When a Good Brief Becomes a Design Tool

I had to turn 47 before I stopped arguing against calling myself a designer. I used to simply say that I work in IT.

In German-speaking countries, "design" is still often synonymous with visual design. And honestly, I was never particularly good at using traditional visual design tools. Fireworks, Photoshop, Sketch, Figma… you name it. My usual answer was: "If database design is called design, then you may call me a designer too.

What I could always do was understand people. Run workshops. Uncover needs. Translate business goals into requirements. Explain to brilliant visual designers what we should build and why. That has been my job for more than two decades.

Over the last year, our team at Die Haftpflichtkasse VVaG developed a design language for our digital touchpoints. The focus was on customer-facing products, covering typical CMS building blocks like headers, footers, and content components. Supporting internal software was always part of the vision, just not something we expected to tackle this soon.

A little over two weeks ago, that changed.

We started building an internal pilot for agentic coding. Suddenly we needed interface patterns for software rather than websites. I took our existing Figma work, the HTML derived from it, the project requirements, and started experimenting with Claude Code—mainly to understand what these tools could do.

The result surprised me.

Patterns evolved quickly. The system remained HTML-first, as our frontend landscape is diverse and plain HTML serves as the most reliable common denominator. This phase focused on exploring a coherent software design language, adding a proper dark mode (high contrast, low brightness—call me an accessibility test person 😉), and keeping accessibility central from the start.

What began as an experiment has evolved into something I’d describe as an AI-ready, code-first design system for software. The CMS patterns are included in the design system, but they are not yet fully aligned with Figma.

My biggest learning, though, has nothing to do with design systems.

I still can't create beautiful interfaces from scratch in Figma.

I still can't write production software on my own.

But I can write a really good brief.

For the first time in my career, that skill is enough to turn ideas into coherent interfaces and working code. Not because AI replaced designers or developers, but because it removed the translation layer between intent and execution.

Maybe I didn't become a designer because of AI. But I would no longer object to being called one.

Maybe AI simply gave me the tools to express the kind of design work I had been doing all along.

Originally posted on LinkedIn.