow. But, you know, although…

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. How much of that was like one shotted, right? So you you you had some conversation back and forth about it, you gave it the Figma files. I’m

Petar Ceklic

Yep. Yep.

Jarrad Grigg

presuming you connected via C P or you give it screenshots, and then what you

Petar Ceklic

Yeah, well, it’s only three screenshots, right? So whilst a mega app would do that, like I originally connected it through, but then it wasn’t, I was getting some funny results. I think Figma’s MCP not so great at the moment, but hopefully that changes soon.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

But yeah, then the first iteration of it, like, you know, the background was fixed for us. particular size phone, like, and then you change to a smaller, bigger phone and it’s not quite working. So then I said, no, no, you know how it is. It’s like the developer tries the easy way first and then you go, look, no, make it more of a canvas and make it always feel, you know, that canvas, et cetera. but little detail.

Jarrad Grigg

to a proper yeah. So there was an iteration where like it it spat something out and you’d like you said before, you’ve never used X code. So it guided you through that. You are running you’re now running a simulator and you’re actually seeing the builds and testing them you know within hours of actually giving it the design, right?

Petar Ceklic

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, that’s correct.

Petar Ceklic

And just to able to put it on your phone, like, you know, I didn’t know you could do that with X-Ray. Like I’ve never really, like I said, never had the install on there, but to actually run it on your phone, you’re like, wow, this is actually quite powerful because like it’s not even in the app store. But so yeah, those first few runs of what it thought was good was not quite there. like any developer, so then it’s like, no, the corners need to be X-mount, give it a bit of shadow. You know, some of these things, like just the small things like the padding, spacing, et cetera.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

And, you know, that’s a little bit painful because you’re going back and forth, you’re sort of describing your

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

screen-shouting. And I know some of the tools you use are probably better at that, where you actually can actually almost do it on canvas. But once I was… relatively happy, tested it a few times. I thought, well, okay, well, now is the time to put it on the app store. And

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

that was kind of exciting. no, not

Jarrad Grigg

Because you’d never done that before, right? You’d never published an app.

Petar Ceklic

for, where is it?

Jarrad Grigg

And and there’s a whole bunch of systems now that try and all do that for you, right? Like so the recommended for instance. but you you did this with Claude just asking, kind of brute forcing the approach, right? Is that what I’m hearing? Yeah, basically.

Petar Ceklic

Yeah, basically like what do we need to do to make it go on? And I think you sent me one of those gits that sort of

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

checks every bits of code of what Apple App Store looks out for and fix it. And that’s a great thing about AI is you can just say, look, this is what to look out for, pick it up, fix it if it needs to be fixed or not. And then Sunday Avvo, was to a point where I was… happy with it, submitted it, and then it’s the waiting game. And from memory, think,

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

I was totally expecting it to be sent back of something’s not right, but it was on there straight away, and I was like, my God, that seemed a bit too easy.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

But then obviously then I got a few friends and family to test it, and they’re coming back with errors, and I’m like, shit. And so that’s why… Version what are we at? You probably know where the version is more than I do actually

Jarrad Grigg

That’s all right.

Petar Ceklic

But yeah, there’s a few versions in now.

Jarrad Grigg

So yeah, I guess that’s probably the next sort of rough direction is is because this is just like a a learning experience for you, right? You’re not too worried about the outcome. Like you want it to be great, but you know, are you and and it is. are you t yeah how did you go about testing this? You know, did you like you say you’ve you’ve kind of pushed it up and you’re getting feedback from others, you’ve used it a little bit yourself. and the way that you’re using the the the model is just sort of make it better. Fix this, change that. have you ha if you went back and was to do this again, how would you approach that side of it, the testing?

Petar Ceklic

I’ll probably test it more to be honest. But

Jarrad Grigg

Project.

