From Figma to AI: How Alex Kukharenko is Reshaping Design Workflows
Join us for a conversation with Alex Kukharenko, a UI/UX designer and agency founder with 12-15 years of experience, as he shares his path from traditional design tools to AI-powered workflows.
At a glance
About Alex
Alex is a UI/UX designer living in Germany with over 12-15 years of design experience. For the last five years, he's been working in leadership roles as a design lead or head of design, and for the past two years, he's been the founder of his own agency. Recently, Alex has been shifting his focus towards AI tools, speed improvements, and prototyping.
Currently, Alex works as a design lead for a team of three designers, coaching them and helping them grow. He also serves as the primary client liaison and contributes to the UI side of projects, using his experience to judge design effectiveness and intuition.
The AI Path Begins
Alex's AI path started even before ChatGPT became popular. "I started my AI path even before ChatGPT because it was Stable Diffusion in 2023, more than two years ago," Alex explains. "I was like, 'Oh okay, Stable Diffusion generates photos for prompts,' and that's when I started doing my first prompts to be honest, and ChatGPT wasn't really popular back then."
When ChatGPT was introduced, Alex had a pivotal moment. He asked ChatGPT to write copy for an entire website, and the results were shocking. "It wrote everything and I was like shocked to be honest, and that was the first time when I understood okay, ChatGPT is a good friend, it's an assistant."
Current AI Tool Stack
Core Design Tools
Figma remains central to Alex's workflow: "Of course we have Figma, it's not going to disappear this year I think because we still need to do some projects old school way where we do mockups and other things."
ChatGPT serves as a creative partner: "We use ChatGPT as a partner or companion for creative work. One of the cases is imagine we need to come up with some illustrations and it's cyber security field or data mining, whatever. It's sometimes really hard because we need to think about the industry about the visual concepts, but actually ChatGPT really helps with that."
AI Builders Revolution
Alex uses AI builders like Lovable, V0.dev, and Replit: "When I need to test the direction, I'll just do prompting in all of them at once and then modify a prompt and then push to four of them and then see what happens. We are getting different results with each of them."
His approach is strategic: "They are different, and I also heard that they are running on the same language models, but to be honest, the output is so different one from another that's why in the end I kind of take screenshot from one tool and bring to another one."
Animation and Visual Tools
For complex animations, Alex's team uses After Effects, LottieFiles, and Jitter: "Jitter is for video, it's a lot easier than After Effects."
The Reality of AI's Impact
Alex is honest about the dual nature of AI's impact: "There is some balance between excitement and scarcity, and I'm bouncing between one side to another because I'm so excited that sometimes I'm scared because I can see that a lot of people can lose a job maybe if they don't adapt with tools."
A Real-World Change
Alex shares a striking example from his recent work: "I'm working with a couple of startups and just a few months ago they let their almost entire dev team go because of the dev tools that are helping devs to be more efficient. I almost was alone together with CTO who is super excited about AI, and we now paired and I prototype directly in Lovable, we connect to GitHub so he pulls up code and then asks code to directly get the code from repository and bring to current application."
https://youtu.be/IiRclTWMz-0
This represents a fundamental shift: "The connection between design and code almost doesn't exist because I'm really pushing things that I've created in Lovable to repository, and this code is going to be used on production. I haven't seen cases like this before."
The Future of Design Roles
Senior Designers: Safe but Must Adapt
"I think we're going to see some separation. We're going to see some senior principal designers who are going to be using Figma still and Illustrator and Photoshop as it was before, but they are highly paid, they are super deep into UI with gradients and glows and liquid glass because they have very good taste that they spent 15 or 20 years of learning. AI is not replacing them right now."
However, even senior designers need to adapt: "For corporate jobs and enterprise jobs, I think senior designers are completely safe, but they probably should start using AI as a little assistant."
Junior Designers: The Challenge
The situation is more challenging for junior designers: "The big change is happening for junior designers because I really have examples when Lovable or V0 or any other tool is creating much better design from my 5 minutes prompt than a designer during like 6 hours, and that's the reality we have to admit."
https://screen.studio/share/bln3Kvpr
Alex's advice is clear: "Junior designers have to learn how to use these tools to keep their job, to stay relevant on the market, to accept the change in our industry that we are not working in Figma anymore only. We have also ChatGPT as a partner, we have Perplexity for search and Gemini for research and any other AI builder for building quick prototypes."
The New Designer Type
"Designer in the AI Era"
When asked what to call this new type of designer, Alex is straightforward:
"Designer in the AI era, that's it. It's an evolution of our job. 15 years ago I was making websites in Photoshop, and now it's in Lovable. It's designers still, we still have to have taste, we need to train ourselves to look at beautiful things as it was before, nothing changed, but the tools are changing."
The Proactive Approach
Alex emphasizes the importance of designers taking initiative: "I believe that it has to be you, designer, who will come first to your manager and say, 'Okay, this is what I offer. We can use, can we get a premium $20 membership for any tool and I'll show you how we can do things faster and much easier?' So it's going to be designer who comes first."
Staying Current in the AI World
Information Sources
Alex's primary source for AI updates is Twitter/X: "The best source of knowledge for AI and what's happening is X, so Twitter. That's where AI builders are hanging out, that's where you can see impressive demos, that's where really good designers are spending time as well."
He also recommends business and tech podcasts: "I'm also listening to a16z podcast on Spotify and My First Million podcast as well on Spotify because as we now become more of horizontal designers and not vertical ones, we have to be updated what's happening and what's possible."
The Design Community Challenge
Alex notes a concerning trend in the design community: "I find our design environment and design space is closed in a bubble right now because many of us are saying, 'Hey, AI is not going to replace us, that's just a tool,' and because of that, designers are not that open to this fact that this is the new reality."
Instead, he looks to "solopreneurs, devs, or founders of startups who are doing that because this is what shows the direction."
Advice for Designers
For Junior Designers
"Learning is the must, so we have to learn, but what exactly to learn? One of the things which I almost always find super useful is to work on your side projects, and these tools are helping you with that."
Alex suggests practical application: "Imagine you have an idea, what if I come up with the library of navigation or some design patterns, maybe just a collection of links? You'll get to learn these tools, how to prompt, how to push things online, and you are stepping into this position to become more like an AI prototyper and AI designer in this era."
For Design Managers
"This is very challenging time for design managers because we need to see who is able to adapt within a team. The challenge for design leads and design managers would be to figure out how to help your team with AI, how to give feedback, how to help everyone to stay on the same page to accept current reality."
Alex's practical advice: "Let's find who is able in your team to stay on time and stay in this new era and help other people who are not able or who don't want."
The Positive Outlook
Despite the challenges, Alex maintains optimism: "Now it's so much easier to do research, it's so much easier to do social images, generate content, and because of that, my designers don't have to do very boring repetitive work but focus on things that require taste and product thinking."
He emphasizes the core value designers bring: "This is what we are capable of doing, we have taste and product thinking. Let's just become stronger because we're going to tell AI what to do, otherwise we are useless. I'm still positive, I actually see the big opportunity for us designers to adapt to new world."
Alex
Find Alex Online
Connect with Alex Kukharenko on LinkedIn to follow his path in AI-powered design and learn more about his agency's approaches to modern design challenges.
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