Archita Bose

Product & Brand Designer at Barion · Magazine No. 001

building before ai

My fleeting attention span and I are constantly building more than one thing at a time. It is how I keep myself engaged, excited and exploring. Currently, I work full time at a Fintech company in Budapest and we’re launching a huge web app design by yours truly. I freelance on branding, website, and web app projects, helping companies find their footing in their industries. In my free time I build little web apps of my own, and I built my portfolio this year using Claude. I'm also growing a small community on Instagram where I connect with the designers, share ideas, try out new tech, and share the design side of my life.

origin what changed

AI is constantly surprising me. My first use was probably like everyone else's: opening up ChatGPT and asking, "Do you think this is a good decision?" But the first time I was truly impressed was when I used AI to build me a web application, and that was only a couple of months after that first silly use. I built [Recipe Book Site](https://www.recipe-book.site), which I think only I use now, mainly to store and customise recipes on.

new question 5

My physical workspace is clean and tidy on the photo, but a mess on a regular basis, but content creators regularly conceal reality, so this is just that.

ai stack

Two or three years ago my stack was Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Blender, Figma, and Jitter. Now it's Figma, Claude, Claude Code, Notion, Jitter, Blender, Illustrator, Photoshop, CapCut, and Figma Weave. What shifted is that I got a lot more into building working products, and the whole stack changed with it — every app I use now works differently than it used to, because they've all got AI integrated. That was the pivotal point. It mainly helps me bridge the gap between design and dev, and there are some things I just hate doing that it handles for me.

ai projects

I use AI across a wide range of work. On the writing and admin side, it helps me draft contracts, collect and organise research, keep brand guidelines in order, and structure content for websites and guideline docs, and I've automated a lot of my email responses too. In design, I lean on agents for the busywork - generating placeholder contact details in UI, that kind of thing - and I prototype with AI constantly, at every stage of the process. It also handles a fair amount of asset generation for me: profile images, specific brand imagery, and short video clips. And then on the build side, I use it for website and web app development right through to deployment.

recent ship

Recently, I shipped my own [design portfolio](https://www.architabose.site). This I think was my most interesting use of AI thus far. I really pushed to see how much I could outsource. I designed the pages myself, I think I will probably continue to gatekeep that part of the process. This was mainly landing page and project page structure, deciding how to handle navigation and interactions. I collected all of my content on Notion, fed the link to that page to Figma AI Agent and it created all the project pages with the copy it pulled within structure/ template that I created. This was the biggest time saving game changer. I used Claude to build the whole site from Figma frames. My favourite part is imagining and asking for specific interactions and seeing it come to life.

ship timeline

I think an AI agent has the same place in my design file as an intern would, helping me out with repetitive or less complex thinking tasks that I'd then go in and tweak later for finer details. However, it takes the place of a senior dev when it comes to developing a site from the ground up. AI also helps me a lot during discovery phases, organising cluttered information in my mind, handling repetitive tasks, and being the developer to my designer.

impressed by

I love when people use AI to make things that feel very human, very tactile and generally whimsical. It’s a bit contradictory, but it reminds me that we’re all here to create something no matter what the tool. I love [Queen's Journal](https://queensjournal.app/) one because it has conventional UX patterns and I always enjoy a rule breaker.

who taught you

I don’t really say no to anything I already did before. It’s more like, starting to do new things. Like developing apps and such. I guess editing word documents is a beast I refuse to fight.

builders watching

I love whatever [Meshtime](https://www.instagram.com/meshtimes) is doing. She’s always on some wildly creative side project and is such a trendsetter of the industry.

new question 2

I think my greatest design influence, especially in Product Design is Ketyi Balazs. He’s like an unofficial design mentor to me, and taught me in my masters in graphic design course. I still have small habits in my design process that come from advice he gave me.

biggest misconception

So many. I think everytime I try out any video generation stuff, I, first of all, feel like, super guilty and I also feel that having a knowledge gap even with AI, will get in the way of achieving high quality, tasteful end products. I have a definite knowledge and “vocabulary” gap when it comes to video or photo editing and hence, also generation.