play episode
Podcast
S1
41 mins
Aug 24, 2026
How One Designer Builds Tools People Pay For: George Hastings
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George Hastings is the solo founder of Unicorn Studio, the no-code tool that turned WebGL and shaders into something designers can touch and play with.
But my favorite thing about George is that he built it alone, with no VC money, after years at IDEO and AREA17.
This conversation goes deep into deterministic chisels vs stochastic AI design and his advice to designers who want to build their own tools.
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LINKS:
Unicorn Studio: https://unicorn.studio
George Hastings on X: https://x.com/soulegit
FOLLOW ME:
Newsletter: https://uxtools.co
X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertom
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco
Chapters
0:00 — Cold open and intro
1:39 — The blank page and building your own inspiration
4:48 — Making things vs building products
6:15 — Falling in love with code: AREA17, CodePen, and the browser
8:12 — Open canvas tools and the tension with code
9:06 — Reverse engineering the happy accident
11:02 — Knowing when it's done
12:12 — A tool or a way of thinking?
13:46 — The chisel vs stochastic design
16:50 — Building at 90% agentic: you're the boss, check the work
18:37 — Why AI struggles with shaders
20:24 — An agent inside the walled garden
21:35 — Charging money and the long closed beta
22:37 — The pixel game, Khroma, and getting the building bug
25:47 — Solo, no VC: "I'm really just trying to be an artist"
26:58 — Advice for designer-builders: solve a sexy problem
28:03 — Selling the workflow, not the outputs
30:15 — Soul, special sauce, and letting the shaders go
32:47 — OpenClaw, MCP, and agents using your tool
37:19 — The controlled agent rollout
38:22 — Orchestrators and mourning the old workflow
40:51 — Outro: go play with it
