My quest for automated always-on-brand digital design might be over.
A design agent that you can really delegate to.
- client
- -
- agency
- -
- role
- Design Technologist
- year
- 2026
Pen-pal studio is the latest development in my quest to get AI agents to produce high-quality, editable, and always-on-brand digital design.
A standalone Mac app
Built in Electron and powered by Claude, it brings a dedicated UX to produce, edit, manage, approve and export digital design assets, created over a purpose-built brand design system.
The path here
I've been pursuing this for a while, and the same core idea has assumed different forms over time.
Built figma-operator, a system that lets Claude read, plan and edit a Figma file through natural language.
Built OWD for Figma, the research preview of a design co-pilot that runs inside Figma.
The difference here is that you don't even have to open a design editor.
It has a headless mode, meaning that you can ask pen-pal to use Pen.dev autonomously to create assets from your design system based on a brief, and bring back the results for you to approve and/or edit.
You can also use it as a design copilot while you are working on the canvas.
Open the live project and work alongside Claude, or make changes yourself.
Samples
Brand data
Optimized for building, managing and using brand data or a design system.
The weakest point of all the agents I've been building is the dependency on an external app to serve as a human interface with the assets, but that's about to change.
What's next will be a big deal! (WIP, tho)
Pen-pal is about to get its own internal canvas, with layout, text and vector editing tools, image generation, and design system management.
