Prologue: The Problem with “It Looks Good to Me”
 

Design critique can sometimes feel random. As subjective as music taste. One Creative Director’s “bold and fresh” is another’s “off-brand and distracting.” Add tight deadlines, distributed teams, and varying skill levels, and feedback can quickly become inconsistent, slow, and, worst of all, demoralizing.

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I’ve seen the same scenario play out: designers waiting days for feedback, only to get contradictory notes; stakeholders unsure how to articulate what’s wrong; and creative leads buried under rounds of subjective revisions.

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I wanted to see if AI could help fix this—not by replacing creative judgment, but by giving teams a shared, objective language for evaluating work.

Challenge
Create an AI-powered system that could deliver clear, consistent, and brand-aligned feedback.

Strategy
I developed Dauron, an AI-driven design critique assistant that uses academically grounded principles to assess creative work in real time.
 

The aim was to:

• Empower designers to self-assess before presenting work
  
  
• Give stakeholders a fast way to understand intention and execution quality
  
  
• Maintain brand consistency while scaling production across teams and geographies
  
  

Execution

• Academic Foundation: Based on the Graphic Design Program at CalArts—one of the nation’s leading design schools.
  
  
• 8-Point Evaluation Model: Function, Audience, Hierarchy, Composition, Visual Contrast, Additional Contrasts, Theme/Concept, Narrative/Sequence.
  
  
• Framework Development: Converted academic concepts into a practical critique model that could adapt to any brand book or brief submitted to Dauron.
  
  
• AI Training: Refined Dauron’s feedback over multiple iterations (“epochs”) by having it evaluate hundreds of real-world design examples.
  
  
• Open Access: Released Dauron as a resource for any team interested in building similar systems.
  
  

Learnings

• Strategic Insight: Marrying academic rigor with AI can create tools that scale without diluting creativity.
  
  
• Leadership Lesson: Giving teams clear, AI-enabled frameworks builds confidence, autonomy, and skill growth.
  
  
• Operational Takeaway: Dauron is low-cost, replicable, and customizable for long-term quality and efficiency gains.
  
  

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