Petar Ceklic

because I had that challenge of let’s make it over a weekend.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

But then as soon as it’s out in the wild, then you start feeling kind of like this added sense of pressure of like, look, I don’t want someone to be using this and then it to fail for one. they’re putting,

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

you know, it takes a little while to create your own pack list. You’re using it for a trip, you’re excited and then it not to work. then very close after launching, I think I did three or four updates in the next sort

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

of week or so. And it’s all back. bug fixes. So yeah, so to answer your question, yeah, more testing is what I would do differently. But like, it’s also a very simple app, right? You’ve got six

Jarrad Grigg

This year.

Petar Ceklic

or seven screens, max. But yeah, so I’m sure app developer would look at it go, oh my God, it’s so like bad code wise, but then you can’t blame me. You have to blame code, Claude.

Jarrad Grigg

No, that again it’s it’s not a it’s a simple application, right? So it’s fine. Do you know how it’s built it by the way? Do you know if it’s used a framework or if it’s building it in in Swift or not at all? Swift

Petar Ceklic

Swift sense meter.

Jarrad Grigg

stack Yeah, okay. That’s great. Yeah, I I guess that’s the beauty of it. the

Petar Ceklic

Can you tell quickly with just looking at this screen or you got packapp.swift?

Jarrad Grigg

I can’t quite see, it’s all a bit small for me, but that’s the case. So Squick yeah Yeah, there you go. It’s it’s it’s a native app, so that’s great. Yeah, i and and that’s another thing with this technology is like if if you’re a a designer wanting to build things, the stack doesn’t matter that much. You know, the I’m sure engineers would disagree and and there are you know, it does you you do need to make technical considerations when you’re working on a large scale software, but something like this It’s perfect just to experiment with, right? And I think you did a you’ve done a great job of just like setting yourself that two day limit to go from absolutely nothing to a published app in the App Store. and I bet if you told yourself that, you know, a year ago that you you could do that.

Petar Ceklic

I’ll like, yeah, maybe not.

Jarrad Grigg

Maybe not. so yeah, I guess like this is a really good use case of sort of using a technology to sort of further yourself with the as a designer. What was really interesting there for me is is you’ve still got you’ve still got your approach. You’ve still got your manual approach of like you’ve come up with the idea, you’re experimenting, exploring, and but you haven’t actually designed every flow there. You know, when you w in the board there’s only a few core concepts. It’s not like you have every single different use case and every flow mapped with annotations and detail and everything as a handover file. You’re ju it sounds like you’re just dumping screenshots into Claude and just saying, Hey, this is what I want to build obviously with more context than that. And it’s sort of working with you to get the job done.

Petar Ceklic

Yeah. And it’s almost like a, you know, how like if you’re a senior designer somewhere, you may hand off the initial hard work, which is initially come up with this is in my opinion for, for most projects is like the harder work, what’s kind of look and feel we’re going to do. And then you can hand this off to a junior or mid designer and then go, yeah, okay, I get it. Now I know the sort of color scheme and the concepts I can take this and and do the other pages and that’s kind of what Claude’s done here, right? So it’s still got the background, it’s still got the sort of look and feel of what I did initially but I didn’t design this view. And just like in terms of buy a coffee, I’ve had a few people buy a coffee which is, know, I really just

Jarrad Grigg

It’s right.

Petar Ceklic

wanted to put it out there for free but it’s funny people actually like appreciate it and you you get a few kickbacks for that. you wouldn’t retire off the money but it’s also once

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

again you’re pushing back to your own website, a bit of SEO there as you know the game, Jared.

Jarrad Grigg

So yeah, yeah, that’s it’s it’s really good. Yeah. So I mean it it shows shows it. I mean, you you a point that you raised there that I kinda want to touch on for a bit. So firstly, thank you for sharing that. I I really appreciate it. I think you’ve done a great job. I think it looks great. I’ve used it, it works great. and it kind of just goes to show you how you can go from idea to something real now as a designer very, very quickly, like two days. Amazing. And to be approved straight away in the App Store. I mean, that’s generally unheard of for me. So well done. but you did raise something there where you said, like, I mean, you would have an art director or a senior designer who would create a few course screens and then you’d handball that off to a sort of a junior or mid-tier to do that grunt work. What happens to the what happens to those designers now in this world? Like if you you have this standard studio set up where that’s how it works, the tiers of designers, right? What what what do they do now? you know, if they no longer can learn from seniors in that way. How how do you think that changes the structure of agency or how designers should approach their work in this this with this kind of technology?

