Roy Quilor

The design job market is rough right now. So I built Booo: a short list of software companies with a design culture and a London presence, with a note on how each one works, sourced from their own pages and YouTube talks. Who am I missing? Inspired by the conversations on Dive Radio with @designertom and @ridd_design

An agency founder asked if I could fix a broken React/Next.js app myself, without AI. I can't. Before AI I could do HTML and CSS. So I changed my headline from "A designer who ships" to "Product designer. Building and shipping with AI." Is it better to be precise or to sound impressive?

Websites are boring? Here’s one way to add personality. Hover the mascot → play button → dot-matrix visualizer of its theme song. Shipped with ElevenLabs Music + Cursor + Claude + ChatGPT.

On Booo, every company is a pile of papers. A note, a post, the careers page, a video. Each has its own shape: notes are 5:4 and yellow, posts are portrait, videos are 16:9, sites are a tiny browser.

Booo's mascot is 24 by 24 pixels. Five sizes: 16, 24, 32, 48, 72. Eight states: idle, sleep, thinking, loading, waiting, success, error. Each state is a few cells changing, in CSS. No images. It's also the loading screen, favicon and 404. Which state would you add?

Meet booo.app

I just turned a static SVG icon into a hover animation with AI. No manual keyframes. No motion designer. For the final polish on something I’m shipping, I took the SVG, shared some resources, and inspo and got something I + agent can riff on. Before I would ship static logos because proper hover states used to take real time or get skipped entirely. But for busy founders and small teams who need to ship fast and look intentional, a simple hover animation on the logo or key icon is one of the highest-leverage details left. It makes the product feel considered instead of unfinished. I used to leave these static. Now the barrier is low enough that I’m adding them as standard. Curious how other designers are handling hover states and micro-interactions right now, still doing them manually, or have you found a faster workflow that actually fits into a ship cycle?

3D & shader tools everywhere. I am still iterating on auth. Cursor and Supabase got the flow shipping. AI fatigue sent me back to Figma to design the real states, then back into Cursor with Figma MCP. Not exciting. Essential. Light and dark of create account.

Back from Japan. Thinking about moving from Product Designer to Design Engineer. Less title, more: where do I actually fit, and what do I still need to close. If you hire freelance/contract and you’re stuck at the design + dev intersection: - UI is not consistent, team is shipping fast - Shadcn/ui migrated, not adopted • agents shipping UI not fully trusted • no designer on PRs, so things drift Last job: pitched shadcn, semi migrated it with a dev via PRs. Client loved the system. Then they didn’t need me. So I started selling the next layer. Guardrails, agent rules, and how teams actually use a DS when habits take over. DMs open. Seed / Series A.

A few things I’d tell a designer starting a solo role at an AI company: - Know the frontend stack the team uses and prototype with it with an AI agent. - Talk to as many engineers as possible about how they currently build UI. One person told me ~90% of a feature was Claude. - Push product people on the user problem and the “why,” not just the solution. - Share progress async with short screenshare videos. It keeps everyone oriented when things move fast.

The new design system problem. When developers can prototype and ship UI features extremely fast with Claude, a new problem appears: The AI doesn’t reliably follow the design system or codebase conventions. We started seeing drift, inconsistent components, patterns that ignored what already existed, small decisions that compounded. I began pushing for better guardrails (improving the claude.md and clearer system rules), but my time on the project ended while that work was still early. Design systems used to be mainly for humans. Now they also have to constrain the AI.

When the team starts relying on AI more than you. Something that happened quietly: In the early days, an engineering team I worked with wasn’t heavily using AI for UI. Once they started leaning on Claude, they needed me less for day-to-day screens. Not dramatic. Just a gradual shift. The role started moving from “make the interfaces” toward “set the system and the constraints so the AI (and the team) doesn’t drift.” If you’re a designer inside an AI-heavy product team, this transition is probably coming for you too.