02 · AI · Visual exploration · Method

Singular: from zero to two decks in a week

How I used five generative AI tools in parallel to explore six visual directions and change the kind of conversation I was having with the stakeholder.

00·

The brief

N5's CEO hands down a vision: Singular, a B2B customer engagement platform with AI for banks. There's technical architecture, there's a commercial hypothesis, there's strong intuition about where it sits in the market. What's missing is a designed product, a visual narrative and a concrete way to show the team and clients what the thing looks like.

The brief was clear: in one week, produce something that worked both to align internally and to sell. With no more context than that.

Opening slide: “A chatbot talks to the customer” crossed out and, next to it, “Singular talks to them on the bank’s behalf”. — The starting point: telling Singular apart from a chatbot. The proposition lands in a second.

01·

The first decision was conceptual

The first thing I did was understand the product. The first design decision I made changed everything that came after.

What looked like one product was two.

An operations panel for the bank's CRM Manager: high density, dark mode, real-time actions. And an executive panel for the C-level: read-only, top-down narrative, strategic synthesis. Treating them as one thing would have compromised both.

Separating them was the first deliverable of the week, and it was conceptual: I hadn't drawn anything yet. From there the work ran on two parallel tracks.

The first was the UX deck, the experience architecture of the whole system. How Singular works as a product, its three layers: the brain that decides, the voice that executes, the customer who lives the consequence.

Pencil illustration: a wired face, a figure speaking and a person looking at a phone, chained vertically and surrounded by annotations and technical diagrams. — The three layers of the system: the brain, the voice and the customer. Illustration generated with AI from the canonical prompt of the visual system.

Deck slide: a diagram of three chained boxes (Bank, North Star, Singular) and below them the three configurable layers, numbered. — "The bank defines the universe, the system activates the right version." On the right, that idea materialized in the conversation the end customer actually receives.

A hand holds a phone showing a messaging thread: the assistant proposes an alternative fixed-term deposit with its rate and the customer replies in two lines. — "The bank defines the universe, the system activates the right version." On the right, that idea materialized in the conversation the end customer actually receives.

02·

Mapping the space

The second track was the visual exploration of the admin. I decided to map the whole space: five different generative AI tools, the same brief for all of them, six visual variants in parallel. I did it so the CEO could choose with real judgment.

Every AI tool has a default voice that pulls toward a style. Fighting it wastes time; using it is what makes exploring six directions in a day possible.

One pulls toward clean fintech, another toward modern software product, another toward extreme density. Using each for what it does best turns a limitation into a method. For every variant I documented which tool was used, what prompt it got, what had to be fixed by hand and how fast it could be iterated. That documentation is part of the deliverable.

Variant	Visual direction	Tool
A	MOB Light — N5's own system, light mode	Claude Design
B	MOB Dark — N5's own system, dark mode	Claude Design
C	Liquid Glass — light physics, visionOS applied	Claude Code
D	Bloomberg Style — maximum data density	Lovable
E	Bugatti — fully monochrome, extreme discipline	Stitch
F	Lápiz Dark — editorial cream in dark mode	v0

Variant D: a data terminal with a sidebar of sections, small type and a full-width stacked area chart, with the percentages in a row at the bottom. — Variant D · **Bloomberg Style**. Maximum data density, no aesthetic concessions. The direction closest to the real banking context, and the one that ended up being chosen.

Variant A: a light dashboard with the health score set large, a line chart beside it and goal cards with a progress bar.

Variant B: the same dashboard on a dark background, with the goal cards turned into outlined blocks.

Variant C: the same dashboard with translucent surfaces and a saturated-color area chart. — Five of the six directions explored. Each one is a different hypothesis about what kind of product Singular is. All of them were produced in a day.

Variant F: a dark, restrained dashboard, in English, with the chart reduced to thin unfilled lines. — Five of the six directions explored. Each one is a different hypothesis about what kind of product Singular is. All of them were produced in a day.

7 days of work

5 AI tools

6 visual variants

2 decks delivered

03·

The outcome

Two actionable decks by the end of the week. The UX one to align the team on what is being built. The visual one so the CEO could make a real decision about aesthetics and direction, with full traceability of why each variant was considered and why it was dropped.

The methodological thesis behind all of it: AI as co-pilot. Every design decision was mine; every asset produced went through at least one tool. The designer's role becomes that of director, curator and critic of output.

The CEO walked into the final meeting with a real decision to make, and made it: the maximum data density direction. The closest to the real banking context, and the hardest to defend without having explored it against the other five.

What matters most to me about this case is the kind of conversation it enabled, more than the volume produced. The dynamic became "here's the space, you decide".

And what it proved, at least to me, is that speed used well lets you explore the whole problem.

Outside the briefThe demo

Singular has a product in development. But when the CEO needs to give a keynote at Fintech Americas, slides aren't enough. The brief was to take a hard turn: forget the product for a moment and think like a show.

This demo is the concept car at the auto show. A working piece so the room can see where the system is heading before it exists.

Demo screen: a live map on the left, five agents in circles around a central node, and panels for goals, costs and human interventions on the sides. — The demo that accompanied the keynote. See live demo →

correction There was no brief, and at first I took that as a problem. I lost two days waiting for the conversation to turn into a concrete request, and it wasn't going to. When the assignment comes out of a vision, asking for clarity only stretches the wait. The way to unblock it is to put options on the table so the decision can be made.

The first decision was conceptual, and I think that's why the case has something to tell. If I'd started drawing, I'd have ended up defending my taste against the CEO's, which is an argument nobody wins. Defining the exploration space first turned it into an argument about criteria, which is also the only kind you can document afterwards.

correction I picked each tool for what it was good at. For a while I used the generative ones to produce the final deliverable: it came out fast, but it came out like everything else. Here I put them to work producing quantity, and only then sat down to choose with six directions in front of me (good and bad). The decision stayed mine; what got faster was arriving at it.

Ending up in a keynote sounds good. For me the result is that you can reconstruct why that direction was chosen out of the six. An approval by eye would have reached the keynote too; the difference shows up later, when someone asks why.