ALICE ZONG
Alice Zong DESIGN
Vibe CODING
I'm a visual designer. For most of my career, the things I imagined and the things I could actually build lived in different rooms. Mockups stayed in Figma; the working version belonged to someone else.
Vibe coding has begun to change that.
This is a small archive of projects I make by working alongside an AI assistant — describing in plain language what I want a thing to look like and how it should behave, then iterating until it's there. I'm not learning to code in the traditional sense. I'm designing in conversation.
The pieces here are small and personal. They are the kinds of things I always wished existed but never knew how to make. None of them are finished, and that is part of the point. They are notes from someone learning, in public, that the bridge between imagining and building is shorter than it used to be.
Rethinking the App Store design:
a new lens on how we see future users
A visual designer's process of using AI-assisted thinking to move from a vague brief "add more video" to a rigorous redesign framework built on three concepts, two product layers, and one working principle.
The real question:
"When AI agents do the shopping, what is the App Store actually for?"
This project started as a visual redesign brief.
It ended as a question about what human-facing product surfaces look like when AI agents become the primary transacting layer.
A Quite Board
GO/GOMOKI Game
This project began with a small frustration. I wanted to play Gomoku in an aesthetic I loved — slow, quiet, monochrome, more like a piece of editorial design than a digital game. Every Gomoku app I could find felt the opposite of that. The boards were CAD-precise, the stones glassy, the interfaces loud. There was no version of the game that I, as a designer, wanted to spend an afternoon inside.
For a long time, that was the end of the thought. I'd open Figma, sketch a few mockups of what such a thing might look like, and put them in a folder. I assumed the project would stay there.
What changed was vibe coding. Working with an AI assistant, I realized I didn't have to learn to code in the traditional sense to make a website. I could describe what I wanted in plain language — "a hand-drawn Go board where the lines wobble slightly, like ink, with deterministic noise so they look the same on every visit" — and the assistant would write the code, explain it, and let me iterate. I was still designing. I was just designing in language.
The project unfolded over a series of small conversations.
I described the visual system — warm whites, charcoal black, paper grain, italic serif for poetry, sans for breath. I described the board, the stones, the soft vignette. I described the gameplay — Gomoku and Go, three difficulty levels named calm · thoughtful · ruthless, undo and full history playback, no scoreboard. I described the voice — a small library of philosophical lines that appear at the end of a game, in the spirit of the stones owe nothing to the hand that placed them.
What I didn't expect was how much of designing this was writing. Writing the difficulty descriptions. Writing the post-game aphorisms. Writing the closing thesis. The interface ended up being almost as much copy as it was graphics — and the copy and the graphics were inseparable.
The result is two small things: a playable prototype, and a short case study about how it was made. Both live in the same visual world. Neither is finished — the AI is rough, the Go logic is light, the responsive behavior is incomplete. They are notes more than products.
But the project quietly changed something for me. For the first time, I made something that worked — not just something that looked. I learned that not knowing how to code is a much smaller barrier than I thought, as long as I'm willing to describe carefully what I want.
I'm still a visual designer. I still draw before I do anything else. But there is now a small bridge between the things I imagine and the things I can actually build — and I expect to walk across it again.
