The Old Way Was Slow for a Reason
We stopped using Figma about six months ago. Not because we think design tools are bad. We stopped because, across roughly a dozen landing page and app projects, we found ourselves spending lots of time on work that now takes significantly less. At Dentro, we now design with AI to build landing pages using AI tools like Cursor, and the results ship faster with fewer revision cycles than our old process delivered.
This especially makes sense when you're not a professional designer, as you'll get up and running much much faster than doing the work from scratch. In this article we want to show you how we approach design with AI at Dentro and hopefully give you a few pointers on how you can do the same.
This guide is perfect for founders, marketers, and business leaders who commission landing pages but don't design them. It should give you a clear picture of what design looks like when AI handles the craft – and why the old assumptions about timelines, costs, and who you need to hire not necessarily apply as they used to.
The approach works well for zero-to-one landing pages, product pages, and marketing sites where speed matters. It works less well for complex design systems, brand identity work, or projects requiring deep visual consistency across dozens of touch points. AI of course also helps with that, but to a lesser extent than fresh landing page and product designs.
Why Design Projects Took 2-4 Weeks
We've been through this cycle plenty of times. Gathering inspiration, creating mood boards, exploring options. Then building mockups in Figma. Reviewing, tweaking, revising. Maybe two or three rounds of this. Then translating those mockups into code. More review cycles. More revisions. The problem wasn't complexity – it was the gap between thinking and making. Especially for us as non-professional designers, translating what's in our head to an actual design has always been a bit of a struggle. We'd have a vision in our heads, spend hours trying to realize it in Figma, then spend more hours implementing it in code. Each translation step introduced friction. By the time we had a live page, the original vision had passed through multiple filters of execution. Two to four weeks was actually fast for this process. Many projects took longer.
What We Were Actually Spending Time On
Here's what's interesting about the old model. We weren't just investing time in taste or creative direction. We were spending hours on craft and execution. Learning Figma's quirks. Writing clean CSS. Making a button look exactly right. These are real skills that took years to develop. The bottleneck was technical ability. We had to know how to execute the vision ourselves, and that knowledge took time to build. Every new technique meant more learning, more practice, more iteration. This made sense when execution was hard. But execution isn't hard anymore. The constraint has moved somewhere else entirely.
How AI Tools Change the Design Bottleneck
AI tools like Cursor can now write deployable code from natural language descriptions. We don't mean rough prototypes or demo-quality work. We mean code that ships to production.
On our recent projects, we've consistently hit Lighthouse accessibility scores above 90 after running manual QA that includes things like color contrast verification, and cross-browser checks in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Your results will depend on the complexity of your page and how thoroughly you test.
This shifts the economics of design work. When execution becomes cheap and fast, the crucial part becomes knowing what to ask for. Taste and communication are now the scarce resources. Technical execution is abundant.
If there's anything you take away from this article, it is this.
How We Actually Design at Dentro
Now let's jump straight in. We will tell you a bit about how we currently do design. No need to follow this 1:1, feel free to tweak the process to what works well for you.
Brainstorm the Design with AI
Our process starts in Cursor or Claude Code with a fresh project. Before any design happens, we brainstorm with the AI. This part is actually crucial because it lays the foundation for everything that follows. We talk through the purpose, the audience, the feeling we're going for. We also research. We find designs online that resonate with what we want, share them with the AI, and explain what we like and don't like about each one. "This typography feels right but the layout is too busy." "Love the color palette here but the buttons feel dated." This back-and-forth helps the AI build a clear picture of the direction we're heading.
Build the First Version
Once both we and the AI have the vision locked in, we start with one main page. We let the AI create a content structure first. Then we let it design – no functionality yet, only visual appearance. This first page is critical because it establishes the core components: fonts, buttons, color system, spacing. These elements will carry across every other page, so we really need to nail them here. Then we iterate. Sometimes we're making small tweaks like "the header needs more weight", "pull back on that accent color". Sometimes we're redoing whole sections from scratch. Often we'll have the AI generate three or more completely different versions so we can compare approaches side by side. This is something that would have taken days in the old process. Now it takes minutes and it's super helpful in order to quickly decide on a feasible direction and start working on the details.
