Bringing generative AI onto the surface where creative work actually happens.

Burlap is an AI-native infinite canvas for creative professionals, built for macOS on a BYOK model. My role sits closest to a hands-on Head of Design, working directly with founder and the engineering team, but product design is the largest part of the job by a wide margin. We ship a new version almost every week, through the beta and beyond, which means design decisions land in users’ hands within days, not quarters.

The product is shaped around a simple premise: AI generation belongs inside a workspace, alongside references and iterations, not isolated in a chat box. Day to day, the work centers on taming an aggregator architecture of unusual complexity, hundreds of generative models exposed through a single canvas, each with its own parameters, quirks, and capabilities. Every model added is a new design problem, reconciling its native logic with the rest of the system without turning the interface into a control panel.

I also lead brand and creative direction across the project, touching every surface where Burlap shows up in the world: visual identity, marketing, growth, social, launch materials, and the studio’s overall posture. The brand carries the same character as the product, tactile and matter-of-fact, closer to a studio tool than a tech product.

A meaningful part of the work happens alongside Third Wall Studio, the animation studio side of the operation. I partner directly with the artists, the director, and the video producers there, treating their daily practice as the brief and pulling needs from real production into the product roadmap.

burlap.app

Industry

AI / Tech

Location

New York, USA

Deliverables

Brand Identity

Product Design

Digital Design / UI & UX

Generative tools tend to expose every parameter at once, on the assumption that more knobs equal more power. In practice, it buries the work under its own configurability. Burlap shows the essential settings up front, the ones you actually reach for when starting a piece. Advanced controls stay close, surfacing the moment a project calls for granularity rather than competing for attention from the first click.
Creative work has no containers and no noodle lines. We built Burlap around that conviction. Node-based interfaces are powerful, but the power is expensive. They ask you to build a system before you make the work, and to maintain that system as the work evolves. We didn't want that to be the price of using AI on a canvas.
Where traditional creative apps push controls into floating panels and side rails, Burlap treats the canvas as the only true surface. Tools come to your work, not the other way around.
A strong center. A loose perimeter. At the center, a custom B letterform, drawn with enough weight to hold its own against anything placed near it: generative imagery, motion, video, type. Around it, the system loosens deliberately. No grids. No fixed compositions. No templates pretending to enforce order. The identity extends the same way Burlap does. An open surface that adapts to whatever lives on it, not a structure that work has to fit inside.