Colin Dunn
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Episodes
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First of Kind · Electric Feel with Colin Dunn
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Will AI Replace Brand Guidelines?
Colin Dunn says AI models are going to replace brand guidelines, and the entire creative production process is going to be remade in the image of AI. The end state is a person on the team who crafts the narrative, the story, and the vision, while the rest of the company self-serves and generates the on-brand assets it needs. Almost every function in a company is a customer of a brand team, because everyone needs new content, whether a presentation, a flyer, or swag for an off-site.
The way there starts by winning creative directors, who hold the power inside the company. Canva is trying to sell a tool that lets graphic designers and creative directors pick templates a marketing team can sel
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How Big Would Visual Electric Be Without AI?
Colin Dunn says Visual Electric is about half the size it would be in a pre-AI world. Rewind the clock five years and a team that could output the same amount of product at the same speed would have to be twice the size it is today.
Tools like Cursor are why the team can stay smaller. The engineers say they are twice as productive with Cursor than they were before Cursor. One customer support person working 10 hours a month handles all the volume, and that probably would not be possible without AI. Across the company, people are becoming more productive and full stack, because the tools let them extend into adjacent jobs.
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How Did Colin Dunn Get Into Graphic Design?
Colin Dunn got into graphic design by making NBA fan art in high school, before he knew the work was a career. He made fan art of Jason Richardson, LeBron James, and Michael Jordan, then wallpapers and websites. Internet forums and a site called West Coast Remix, where people downloaded wallpapers, connected him with other creatives. He treated it as a hobby.
His oldest sister, Katie, asked if he had considered art school, around his junior year of high school. A friend of hers was a type designer who had gone to art school, he thinks RISD, and that made a career feel possible. He looked up the average income of a graphic designer and saw he could expect to make as much as $35,000 a year wh
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Why Does Taste Make Designers Great Founders?
Colin Dunn says designers are uniquely positioned in 2025 to be great founders because taste is the new skill. AI is elevating everyone's ability to create, so the differentiator is who knows what great looks like, and designers have a huge advantage.
People shy away from founding when they picture one-on-ones, taxes, and pitching. Motivation shows up when the work serves a larger mission and goal. He has been every job at Visual Electric, including office manager and customer support, and at no point had to force himself because the work served the larger goal. He gets to design the product and also the experience of working at Visual Electric and of being a customer of Visual Electric.
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What Is the Best Career Advice for Motivation?
Colin Dunn calls the best career advice getting in touch with what is uniquely motivating and figuring out how to optimize for it. He always understood that autonomy was important for his motivation, and he does not know whether he was listening to it as much as he should have. He assumes the same pattern is not true for everyone, because people have different configurations of what motivates them.
Ask where someone wants to be in five years or in 10 years and most people cannot answer, even if the plan is to design a career as a path to getting there. Most people collect a set of offers, run a pros and cons analysis, and choose the option that seems best. The habit has a LinkedIn quality.
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What Surprised Colin Dunn About Being the Designer?
Colin Dunn says the most surprising thing about the CEO and chief designer role is how weak his attachment to being the designer has been. He expected the opposite.
He used to think he was a product designer in the sense that the role was his identity, the same way he had been a graphic designer before that. Designers often make being a designer a big part of their identity, not just a job. He now treats the roles as different flavors of an orientation to the world and a way of seeing things, divorced from the specific task. The job has not changed the way he sees it. He is still a designer, and he is designing a company. The materials have changed. What got him into design is deeper than w
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Why Do Complicated AI Interfaces Become Simple?
Colin Dunn says complicated interfaces usually exist because the models are not good enough, and once the models get good enough the interfaces become very simple. A hard switch to an entirely new modality is too soon: the technology is not ready, and people are not ready.
People fall at different points along the adoption curve, from early adopters to the early majority, the late majority, and laggards. Customers right now are early adopters who see what is coming and want to be part of it. Tremendous economic and creative opportunity belongs to people who decide to jump in, and it is okay to stay skeptical and keep a way of working that already works. One inroad swaps searching for stock
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Why Do AI Designs Look Finished From the Start?
Colin Dunn says AI lets you design at full fidelity from the beginning. The first thing you put into the prompt box comes out looking like an image that could go into production. In typical creative work, the fidelity you are working at increases as you move down the production process. You start with the thumbnail sketch, move into more detailed renders, and eventually go do the photo shoot.
You are still in exploration mode. You are just exploring at a higher degree of fidelity, so an early pass already looks like an image that could go into production.
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What Skill Is Left When Everyone Can Design?
Colin Dunn says the skill left over, once design tools get easier and everyone can make things, is taste and the ability to tell a story. Prompting is much easier than manipulating layers and the intricacies of design tools today, so more kinds of people will be able to use design software as the technology improves.
The people best at taste and story today are creative directors, art directors, and brand designers. They come up with a narrative, build a world, pick the art direction, the brand voice, the individual elements, and the colors, then assemble a cohesive, recognizable system and execute it across marketing channels. In a design agency studio the order runs creative director, art
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Does Venture Capital Change What a Real Problem Is?
Colin Dunn says the definition of a real problem is very different if a company is funded by venture capital. There is not as much great design as there are great designers in the world because so many designers are working on venture-backed companies. The bar for building a venture-backed company is very high in terms of market cap and what success means in that category.
Darkroom is non-venture, and Glass is another example. Both are bootstrapped, design-led companies that, as a lifestyle business, he thinks would be considered very successful. Both are examples of beautiful design. He thinks raising venture capital would maybe be the death of Darkroom and Glass.
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Why Did Colin Dunn Choose Daycare Over a Nanny?
Colin Dunn chose daycare over a nanny because he felt the social environment would help his child's development. He is a father of one and expecting a second, and he treats the environment around his kid as job number one.
He did not have the right environment as a kid. He was a fish out of water and was struggling to channel his energy in a productive way. Looking back on the experience scares him. He hopes karma does not exist, because he is screwed. The biggest lesson he takes as a parent is to stay very conscious of the environment they put their kid in. One of the first decisions was whether to hire a nanny or go to daycare, and daycare won because the social environment looked helpful