House of Gai

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

08/19/2026

Free design summit, 26 speakers, and the replays are free for 48 hours.

The Future of Design, 25 to 28 August. Upgrade to the Boss Bundle within 30 minutes of signing up and it’s half price, with lifetime access to every session.

💾 Save this before the price moves. Comment BOSS for the link.

08/19/2026

Free four-day design summit, 26 speakers, and I’m one of them.

The Future of Design runs 25 to 28 August. Chris Do, Debbie Millman, and 24 other people who actually do this for a living. Free ticket, free live Q&A after every session, replays free for 48 hours.

The upgrade is the Boss Bundle: lifetime access plus every speaker’s paid resource. Mine is 3 months of VIP in the Creative Futures Hub, $147 on its own.

💾 Save this. Comment BOSS and I’ll send the link. Affiliate link, and I’d rather tell you.

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 👇

Address

New York, NY
10036

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when House of Gai posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to House of Gai:

Shortcuts

Share