John Maeda

And that's why I'm so excited.

We've been experimenting with Paul.

We have this thing called the GitHub Copilot app.

It's a new app.

And the challenge with that has been to keep the human tastes and craft and all the high-tech goodies.

And to Paul's point about raising the floor, humans should be able to raise the ceiling of what they can do.

So we have human animators making the craft and the final decisions around some of the super-duper high extreme polish, but we want to have the coding agents do the part that have the drudgery.

Well, in the 1980s, late 1980s, there was this application that was called Photoshop that was amazing because it suddenly let you draw pictures and play with photographs or whatever.

It was popular among photographers and people like that.

But when something called Kai's Power Tools came out,

it blew up the TAM for Photoshop because people could do weird algorithmic things with their faces or all kinds of filters because Adobe Photoshop opened up this plugin architecture.

So people could write code, could put things in that plugin format.

And so when I saw Paul's work, it reminded me of Kai's Power Tools, but for design and less weird, but very focused, very functional.

When I saw Impeccable, it reminded me of just giving away my era of when Postscript came out.

Most people don't realize that Postscript was a miracle because the Adobe guys, the Warnock, the manual for Postscript is beautiful.

It's incredibly well designed.

Those engineers understood graphic design better than most graphic designers.

So Postscript properly encoded the perfect set of primitives to implement visual graphic design of the day.

And so it required people who were technical and also design-minded.

Same with Donald Knuth, before that with tech.