GPT-3 Design Hype šŸ¤Æ

Should design tools code?

GPT-3: Describe what you want, and let the computer design and build it for you! šŸ‘€šŸ‘‡

Over the last couple of years, weā€™ve seen the odd design tool pop up that brings a touch of AI to design. One of the most anticipated in this category was UIzard, a tool that turned paper sketches into designs. Minds were blown all over #DesignTwitter as we saw an increasing number of AI-powered tools for web designers:

Sketch a wireframe in pen or pencil. Use your phone to take a photo of your sketch.

Then in early 2019, instead of the clichĆ© question ā€œshould designers code?ā€œ, people started asking ā€œshould design tools code?ā€œ.

And now in 2020, minds are being blown again! This time though, instead of paper sketches, weā€™re turning words into UIs with a cool technology called ā€˜GPT-whatā€™? Hereā€™s a definition:

GPT stands for ā€œgenerative pre-training transformerā€, a language model which can generate world knowledge by training on a diverse corpus of text. GPT-3 is the third iteration of this model. Itā€™s basically a language predictor: you feed it some content, and it guesses what should come next.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff in GPT-3 and the future of human productivity

āš ļø GPT-3 Hype

Hereā€™s some of the hype around the internets and twitters about GPT-3 and design:

1. Sharif started with this GPT-3 layout generator:

GPT-3 Layout generator in action

Sharif is the founder of debuild.co, where heā€™s trying to provide this technology as a ā€˜faster way to develop web appsā€™:

Sharif Shameem: I just built a functioning react app by describing what I wanted to GPT-3.

A couple more of Sharifā€™s demos include:


2. Next, Jordan Singer built ā€˜Designerā€™, a GPT-3 Figma Plugin:

Check out more in his twitter thread, and this excellent article where he goes into details on GPT-3, and how he trained his app to create UI layouts.

When I saw all of the GPT-3 concepts going around, I just had to get my hands on it.

Jordan Singer


3. Then The Independent covered it!

The Independent article

4. Harley Turan shared GPT-3 generated color scales

GPT-3 generated color scales

5. ā€¦And GPT-3 generating React components:


6. Daniel Davis resurfaces his article on GPT-2: Generative Design is Doomed to Fail

Generative design is doomed to fail

[Update, Mon 27 Jul 2020]

7. Dhvanil builds another UI creator for Figma using @OpenAIā€™s GPT3.

Inspired by Sharif and Jordan, Designer and generalist, Dhavnil couldnā€™t stop himself from building his own GPT-3 UI creator in Figma:

GPT-3 UI creator for Figma

He highlights 2 levels where GPT3 comes in: Text classification, and JSON (text) generation. Check out his Twitter thread for a step-by-step explanation..

Define your UI component in simple English, and GPT3 + @figmadesign will create a full-blown mockup for you. With accurate text, images, and logos.

Dhvanil (@dhvanilp), Designer and Generalist

Those are just a few popular links floating about, and thereā€™s probably a lot more to come. For more GPT-3 demos (maybe less design related), check these out:


2023 update, check out this article for more on Generative Design:

Share to your friends
Author avatar

Prototypr Team