Design Assistant

🧠 About the Project

🎨 Inspiration

Design Assistant was born out of a common frustration faced by solopreneurs, content creators, and small business owners — the friction of bouncing between tools to write captions, design visuals, and optimize content for performance. We asked ourselves:

"What if you could go from idea ➞ beautifully branded content —without leaving Adobe Express?"

That single question led to the creation of an all-in-one assistant powered by AI that generates compelling content and visuals based on just a few words.

🛠 How We Built It

We used the following technologies to build Design Assistant:

🖼️ Adobe Express Add-on Runtime (Document Sandbox)
⚛️ React for building the UI
🤖 Google Gemini for natural language generation
📦 Webpack & Babel for bundling and transpiling
💡 Custom rendering logic to inject AI-generated layouts and captions into the Adobe Express canvas

Code example:

const HelpModal = () => showHelp && (
  <div className="help-overlay" onClick={() => setShowHelp(false)}>
    <div className="help-modal" onClick={(e) => e.stopPropagation()}>
      <h2>Design Assistant</h2>
      <p>AI-powered content & design help, right inside Adobe Express.</p>
    </div>
  </div>
);

🤯 What We Learned

Adobe Express Add-on APIs offer powerful design insertion and manipulation tools.
Contextual UX is key — embedding help components like HelpModal greatly improved user onboarding.
Prompt design when using Gemini is half the battle — getting high-quality outputs meant iterating on how user prompts were translated under the hood.

🚧 Challenges We Faced

🧩 Integrating React inside Adobe’s iframe-based runtime required deep debugging of messaging and styling contexts.
📐 Dynamic layout injection had to adapt across different user screen sizes and canvas states.
🤖 Prompt tuning for Gemini was a balancing act — too open, and results varied; too restrictive, and creativity suffered.
🤝 Ensuring accessibility and clean UX for non-designers was harder but absolutely worth the outcome.

💭 Future Improvements

Add brand presets so users can save their fonts, logos, and colors
Explore multi-post campaign planning
Enable direct publishing to Instagram and other platforms
Integrate analytics insights to inform creative decisions

⚡ Closing Thoughts

Design Assistant turns everyday users into standout creators with minimal effort and no creative block. We’re proud of how closely the experience mirrors a “human assistant” — always there, always on-brand, and always inside the editor.