Petar Ceklic

Like, I don’t know about you, but like, I just feel like AI is everywhere,

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

but it really isn’t yet, especially not in Perth, right? So like there’s lots of agencies that aren’t even using it. The developers are still hand coding. So to answer your question, I think they’ve got a little bit of time in Perth or Australia, but I’d be worried if I was them. And I feel like they’re only I’d really strongly recommend that they get into AI and using it as a tool themselves because I know if I’m a HR person and I’m looking at two designers, one that uses it, one that doesn’t, and I get a lot of flack for saying this but I’d fire the one that doesn’t because the one that does is way more productive. So I just think everyone needs to sort of somewhat adapt but I just look at it as a positive, net positive over a net negative.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Like the the detractors, you know, everything is a is a tool which which changes the way you work, right? Like if i you know, you take Figma out of the picture and it was Photoshop before that, you know, you remember doing responsive layouts in Photoshop? Well the different PSDs that you have? And now you have something that works it it it and allows you to to work a lot faster. You know, no one’s you know yelling about Figma. and saying we must work in Photoshop, you know, that ship sailed. And I think this is the same. I think this is something that is just an additive to an existing sort of industry. And if you adapt to it and you learn how to use it, yeah, you thrive. and I don’t think it’s going to replace design. I I think the more I use it and and the more teams that I work with, design actually becomes a lot more valuable. because it’s thinking in s it’s thinking in systems and flows, especially in the product space. And all the output, you know, the output will get better, no doubt. But yeah, like the best of the best of these generative designs, in my view, is still pretty bad. and designers like yourselves, you know, can can far outstrip the quality of of what gets created with these models. But for like your mid tiers and your juniors, you know, I’ve made the case before that they should st learn the fundamentals as well. Like learn the real fundamentals of design, you know. all the things that make something great, you know, typographic hierarchy, the use of white space, you know, use apps and understand how how they work, the flow what makes a good flow, you know. if you can get all that right, then it doesn’t really matter what the tool is, you know. you you’re gonna be a good designer. And that it does take years of doing that. So I’m not saying it’s gonna be easy for juniors. I think that it’s really challenging. But you know, I remember when we were younger, You know, we would just make stuff, right? Like you would just you just jump into Photoshop and you’d start creating things and you just have to have that same hunger, I guess. so I it is I don’t have the answer. I don’t know the way it’s gonna go, but you know, I’ve I’ve heard on a podcast before a good example of this was, you know, radiology and radiologists like five years ago. the AR technology was really great at being able to understand a scan and diagnose disease. And it got to the point where it was better than radiologists at diagnosing disease. And the argument was, well, radiologists are out of the the machine can do it. Well what happened was quite the opposite. the amount of radiologists exploded because the job wasn’t the task. The job was

Petar Ceklic

Hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

saving lives. And now they can do that more. with the technology. So you need more radiologists. So you kind of unblock, you know, you clear the backlog of people waiting to

Petar Ceklic

Hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

get scammed because it just happens faster. and it

Petar Ceklic

Yeah, I’ve seen that trend lately. I don’t know if you’ve seen some of the big companies that initially may have had a mega reduction because of AI, but now they’re rehiring again, right? And they’re going, actually, whilst we thought AI was going to save us this much workforce, we actually need the humans back, right? So now they’re rehiring again. They’re rehiring people that know how to use AI as well because they’re more productive, but like, I forget some of the big companies that are doing it now, thinking about doing a LinkedIn post

Jarrad Grigg

I think that’s yeah.

Petar Ceklic

about it because it’s not all doom and gloom. know, those articles and posts do get a lot of hits, it’s not like that in reality. I feel like it’s, we’re still okay. We’re all gonna have a job. We just need to keep up with the technology, especially our field. Like, you know, there’s a few designers I know that like even like, like all their layouts in Figma, they’re like, nah, I don’t like it. Okay, if you keep pushing back on things that change then

Jarrad Grigg

Things that change.