Tweak to Perfection
When we land on a version we love, we perfect it. We add animations, transitions, micro-interactions – the details that make a page feel alive rather than static. AI is also surprisingly good at creating custom illustrations or animated graphics that fit the established style. For example, have a look at the animated illustrations on our service page (e.g. AI Process Automation or AI-Ready Infrastructure). The whole thing happens in code from the start. No Figma. No design handoffs. No translation layer where things get lost. Every iteration is the real page. You're not looking at a picture of what it might look like – you're looking at the actual thing and can immediately test on different browsers and screen sizes.
To give you an idea which results we are seeing with this approach. The design for the current Dentro website has been developed from scratch in less than 10 hours. It is unique and not based upon a template. Another example are landing page we did for NoteThisDown, DentroChat or Vidanis.
The decisive Factors: Taste and Communication
So, if execution is no longer the bottleneck, what is? We've found it comes down to two things. Taste and communication. Neither requires a design degree. Neither requires years of formal training. But both require something that can't be faked.
You need to have spent time looking at design, caring about it, developing opinions. And you need to be able to articulate those opinions in ways that translate into action. These skills were always valuable. Now they're what determines quality.
Taste: Knowing Good From Bad
Taste isn't mysterious. It's pattern recognition built over time. You develop it by looking at thousands of websites, noticing what works, caring about the details. Why does this page feel premium? Why does that one feel cheap? What makes typography feel confident versus playful?
You don't need to know how to create these effects. But you need to be able to recognize them when you see them. This is good news for people who've spent years commissioning design work. You've likely been developing taste without realizing it. Every time you said "that's not quite right" or "this feels off," you were exercising judgment that now has direct value.
Communication: Describing What You Want
The second skill is equally hard to develop. You need to be able to describe what you want. Also in terms of feeling, not only technical language. Saying "this feels cramped, it needs room to breathe" is more useful than "add more padding". Saying "the typography feels too playful for a B2B audience" gets you further than "change the font". The AI can translate vibes into specifics. But it can't read your mind. Your job is to articulate aesthetic intent clearly enough that the AI can act on it. This is a learnable skill, but it requires practice. You get better at it by doing it.
When taste and communication are strong, iteration becomes your competitive advantage. You can explore more directions, refine more aggressively, and converge on something good faster than any traditional process allows. Here's what that looks like in practice.
Real Results From Non-Designers
We've built real sites using this approach, and they ship faster with more iteration cycles than our old process allowed. When a revision takes minutes instead of days, you make more revisions. On recent projects, we've gone through eight to twelve iterations before shipping, compared to two or three with the old model. When you make more revisions, the final product improves because you can explore directions you would have cut for time.
How We Built dentroai.com and note-this-down.com
Neither of these sites (like any of our sites and apps, for what it's worth) was built by a trained designer. They were built by someone with a good eye developed over years of necessity. The process started with a conversation about purpose and audience (meaning: a conversation between a human and AI).
- Who's coming to this page?
- What should they feel?
- What action should they take?
Then structure. Then components like colors, fonts, and buttons. Then the full page. Then iteration. Each site came together in roughly three to four hours of focused work, spread across eight to ten iteration cycles.
You can visit both sites and judge the visual quality against your own standards.
What the Output Actually Looks Like
This approach works well for certain types of projects:
- Zero-to-one landing pages where you're starting fresh
- Product pages that need to ship fast
- Marketing sites where speed matters
- MVPs where resources are better invested elsewhere
- Internal tools and interfaces
It works slightly less well for complex design systems, brand identity work, or projects requiring deep visual consistency across many touch points. We're honest about the limitations. But for the projects where it works, it works remarkably well. The quality ceiling is higher than you'd expect because iteration is so cheap.
