House of Gai

House of Gai Master AI-driven design with our courses and join a vibrant community of forward thinking creatives.

08/13/2026

Brand process backed by strategy and research - all inside of Figma Weave.

Commenting Branding for the course guide

08/10/2026

AI can’t come up with a bold idea. Correct. That’s not the argument against learning it.

Gustavo Panichi is a design director at SketchDeck, and he was the one leading his company’s AI rollout while privately not buying a word of it. His line on the intake form, before week one:

“I’m skeptical about AI coming up with bold or disruptive ideas.”

Then he built ARC, a gym brand for Lisbon. The research came first: Perplexity mining audience patterns and reviews, a trained GPT pressure-testing the strategy. It found a city stuck between two bad options, party studios with no depth and corporate chains with no soul. So the brand sells neither. It sells The Better State, and every visual call answers that finding. Most of what he generated, deleted. 3 to 4 hours a week for ten weeks.

From his own case study:

“AI doesn’t replace craft — it amplifies it, giving more room for judgment, taste, and refinement.”

Send this to whoever at your company got handed the AI brief.
💾 Save it for the next time someone tells you the tools will do the thinking.

Comment BRANDING and the course guide lands in your DMs 👇

September cohort. Work: Gustavo Panichi, Design Director.

08/07/2026

Nano Banana does a nicer risograph. It can’t do this.

Gen effect node is new in Figma Weave. You describe a visual effect in plain
language and it builds it, plus the sliders to control it. I chained two of them,
a banded illustration pass and a riso pass, then ran the whole chain over a
Seedance animation.

Same effect, same settings, every frame. That’s the part a single image model
can’t touch.

The riso on its own is fine, not brilliant. The stacking is the story.

💾 Save this if you’re weighing up AI design tools.

Code AWood30, 30% off. Affiliate code, I get a cut, I’d be posting this anyway.

08/05/2026

Hey Studio built a working design app in five minutes.

Not a prototype. A tool their studio actually uses to generate their own graphics.

Veronica’s point on our call: the idea took longer than the build. Five minutes was the easy part.

Every graphic designer has one repetitive job they’d automate if they could. A moodboard sorter. A palette extractor. A brief-to-deck starter.

You can build that yourself now. You just need someone to show you where to start.

Should I run this as a free demo inside the Creative Futures Hub?

Comment FUTURE and if enough of you want it, I’ll set a date.

💾 Save this and send it to a designer who’d say yes with you.

07/31/2026

Most people set their AI up to agree with them. Cecilia trains theirs to argue.

Cecilia Righini runs , a non-profit studio in Edinburgh built
for women and LGBTQ+ led organisations. Their setup does one job: find what
they missed. Not confirm what they already think.

💾 Save this if your AI has never once told you no.

Drop VIP in the comments for the full session link 👇

07/30/2026

Graphic designers… are we okay? 😭

I made this after hearing “it’s just one tiny change” one too many times.

The broken pencil. The printer hug. The face planted on the laptop. And now clients giving feedback with ChatGPT.

The images were made in Midjourney… but the idea, art direction and emotional damage were very much human.

Which one feels most like you today?

Want to learn how I turn an idea like this into a consistent Midjourney campaign? Comment MIDJOURNEY and I’ll send you the course details.

07/29/2026

Six illustrations. One node. Nothing changed between them but the input icon.

Figma Weave shipped Gen effect node today. You describe a visual effect in plain language and it builds it, plus the sliders to control it. This one takes a flat black vector icon and fills it with flowing colour bands. Same node across all six Australian animals, settings untouched.

That’s not a filter, it’s a system you own.

💾 Save this for the next brief that needs a cohesive icon set.

Code AWood30, 30% off. Affiliate code, I get a cut, I’d be posting this anyway.

07/27/2026

Who gets designed for, and who gets left out?

It’s the question most briefs never ask, and AI is about to make it much harder to ignore.

Cecilia Righini kept hitting the same wall early in their design career. Bias, exclusion, being asked to make themselves smaller to fit. At some point it stopped looking like bad luck and started looking like the design. So at 25 they built Studio Lutalica, because the studio they needed didn’t exist.

The part that hits for me: design decides who gets seen, trusted and safe in the world. Inclusive design isn’t an accessibility checklist you bolt on at the end. It’s part of every brief you’ve ever worked on, from brand identity to art direction to the images you generate without thinking twice.

And as AI tools settle into the design process, those calls stop being individual judgement and start being defaults, baked into the software before you open it.

Cecilia’s talk on inclusive design in the age of AI is free, tomorrow at 6pm UK, and it’s recorded.

Comment FUTURE and I’ll send you the link. And send this to the graphic designer you’d want in the room with you 👇

07/21/2026

He signed up calling himself a bad student. Then he built one of the sharpest brand identities this cohort produced.

Simon Tapson is an in-house designer. Corporate world, where the creative thinking quietly gets filed away. He came in thinking AI was one thing: a faster way to make pictures.

Then he made RASA. A curated Southeast Asian pantry for Melbourne CBD that competes on judgement, not range. Market research in Perplexity. A virtual client built in ChatGPT to pressure test the positioning. Visual system through Midjourney and Weave. Every call that mattered, his.

In his words:
“it doesn’t have to just be all output - it can help expand but also focus my thinking”

The hard part was never making the options. It was knowing which ones deserved to survive. The taste was always his.

Want the course link? Comment BRANDING and it lands in your DMs.

Process nerds: what’s the last idea you killed that you’re still glad you killed? 👇

💾 Save this for the next time AI has you second-guessing your own eye.

Work: Simon Tapson, in-house designer.

07/15/2026

ChatGPT Work just launched. Claude Cowork went mobile the same week. Designers, breathe.

Both are Al agents that finish multi-step creative work, not chat. And which one to learn is the wrong question. If you can write a strong brief, you can drive either one. That’s the skill, and you’ve had it since design school.
Live Claude Cowork demo this Monday in the Creative Futures Hub.

Comment FUTURE and the link lands in your DMS

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