Petar Ceklic

guess what? Three, four years down the road you’re like so out of touch.

Jarrad Grigg

Which yeah, don’t calcify your thinking. Yeah. I

Petar Ceklic

Hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

mean I can’t not use auto layout. It drives me nuts to not use it. but then also, you know, when you like you say, you do MAMCP, you know, the results haven’t been great. But you know, you you you shift to building things rather

Petar Ceklic

Mm.

Jarrad Grigg

than you know creating complex figure layouts as well. I I flip my approach to do that. I just I just actually go straight to build and then I refine from there once I’ve got great requirements. And Figma’s fantastic for concepts. but you know, I I’m not the kind of guy to create really, really intense design systems. I’m not saying that they they they’re not useful. I think like a a really great design system actually means that AI can do its job better. so maybe I need helping hand. But yeah, to have that full full circle does work really well. If you’ve got a really, really strong design system, AI can use that to build things a little bit faster and better. But

Petar Ceklic

Yeah, I just remember how it is. To me, designing, creating a design system for a big client that may take months, to me, that’s not interesting work, right? And I’ve said no to

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

many, many jobs that are like, look, we just need a mega design system. I’m like, yeah, sounds great. Not for me. But

Jarrad Grigg

So

Petar Ceklic

nowadays, it just seems that’s a perfect task for AI, right? these are the rough

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

sort of nuts and bolts, you sort of give it a first pass, I’ll look over it and go look, improve here, improve there but to sit there and

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

just have so many man hours of just creating iterations of forms etc. yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

yeah. I mean at some point the the economics just stop working, right? You you pay someone, you know, eighty, hundred dollars an hour or whatever it is to do that, where you can get an agent to do it for for dollars, right? And and it’s pretty good at that. It’s it’s actually pretty

Petar Ceklic

Hmm. Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

good at creating components in Figma and and naming them accordingly and all that sort of stuff. So I do the same. That’s exactly how I use it. Yeah, great. So on on the on the labor side of things, we sort of talked about that a bit. So Beyond design, where do you see where do you see this going? Like the models get better, capability gets better. You know, we as designers, we create interfaces, right? And experiences. We create a UI for a a human to interact with. does that go away? Do do we have agent to agent where you know we we’re not looking at screens so much anymore? Is our work, do you think, going to be designing different types of systems. or do you think it’s gonna be like I don’t know, vinyl or something? It’s all it’s it’s always gonna be there.

Petar Ceklic

Look, I love future speculation and I love all things technology. So to me, that sounds great, the agent to aspect, but you know, there’s still people that watch free to air TV and we have to, you know, as good designers, we have to accommodate the, it’s for everyone. And so to me, there’s always going to be an interface where it’s a human interfacing with a machine. Whereas agent to agent, that’s easy. They don’t need an interface, right? They just need a port.

Jarrad Grigg

You start to structure the API really nicely.

Petar Ceklic

So yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, so I guess it’s just you th it’s always gonna be there. And perhaps, you know, the the pie gets bigger and you know, our sort of work grows with that pie, right? So maybe there’s another a way that people use services like let’s say you want to book a doctor’s appointment and you no longer need to use the website. You just use your agent to speak to the doctor’s agent and we’ll do it all. You know, you can say, Hey Mia book this doctor’s appointment and it will check

Petar Ceklic

right now.

Jarrad Grigg

what what days would you like and you say that sounds good and it’ll book it. And then you’ve not even used that interface. And so that that as an i as a as an interface doesn’t exist at the moment. but I see that as being like a a a a pie, the piece of the pie that’s going to grow rapidly. But I’m my view is that that pie just gets bigger. More people are using more technology and you know we’ll that interface piece is still really, really important. I don’t see it going away. I just see it changing.

Petar Ceklic

Yeah, and to that point, is chat interface, is that a good interface? Like, if you’re being objective

Jarrad Grigg

If you

Petar Ceklic

and like, thinking about the future, you know, that interface has been the same for the, what, since text messages been around, that’s a long time, right? Surely we can do

Jarrad Grigg

Right.

Petar Ceklic

better than that. What is it though?

