Adam is the founder of Presq and an anti-disciplinary designer from San Jose, CA with design, engineering, and new media experience at NASA, Adidas, Canada Goose, and Carbon3D.
Building design tools for a long time
Founded Presq as a maturation for similar questions, 2 years into the company!
NASA 2019 project - how might we improve tool for non designers, reduce friction for concept and percept
Going from concept to digital to physical manifestation
3d printing - linking about disparate design tools, AI/Dalle (creating 2d image), going from 2d to 3d, creating great UX about bringing that to life
Helping people get into creative entrepreneurship, thinking about how to scale
Getting the final design, getting things into production and scale, cogs light enough to create something profitable
Specialize in footwear, eyes pointed at the future / other consumer goods
Eyewear, homegoods, home lighting
What is your creative process?
Not spending as much time in traditional design workflows anymore
Working with talented designers, full time designer in house
Creative practice is administrative
- Notion
- Data structures, information structures
Creativity manifests in peer to peer communication
Less drawing/sketching/3d modeling
More time listening to podcasts, studying how people communicate
Studied linguistics/cognitive science
“Design is a language”, ongoing study of critical communication
Everything says something, conveys some sort of idea
Used to have independent design firm
- Sketches out moodboards first
Map out your creative journey
(1) Pre-creation - 20% sketching moodboards, empathizing with the problem
(2) Creation - 40% digital sketching gravitysketch, 20% visualization (need to see something rendered), go between 3d modeling/rendering for industrial design, 20% design for manufacturing (grasshopper, lightweighting), supporting something optimally, manufacturing and working with a resin
(3) Post-creation - sharing products
Favorite design tools and why?
CAD - gravitysketch (intuitive UI) “best interface tools are the human hand” - Jobs
When 3D modeling, using 2d interface to interact with 3D object
Gravitysketch is 3D to 3D, more tactile experience
Intuitive, pick it up on day one
“Digital clay” - if you’re working with real clay, you’d hesitate
Eraser, having a back button is freeing and organic!
Thoughts on AdamCAD?
Text to CAD
Not well suited to my needs
Could see a world where it’s a useful tool
Not concerned about design, but about abstraction layer design
“Don’t care what it looks like, fit the need”
Use case of raspberry pi
Womp 3d
- Live rendering
Cinema 4d
Used to use keyshot
Love talking about design more than execution of design operations
Dislikes the grunt work, feels like grunt work when you’re not super skilled
Magic in working with people that makes it look easy
Access to talent
80% of the process to trudge through, get to the point that it feels actionable
What are the challenges in your creative process?
Venture funding for creative projects
Finding the right capital product for creative outcomes
Right now - venture backed company, started augmenting the way that we work to create venture sized outcomes
Okay for us but a lot of people have the opportunity to build something that might make 100k, would benefit from a 25k check
Chance of getting 100k is pretty high
- Available through grants but nowhere else
Thoughts on idea to manufacturing tools?
Huge opportunity for that
Horizontal solutions are difficult
Flora, Backflip AI, Adamcad → text to CAD tools
- If they just focused on enclosures, top of funnel
Really okay at many things, not great at anything
Creates long term issues
Orthogonal approach
If you’re going to enter the space, finding a niche
Arcade AI → specific category (jewelry, area rugs) → specific characteristics that lend themselves to the affordances to the tool like theirs
Jewelry doesn’t need a 3d model, just a couple great images, same thing with rugs
Apparel tech packs
https://www.raspberry.ai/
Clothing tech packs
Pietra
Fourth wall → whitelabeling
Apparel space is a hot place to start for this
Similar paradigm to arcade, don’t need to supply a manufacturer with a 3d model
As soon as you need a 3d model, the technical ceiling goes way up
Segmentation, train custom models
Footwear manufacturing
We understand it
Big sneakerhead, worked at large footwear companies, a lot of tribal knowledge
Founder market fit
Cultural levers
Creator led distribution
Custom trained text to 2d models, custom 2d to 3d models, custom computational design models to mesh to manufacturing geometry
Using off the shelf stuff building custom pipelines/frameworks/code for to help it fit into a specific use case
Off the shelf tools are too generalized (almost there, but not quite), filled in that last 20% gap
Do use tech packs for traditional manufacturing, candidly not challenging for footwear
gd&t engineering
https://www.drafterinc.com/
Do a technical drawing and send it to a manufacturer if you already have a model
This firm already has models
Tech pack / footwear is taking an existing model and sending it to a manufacturer because you need 3d, footwear needs a 3d model
Apparel don’t need that (image → tech pack)
Look at the TAM of these independent orthogonal markets
Our market is not creative design tools
SAM / SOM → specific product niche
Experience talking to investors, finding that pathway yourself
A lot of investors are curious about these specific market openings
Looking into that and tailor our story to that
Overall thoughts on being a creative?
Excited about design and the community of builders in the creative tooling space!