DESIGNING FOR turbulent TIMES AHEAD.

AI-Native Product Studio

→ AI product design

→ Brand systems

→ Product strategy

→ Design through build

Approach

Creating experiences to get you where you need to go, even as the water keeps changing.

AI is changing how people find, trust, and use everything, and most companies feel it without knowing what to do next. Startups move fast on engineering but haven't built the brand people stay for. Established companies have the trust, and are still learning to carry it into an AI-first world. We work with both. Strategy, design, and build happen together, not handed off in sequence. What comes out is still elegant, still human, built to carry a company through water the rest of the industry hasn't learned to read yet.

Practice

Brand strategy & design

We define what brands stand for and how they show up. Positioning, identity, and systems built to scale and evolve. AI expands how we explore and create.

→ Brand strategy, identity systems, positioning, art direction

Products & platforms

Websites, apps, and platforms built for adoption. Design that adapts as the product grows and holds up when the team scales past the people who started it.

→ Product design, UX, design systems, web, mobile

AI product design

Companies are still catching up on agentic AI. The model working is not the same as the product working. Design decides whether people trust it and come back.

→ AI product design, agentic interfaces, conversational UI

Global brand & product

Brands and products that work in one market rarely survive translation intact. Meaning has to be rebuilt, not converted. Bilingual design leadership across the US and Japan.

→ Global brand platforms, localization, bilingual leadership

Reel

Work

Project

LegalOn's AI Brand Platform

Global Brand & Product Platform

LegalOn built Japan's leading legal AI, then expanded into a broader suite of AI-powered business products. The new platform had to hold two opposing demands at once: one coherent global identity across seven products — LegalOn, SalesOn, CorporateOn, WorkOn, CXOn, DealOn, GovernOn — and enough room for each to stand on its own. The resolution was the "ON" concept: always on, always intelligent, always working — a shared lockup carried by every product, each with its own palette and identity.

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Project

Adobe Express Photos

0-to-1 AI Product Design

Adobe wanted to democratize image editing. Adobe's new AI-powered desktop image editor transforms complex editing into one-click operations, making professional-quality enhancement accessible to marketers, SMBs, office workers, and consumers.

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Walmart AI Shopping Experience screenshot 1

Walmart AI Shopping Experience screenshot 2

Walmart AI Shopping Experience screenshot 3

Walmart AI Shopping Experience screenshot 4

Project

Walmart's AI-First Shopping Experience

AI Commerce Strategy & Product Design

Search at Walmart is used by millions every day, which made it both the highest-leverage place to introduce AI and the easiest place to lose trust. The position was that AI should layer onto search rather than replace it, tested in reversible ways on top of a stable core. That framing became the foundation for multimodal search, an AI wizard with AR, and GenAI fashion discovery.

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Project

Adobe Express Enterprise Platform

Embed SDK + Plugin Ecosystem

Adobe Express needed to scale beyond a standalone tool into an enterprise-ready, embeddable platform. I led design for the Express Extensibility team, shaping embedded editors, SDK integrations, and a governed plugin marketplace.

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Project

Modere eCommerce

Japanese Market Platform Redesign

Modere had a global wellness brand and a Japanese storefront that worked as a transaction and nothing more. Japanese wellness shoppers buy on trust, built through community and evidence rather than product claims. The redesign held the global brand system intact while rebuilding the experience around how people in Japan actually decide: personalized discovery, community content, and storytelling instead of a catalog.

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Project

Modular Suite for XD

Design Collaboration Tools

Connecting the dots from collaborative ideation to rapid screen design to final presentation, Modular plugins allow seamless designer workflow in a single app. These visionary tools preceded by several years what the competition eventually released.

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Build

Designers hand off.
Builders wait for specs.
Neither is necessary anymore.

Strategy forms in conversation with LLMs before any tool opens. Design and prototype move together, close enough to the real thing to be tested and shared without waiting for engineering. Then Claude Code, Cursor, and V0 turn it into shipped product. No handoff. Five projects live, from a Figma plugin to an interactive art piece built in a day.

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Start with the strategy

Time with Claude and ChatGPT thinking through the problem, the user, and the product logic. Writing prompts, pressure-testing ideas, getting to a clear point of view before a single pixel or line of code exists.

→ Problem framing, product logic, positioning

Design and prototype together

Moving between Figma and AI tools to sketch flows, screens, and interactions. Close enough to the real thing to be tested, shared, and iterated without waiting for engineering.

→ Figma, Figma Make, rapid prototyping

Ship it

Claude Code, Cursor, and V0 generate and refine working code. The build is directed, not delegated — knowing what you want, knowing when it's right, and knowing how to get there fast.

→ Claude Code, Cursor, V0, deployed product

Studio

Raft Design is an AI-native studio collaborating with companies in the U.S. and Japan on brand, product, and innovation.

Twenty years of building brand, product, and platform work across Tokyo and San Francisco taught the same lesson twice: what survives isn't the work built to impress. It's the work built to move. We work hands-on, owning the hard problems and building alongside product and engineering rather than handing off. Design leadership at Adobe and Walmart. Brand and product work with LegalOn, Visa, Hitachi, and Red Bull. Most engagements start with a company that isn't sure how to move yet.

540M+

Users and visitors interacted with our design in Walmart app

114%

Increase of monthly active users from our strategy

Increase in add-on discovery and use in Express

JOURNAL

View all articles →

Stop Adding AI to the Design Process. Re-engineer It.

→ Read

The Contradiction That Became a Studio

→ Read

The AI-Native Designer Was Only Phase One

→ Read

How I Use AI

→ Read

Designing for Awareness: How Multimodal AI Is Reshaping the Future of Interaction

→ Read

Stop Treating AI Like Cheating on Your Homework: A Playbook for AI-Native Design Teams

→ Read

FAQs

What is Raft Design?

Raft Design is an AI-native studio working across the U.S. and Japan on brand, product, and digital experience. Twenty years of experience across Adobe, Walmart, and LegalOn shape how we work: hands-on, fast, and built to move with change rather than around it.

What does "AI-native studio" mean?

It means AI is part of how the work gets made, not just what it's about. Strategy forms in conversation with language models, design and prototype move together, and working software gets built without the usual handoff between design and engineering. The result is senior design judgment delivered at a speed a traditional studio can't match.

Does Raft Design work in Japanese?

Yes. We work natively in both Japanese and English, with design leadership across both markets. Our founder has over ten years of experience working in Japan, in Japanese, across a range of clients and projects, and this site is fully bilingual. For Japanese companies expanding abroad, or global brands entering Japan, we rebuild meaning for the new market rather than translating it — the harder and more important work.

Does Raft Design design, or also build?

Both. Most studios hand off static designs for someone else to build. We take work through to functioning software — prototypes that behave like the real thing, testable and demoable, using tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and V0. The build is directed, not just delegated.

How do engagements work?

Three ways, depending on what a team needs. We take on projects like a traditional studio, from brand and product design to shipped experiences. We embed as fractional design leadership when a team is scaling and needs senior direction. And we consult with teams that want to make their own design practice AI-native. Engagements run from short diagnostic sprints to ongoing partnerships.

Connect with me to explore your project's potential.