Ad Studio: a unified creative workspace for AI-native advertising
Leading end-to-end design for The Brief AI's flagship workspace, from first concept to beta. It unifies AI generation, professional editing, and brand governance in one canvas.
The problem
The Brief AI was repositioning from a banner-creation tool into an AI-native platform. One where a marketer could generate ads, product photography, and video from a single prompt, yet a professional team could still edit with full control.
Those two needs pull in opposite directions: AI promises speed and accessibility for non-designers, while pro teams need precision, depth, and brand governance. Creation was also fragmented across disconnected modes, and asset production was slow and costly.
Ad Studio's mandate was to collapse that fragmentation into one workspace, and to anchor the company's AI-native repositioning with a flagship surface.
My role
I owned the product design end-to-end, from initial concepts through beta. I worked inside an agile Product Pod with PM, Engineering, and QA, iterating rapidly and keeping design and implementation continuously aligned.
The work spanned product strategy, UX architecture, interaction and visual design, and the underlying design system.
Key decisions
With Ad Studio, the surface was the easy part. The real work was in the tradeoffs underneath.
One workspace, not a chain of tools
I unified generation and editing on a single canvas rather than handing users between modes. Context-switching was the core friction. Removing it was the whole point.
Anchor to a model users already trust
I aligned the editor with the mental models professionals already knew, reworking legacy grouping into intelligent, frame-based containers (“Advanced Grouping”) that behave like Figma.
Govern, don't restrict
To let enterprises hand creation to non-designers safely, I defined the Brand Template Permissions logic: locking and mandatory-asset rules that became the foundation for the Light Editor. The choice was to keep non-designers moving inside guardrails rather than blocking them.
Audit before publish, not after
I built Predictive Scoring into the flow: real-time creative auditing against brand guidelines and WCAG 2.1 AA, so quality and accessibility issues surfaced before handoff, not in review.
Connecting the ecosystem
Around the core, I designed the connective tissue that made Ad Studio viable for professional teams. PSD and Figma import solved the parsing work needed for pixel-perfect rendering and lowered migration friction. There was native access to external media (Shutterstock, Storyblocks, Melodie), and the integration of exactly.ai, so users could generate style-consistent visuals in the platform's own design language.
Design-to-code
I built the tokenised design system the workspace runs on: a tailored Material UI foundation, with the component library built in Storybook alongside engineering under strict design-to-code parity. That kept the workspace consistent as it grew and made front-end handoff fast and unambiguous. Ad Studio shipped on it first, and it later became the design language for the wider platform. Read the design system case study →
Outcome
- Lowered migration friction via PSD/Figma import, accelerating adoption among professional design teams.
- Established the frame-based infrastructure that future auto-layout capabilities build on.
- Shipped the beta release as the company's flagship AI-native workspace.
Reflection
The real unlock wasn't the AI. It was governance as enablement. The moment non-designers could move fast inside brand guardrails instead of being stopped at them, production scaled without sacrificing quality.
Like the way I think?
Open to senior and lead product design roles.