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. I mean you raised a good point, especially with design is is you said within that workflow of creating part pack was then I had to start iterating and change

Petar Ceklic

Hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

this board. And and I I’ve made this case before, it’s like that is not the interface for designers, the back and forth chat box box experience, it’s really difficult. And you you’re it’s much easier as a designer just to get in there and do it. So I don’t think we’re there yet. I’m seeing some improvements in that where you have these it generally works really well for web. there’s a bunch of systems that that have been built that you can lay it on top of the output and you can make those changes yourself. But for mobile apps, yeah, there’s definitely nothing there yet. So I think you’re right on that. Is it it is a painful experience and I I I can imagine there’d be a lot of designers thinking the same thing as like, this is just not fun. The output’s rubbish and I have to sit here for hours talking to you know, change that

Petar Ceklic

and forward.

Jarrad Grigg

text color or whatever. and so I guess my response to that is yes, it is awful, but yes, it will get better. And it feels like we’re in this state of flux at the moment with the technology that you know, it’s like the early days of gaming when WASD and mouse control wasn’t there yet, and every th Wolfenstein clone had like a crazy different control scheme showing my age. and then, you know, it it coalesced into something that worked and that became the standard. So I I’m thinking for designers we’ll get there eventually. I’m really hoping that the Figma agent capability is great. and you can use it as a coworker on the board so you can work naturally and just talk to it to experiment and expand. so I haven’t got it yet. I I have applied for for beta access, but we’ll see.

Petar Ceklic

Yeah, and like, know, with Claude design, the people that are really impressed are non-designers. Anyone that actually has a design sense, no, it’s not great. It’s not really, isn’t. I don’t know, like, to me, like all the AI generated design stuff looks very, very similar. And unless you’re doing some really bespoke kind of

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

extensive prompting to make it look smash it out of that purple, know, blurry kind of look. It looks very similar.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, you you’re right. It it again it’s that point of like if if the tooling become if that becomes accessible to everybody, then you see a lot more of it. because it’s quite cost effective to to produce, right? It was it’s like this might be quite an obscure reference, but in Illustrator there’s a default path brush. it’s like a little paintbrush swatch. And I’ve seen that in so many logos all over the world. because it’s the default one. You know, it’s just that And and no one bothers to like maybe you should, you know, brush it yourself on a piece of paper and scan it in and create your own custom asset. They just click the button. And I think you’re right. I’ve seen the same thing with claw design. I was somewhat critical of it. and yeah, just general AI generation for design in in in total is is if people can just type in a box and get a result and they don’t have the decade of experience, they’re just gonna say that looks great.

Petar Ceklic

I don’t know if you can see this. know, cloud design is awesome. know, like, and like

Jarrad Grigg

I think it’s an opportunity for designers, right? Yeah, here we go.

Petar Ceklic

Adrian said, we’re back in 2016 guys. it’s, to me, this is

Jarrad Grigg

Okay.

Petar Ceklic

not impressive at all, right? Terrible. But some people will, these are the people that say that your job is numbered, right? Design is dead, et cetera. And if this

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

is what we’re fighting against, I think we’re safe.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, yeah. I think I think I think I think so too. Capability gets better but yeah, I think it’s got a long way to go. And and again, we can use it too. So we can we can work faster and better too. All right, well look, Pete, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. we’ll we’ll wrap it up here and I’ll let you know how it all goes. But yeah, thanks thanks for running us through your your process. Is there anything else you would would want to Let designers know. Junior designers getting in the industry being scared of AI.

Petar Ceklic

Look, I think it’s one of those tools that is probably the easiest tool to use because once you’re confused, you just ask it to explain itself. Like what other

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

tool could you do that with? Like if you told me 10 years ago, we’d be learning tools to do that. No, it’s the easiest tool to use and it’s so rewarding. So I would think that as a junior designer, you have to get into it. Otherwise

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Petar Ceklic

you might be changing careers.

Jarrad Grigg

All right. We’ll leave it there. Thanks for

Petar Ceklic

Yeah. On that note.

Jarrad Grigg

watching.