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Do you feel AI product launches are becoming boring?
I haven’t been this excited to play with a new product in a while.
Ben South just announced Variant. It’s phenomenal and it’s free!
The impressive storytelling in the launch video left a strong first impression, and the product did not disappoint.
What’s caught me off guard is how original and thoughtful the design outputs feel.
I have to show you this. But before that, let’s catch up on AI this week:
NEWS
TOOLS
1. Komos:
AI automation platform that learns workflows by watching you work. Record any browser-based task once and AI generates visual, editable workflows with 100+ native integrations and browser automation when APIs don't exist.
2. Napkin AI:
Turns text into professional visuals including infographics, diagrams, mind maps, flowcharts, and data charts. Paste your text, click to generate, then edit and export as PPT, PNG, PDF, or SVG.
AI marketing assistant that creates ideal customer profiles, marketing strategies, and tailored content. Built on real marketing data from thousands of ICPs and campaigns, designed for agencies, consultants, and solo marketers.
What’s the deal?
Variant is the first ever design tool that acts as your creative director.
Until now, you’d probably have an idea, browse through some reference ideas, give it to Lovable or Gemini and let it generate something inspired by the reference you shared.
It usually does an okay job.
Without it, it sucks or gets repetitive in terms of design.
There is no thought, no originality or uniqueness whatsoever. Anyone can tell if a website is AI generated by just glancing at it now.
I think Variant is gonna break that pattern.
How it works
The main function still remains prompting and generating the output. But Variant takes it one step further.
You can pick any design, narrow down its scope, or widen it, change styles, play with the layouts, remix colours, etc
Example:
The original design
I loved the serene vibe and how minimal yet effective the design is.
So I narrowed down.
Now I wanted to go on the other side of the spectrum, so asked it to “Remix colors” for one of the designs i liked in the batch.
Here’s one of the 4 outputs i liked:
You see how far I came from the original idea to this?
The time it took - barely 5 minutes.
I don’t think I’d be able explore ideas this extensively if I spent an entire day on Figma.
The tests
Stripe home page is an icon. It’s universally loved and they recently refreshed it.
So i took a screenshot and asked the tool to go all out, without giving much context just to see what it is capable of coming up with, without a guided set of instructions.
And check this out!
The design is amazing, but that’s not the best part.
Follow the cursor, look at the micro-interactions. See the movements on the right half of the screen.
One more step (or a feature to expand views) further, this is what i get:
Mind? Absolutely blown.
After pulling an all-night just playing around with the tool, I showed it to my team the next day and now we’re sprinting some internal project ideas and competing for a reward.
So, how to use it?
It’s simple.
Go to variant.ai, sign up and start exploring like right now.
The more you play around with it, the more you’ll be impressed.
It’s free! (for now)
My take
Design suddenly feels a lot like browsing.
At time during the testing I was getting Pinterest vibes, its that good!
Prompting is still the A-game. Garbage in garbage out still applies.
But that has always been a solvable issue.
Top models like Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3 have hit a ceiling. They’re damn good at text and still mediocre at media.
And there are tools like Make, UXPilot, etc that are stepping up but I feel there’s a difference.
Most of them are reactive. Variant is proactive.
And that might just be enough for them to win.
Hit reply: Try variant and share the output you end up one-shotting.
Until next time,
Vaibhav 🤝
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