A little promo video made by one of the challengers, Karim Saab, for an Arena match within the @neue_academy community. He went up against his teacher @niccolomiranda and all I have to say is that it was one of best speed builds I've ever seen. The amount of talent in this community is unreal. @stu_smith from @itsoffbrand was one of the judges and even he was impressed. More coming soon...

"How did you do that?" "INSANE." "That would've taken like—" That was the live reaction from a match from @TheDigitalThird's Arena match with @MagicPathAI.

If you haven't heard of this opinion yet, you better get used to it. Everyone's about to become a creative director if you're using AI for your designs. The ones who have a clear and concise vocabulary of what they want to create will be the winners. Clip from my last Arena match: building "Atelier Noir" a full luxury watch site, live in @MagicPathAI while the other builders watched. Develop your eye for good judgement and you'll do well in this next era. Check out what @just_kaz had to say 👇

I was on a sales call last week. My target was $30K. I closed at $10K. First-time client. I wanted to establish the relationship, so I accepted their counter with no pushback. I've sold creative services for years. Ask me last month, I'd have said I was solid at this part. Last week said otherwise. So I'm doing something about it, and inviting others in the same spot. In a month I'm hosting Chris Do in Vancouver: a full day on pricing, objections, staying in the conversation instead of retreating when it gets uncomfortable. Some part of me kept asking: shouldn't I already have this figured out if I'm the one hosting it? Honestly? I haven't mastered this. That's exactly why I booked him, rather learn from someone who has than keep paying tuition one deal at a time. Tomorrow, 4PM PT / 7PM ET, Chris and I go live to talk through it in the open. Bring your own sales challenges, wherever you get stuck. We're opening the floor for a live Q&A after.

I want to be upfront about something. I was nervous about this one. Normally when I run a competition on The Arena, it's well planned. I know roughly what's going to happen before we go live. The Gauntlet was the opposite. A format I'd never run, a brief that was honestly a bit unreasonable, and designers who had only a few days notice. There was no playbook. We genuinely did not know what we'd get. And it was risky because it wasn't just my reputation on the line. I had design legends like @niccolomiranda and @josephberry88 stepping into something completely unproven, live, in front of an audience. If it fell apart, their names were attached too. And I didn't want to misrepresent @MagicPathAI either, since they backed me to try something this new. But they all said yes anyway. And I think that says something about the moment we're in. This is the era to take the risk and run the experiment in public, even when you're not sure it'll work. The alternative is making safe, predictable things while the most interesting stuff happens to people willing to look a little foolish first. So we ran it. And what we got was pretty incredible. The setup: four designers on one team, one brief. Rebrand the entire NYC MTA subway with four deliverables: a brand identity system, a website, a web app, and an interactive asset. 45 minutes on the clock, live in front of thousands. A rebrand of this scale normally takes months. We gave them 45 minutes. Here's what I watched happen. Three built in Figma. @rlyupthere locked the logo and palette. Joseph worked on the website. @niccolomiranda prototyped a spatial web app, then wired up a live head-tracking demo on his webcam, controlling the subway map with his hands and head on stream. The room lost it. And @noormtir was the AI layer for all of them. She pulled everyone's Figma work into @MagicPathAI in real time, added motion, and built a folded interactive map that surprised everyone watching. While three of them built, she was multiplying all of it at once. That was my biggest takeaway. You don't need your whole team deep in AI tools. You need one person who is, and they become a force multiplier for everyone around them. I won't pretend what they made was a finished, client-ready deliverable. It wasn't. But the thinking, the speed, the way they moved together under a live clock was genuinely worth seeing. @AlexAperios was one of our commentators. He's someone other designers trust and respect. Even @designertom calls him "a secret weapon." At the end of the match he said: "To do what you've done in 45 minutes is insane. You'd spend weeks on something this impressive." If a first attempt with barely any prep looked like this, imagine the ceiling when preparation matches ambition. This is the future of design teams: humans and AI building side by side, one person amplifying the work of many, small groups shipping what once took months. We're at the very beginning of something special. That's what @TheDigitalThird's Arena is for.