While modern graphic design apps have put professional results within the grasp of everyday users, it still takes a certain level of intuition and skill to make something look great. However, neuroscientist-turned-entrepreneur Kamyab Ayanifard is hoping to take this technology a step further, creating an app that will allow anyone to create incredible designs -- regardless of skill level.
With the AI-powered design app Shots, Ayanifard is helping users make outstanding graphics with just a few taps. Combining rigorous research techniques from his background in neuroscience with a hands-on approach to problem-solving that's helped him launch three successful start-ups in four years, Ayanifard aims to make beautiful designs as simple and intuitive as possible.
Ayanifard's Studies and Early Career
Pursuing a career in artificial intelligence wasn't always the plan. Ayanifard came from a family of doctors, after all, and his parents had always dreamed of him following in their footsteps. But this all changed when, as a college freshman, he heard Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison give a commencement speech at USC. Ellison's choice to deviate from his family's dreams of him becoming a doctor inspired Ayanifard (who had big tech dreams of his own) to change his education path to a double major in computer science and neuroscience. He credits this decision as the turning point in his life that would allow him to touch as many lives as possible and create something that could help a vast number of people.
This interdisciplinary study of human cognition and computation allows Ayanifard to apply robust scientific research methods throughout his work in developing technology. For one, every decision he makes is backed by a scientific process of incremental testing and iteration. But in his current work with Shots, it's also his background in neuroscience (combined with his technical experience at past startups) that enables him to craft intuitive user experiences and fulfill a user's needs at every step.
After college, Ayanifard proved to be ahead of his time by founding CliQ, an AI co-writer that assists in creating persuasive essays and simplifies academic collaboration -- two years prior to the explosive growth of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Despite the notoriously rigid standards of the education technology space, the startup reached over 12,000 users under Ayanifard's leadership. It also secured spots in the 2020 UC Davis Plasma incubator and the Berkeley SkyDeck incubator (also known as HotDesk) in 2021.
Following this success, Ayanifard worked as a founding engineer at Bubbl, a user-friendly platform that helped communities, brands, and companies organize live events. The app generated $1,000,000 worth of ticket sales in only ten months, rapidly establishing a loyal community of Bubbl devotees.
Bringing Professional-Quality Design Within Reach
Ayanifard has since turned his attention to the world of design by creating Shots, an AI graphic design platform that simplifies the work of making incredible designs to as few clicks as possible. Leveraging a history of building successful startups and combining it with his rigorous hybrid studies in neuroscience and tech, Ayanifard has been able to create an app that understands user intention, the psychology of good design, and intuitive user experiences.
Platforms like Instagram and VSCO have given rise to a generation of visually savvy users. While they may lack formal design education or in-depth knowledge of color psychology and typography, they have developed an intuition for attractive color palettes and text layouts. Shots harness artificial intelligence to amplify this innate aesthetic awareness, offering users smart tools for creating beautiful designs and bringing their intuitive vision to life more rapidly than ever before.
"It's for people who have no understanding of design," Ayanifard explains. "They just know that something is beautiful."
Ayanifard's plans for the app will further leverage AI to help users design professional-quality creations. He's currently working on an in-app companion that will be able to identify where your designs aren't working and provide various suggestions to improve it -- what he calls "algorithmic autocomplete,"
Shots levels the playing field and allows for professional results that are comparable to what's possible with enterprise-level software -- and its results speak for themselves. It currently boasts over 60,000 monthly users, with almost 1,500,000 images generated in just a short period of time.
Kamyab Ayanifard: Democratizing Design
By combining his expert knowledge of neuroscience and computer science, Kamyab Ayanifard is creating innovative solutions that not only solve technical problems but also resonate with users. Thanks to his work, artificial intelligence is unlocking the gates that have kept users from creating professional designs, empowering anyone to create beauty and democratizing design for any user with a vision.