What This Means for Business Leaders
The practical impact is straightforward: faster iteration changes how you work. And independent of whether you do design work yourself or commission it to some agency, it is important to understand that the old rulebook does not apply anymore.
Updating Your Cost and Timeline Assumptions
One key take-away we want to stress: A project that would have taken an agency two to four weeks can now happen in a day. Or an afternoon. We've done this repeatedly, though your mileage will vary based on complexity and how clear your vision is going in.
The cost implications are obvious. But the timeline implications might matter just as well. Speed creates options. When you can build a landing page in hours, you can test ideas you wouldn't have tested before. You can respond to market changes faster. You can ship experiments without committee approval. The constraint shifts from "can we afford to build this?" to "do we know what we want?". That's a very different constraint with very different solutions.
When to Use This Approach
Not every project requires to do design with AI. Complex brand work still benefits from experienced designers (though they'll ideally be using AI heavily as well, more on this in the next section).
But for zero-to-one pages, for MVPs, for marketing experiments, for anything where speed matters and resources are better invested elsewhere, this approach makes total sense. The question isn't whether design with AI works. It's whether the approach works for your specific situation. And more often than you might think, it does.
Designers Are Not Dead
We need to be clear about something. This isn't a story about designers becoming obsolete. It's a story about what skills matter most. Taste, visual thinking, understanding of hierarchy and flow: all of these still matter.
What changed is the execution layer. Designers who adopt these tools will be more productive than ever. They'll be able to iterate faster, try more ideas, deliver better results. The ceiling for great designers just got higher. The floor for acceptable design also got higher. Both things are true.
Great Designers With AI Will Be Incredible
Imagine a designer with twenty years of experience and refined taste, now able to execute ideas in minutes instead of hours. That person becomes extraordinarily valuable. They can explore more directions. They can refine more aggressively. They can deliver work that would have been impossible under old time constraints.
The best designers will embrace these tools and become even better. The designers who defined themselves purely by execution skills face a harder path. But design was never just about execution. It was always about judgment. The tools just made that truth more obvious.
A Practical Starting Point
If you want to test this yourself, here's a concrete way to start:
- Pick one low-stakes page: a campaign landing page, an internal tool, or a new digital product you got in mind.
- Define success criteria before you start: feels right for the brand, communicates clearly, looks good enough to ship.
- Write your first prompt describing the vibe, not the specs: how should it feel, who is it for, what action matters.
- Generate version one and note what's wrong, and what's right.
- Iterate three to five times, refining your language each round.
- Run accessibility and performance checks before shipping (we check Lighthouse scores, and color contrast at minimum).
- Ship it, measure against your success metrics, and decide if the approach works for your next project.
The tools have changed. The timeline has changed. The question of who can ship good design has changed. What hasn't changed is the need for someone who cares about the details, who can tell when something feels right, and who won't settle for "good enough." That's the real bottleneck now – not software, not technical skill, but taste and the willingness to iterate until it's actually good.
Here's why this matters even if you never plan to design anything yourself: understanding this new approach changes how you evaluate and commission design work. If you're approving budgets, setting timelines, or hiring agencies, you need to know what's actually possible now. Many established agencies still run the old process (weeks of back-and-forth, multiple rounds through Figma, inflated timelines), because that's what they've always done, not because it's necessary.
Try it once. Spend an afternoon building a simple landing page with AI. Not because you need to become a designer, but because experiencing the speed and quality firsthand recalibrates your expectations. You'll know what questions to ask. You'll have realistic (high) standards instead of accepting "this is just how long design takes".
And when you do commission design work, ask how they're using AI in their process. If the answer is "we don't", that's worth noting. Not because AI is magic, but because it suggests they might not be keeping up with tools that have fundamentally changed what's possible.
The craft of design isn't going anywhere. But the gatekeeping is. And that's a good thing for everyone who has taste, cares about quality, and is willing to put in the work to get the details right.