Sara Vienna - Taste, Meaning, and How to Stand Out in an AI world
Dive Club 🤿6 Syys 2025

Sara Vienna - Taste, Meaning, and How to Stand Out in an AI world

What does it take to make people feel something with design...?

This week's guest is kind of an expert on the question.

Sara Vienna (https://x.com/sravienna?lang=en) , the Chief Design Officer at Metalab, talks about the responsibility that designers have to shape this AI world that we're entering without losing the heartbeat of a brand.

We don't hold back on the current state of the industry and what it feels like to be a designer today.

Some highlights:

- How to not get swept up in current design trends

- How Metalab has adopted AI workflows internally

- Strategies for leveraging AI to understand research data

- What it takes to put meaning at the heart of a brand/product

- How Metalab invests in the collective taste of the design org

- Where Sara derives signals and how she filters out the noise

- Being late on a trend is bad taste even more so than ugly design

- + a lot more

- Windsurf https://windsurf.com/) and [Suno](https://suno.com/home?wpsrc=Google%20AdWords&wpcid=22042553892&wpscid=173890219393&wpcrid=726251362516&wpkwid=kwd-2827037661&wpkwn=suno&wpkmatch=e&wpsnetn=g&gad_campaignid=22042553892&gbraid=0AAAAA9pWpduFan7icL90FczgyQploCsYi) rebrands

- Jony Ive’s Stripe Sessions talk (https://stripe.com/sessions/2025/a-conversation-with-sir-jony-ive)

- Erica Hall’s book “Just Enough Research” (https://www.mulebooks.com/just-enough-research)

- Anthropic’s Machines of Loving Grace paper (https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace)

- Blok for focus (https://blok.so/)

Jaksot(184)

Karl Koch - Tips for New Design Engineers

Karl Koch - Tips for New Design Engineers

Get 10% off Karl's Become a Design Engineer course: https://join.dive.club/karlToday’s episode is with Karl Koch (https://x.com/_kejk?lang=en) and it’s filled with practical tips for new design engine...

4 Helmi 45min

Why Rive is a big deal for the future of design

Why Rive is a big deal for the future of design

This episode is a deep dive into Rive—the engine powering experiences like Spotify Wrapped, next-gen car dashboards, and so much more.After hearing Luigi and Guido Rosso’s vision for the future of int...

2 Helmi 43min

Best AI Coding Tools for Designers

Best AI Coding Tools for Designers

One of the biggest parts of my design practice is knowing which tool to reach for when coding with AI.There are a lot of options and they’re changing every week 😅So in this episode, I break down:1. T...

28 Tammi 19min

Xavier Jack - How To Vibe Code in 3D

Xavier Jack - How To Vibe Code in 3D

Sometimes you open up a website and it's so good that you're left wondering... how the heck did they pull that off?In this episode the designer of the original Amie website, Xavier Jack (https://x.com...

26 Tammi 45min

Matt Sellers - What a top 1% design portfolio looks like

Matt Sellers - What a top 1% design portfolio looks like

Last month the head of design at Lovable, Nad Chishtie, walked us through the portfolio of one of their recent design hires, Matt Sellers.So today's episode is a behind-the-scenes of what it actually ...

21 Tammi 33min

Stephen Haney - The 2026 AI Design Field Report (tools, process, and what's working)

Stephen Haney - The 2026 AI Design Field Report (tools, process, and what's working)

There's been a heck of a debate around the future of coding and design tools lately... but what's actually happening inside of today's top teams?Where is all this headed and how does the future of our...

19 Tammi 48min

Dessn - Is this the future of AI prototyping?

Dessn - Is this the future of AI prototyping?

Gab and Nim are the co-founders of a startup called Dessn which allows designers to prototype in the context of their production codebase (without any of the setup).So I asked them to hook it up to th...

14 Tammi 34min

Henry Modisett - Inside Perplexity's design culture

Henry Modisett - Inside Perplexity's design culture

Someone asked me recently... if you had to join a design team, who would you want to work for?And my answer was easy... PerplexitySo today's episode with Henry Modisett (https://x.com/henrymodis) (Per...

9 Tammi 47min