Issue No. 02

OCTOBER 2026

Hi there,

Usually this newsletter is about what's new in Framo, but this week I'd like to do something different and tell you a bit about myself: where I come from, why I started building Framo, and what I believe about design and AI.

01 — A car designer at heart

After I finished my transportation design studies in Pforzheim, I started working for Audi, my first real job. For the next ten years I worked on show cars and production cars, including the Audi AI:TRAIL in 2019 and the A6 (C9), which debuted in 2026, so I got to experience the whole journey, from the very first sketch all the way to a production car on the road. After Audi I spent another year designing at Huawei.

I loved that work, but over time I realised I wanted more. There were other fields and topics I had always been interested in and wanted to explore, and one of them was programming.

02 — Why I left

Anyone who has worked in a big company knows how decisions get made there: far away from the people doing the work, often for reasons nobody fully explains, and with a good amount of politics along the way. Plenty of people can live with that, but I never could. I took every decision I disagreed with personally, and over time I felt more and more limited, as if my ideas had outgrown the space I was given. I wanted to make the calls myself and work directly with the people I build for. So I left that world behind, and now I build tools for designers. In my heart, though, I'm still a designer, and I probably always will be.

03 — Learning by building

I've always been interested in learning new software tools, at work and just as much in my own time. At some point learning other people's tools wasn't enough anymore, because I wanted to build my own. So I took a sabbatical to learn programming properly. I started with CS50, Harvard's open computer science course, and then went straight into building the first version of Framo, because I believe the best way to learn something is to build the real thing and learn the skills it needs along the way. That first version was a 3D tool without any AI in it, since back then AI wasn't really a thing yet. I added AI to the app for the first time a year ago, and today it drives most of what Framo does.

04 — Cutting the wrong corners

Most AI tools for designers are built to automate as much as they possibly can: you type a one-sentence prompt and skip straight to the finished campaign film. I understand the appeal, but along the way they also automate away the parts of design that are actually fun, like the sketching, the wrong turns and the fight with an idea until it finally clicks. In other words, they take away the creative struggle, and I believe that only what is hard is truly worth doing. That struggle is where design really happens, and if you take all of it away, what's left doesn't feel like your work anymore, but like the result of a slot machine.

I'm not against automation at all. Framo automates a lot, and there's more to come, but I believe you should always be able to take full control whenever you want to. That's why the agents I'm building can be customised down to the last detail, from their skills and references to their memory and even your own LoRAs: agents that only you could have made. It's also why Framo has a Photoshop-inspired 2D editor where you can sketch, photo-bash and edit with pixel-perfect selections and prompts.

05 — Craft of AI

Every new medium and every new tool brings its own craft with it, and in the beginning that craft is rarely seen or accepted. When photography came along, painters feared it would replace painting for good, and critics refused to call it art at all. Baudelaire thought it should be nothing more than a humble servant to the real arts. Electronic music was dismissed as pressing buttons. Looking back, both judgements seem absurd, and yet it took years before people recognised how much depth there really is in either.

I think AI is at exactly that point today, and it's the reason we see so much slop. Many people believe AI simply does the work for them, so they never notice that there's a craft to learn at all. Without it you can only get so far, and most people stop too early.

With that in mind, I built Framo to give you both the shortcuts and ways of building your craft. There are one-click solutions, like presets that work out of the box or the prompt enhancer that helps you write the perfect prompt. And whenever you want, you can dive in, take full control, build your own prompt libraries and learn the craft of AI, just like with any tool before it.

06 — Mission

With Framo I want to build more than a tool. My goal is an open and inclusive community where we learn from each other and explore this new medium together. It doesn't matter if you have been designing for twenty years or made your first image last week. Photography and electronic music both had their breakout moment, when people suddenly saw what the medium could really do and it grew into an art form of its own. AI hasn't had that moment yet, and I'd love to find it together with you.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end. I hope you liked this more personal kind of newsletter, so let me know if you'd like to see more issues like this one. Just hit reply — I read every one myself.

Roman

P.S. I'm breaking the weekly pattern this time. There's so much new in Framo that I can't wait another week to share it, so there will be a second newsletter this Thursday. Stay tuned.