Crafting Meaningful Brand Experiences in a Modern Context

What does it take to make people feel something with design...?

This week's guest is kind of an expert on the question.

Sara Vienna (https://x.com/sravienna?lang=en) , the Chief Design Officer at Metalab, talks about the responsibility that designers have to shape this AI world that we're entering without losing the heartbeat of a brand.

We don't hold back on the current state of the industry and what it feels like to be a designer today.

Some highlights:

- How to not get swept up in current design trends

- How Metalab has adopted AI workflows internally

- Strategies for leveraging AI to understand research data

- What it takes to put meaning at the heart of a brand/product

- How Metalab invests in the collective taste of the design org

- Where Sara derives signals and how she filters out the noise

- Being late on a trend is bad taste even more so than ugly design

- + a lot more

- Windsurf https://windsurf.com/) and [Suno](https://suno.com/home?wpsrc=Google%20AdWords&wpcid=22042553892&wpscid=173890219393&wpcrid=726251362516&wpkwid=kwd-2827037661&wpkwn=suno&wpkmatch=e&wpsnetn=g&gad_campaignid=22042553892&gbraid=0AAAAA9pWpduFan7icL90FczgyQploCsYi) rebrands

- Jony Ive’s Stripe Sessions talk (https://stripe.com/sessions/2025/a-conversation-with-sir-jony-ive)

- Erica Hall’s book “Just Enough Research” (https://www.mulebooks.com/just-enough-research)

- Anthropic’s Machines of Loving Grace paper (https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace)

- Blok for focus (https://blok.so/)