Last week, I published a new episode of Design Notes with friend of the show Rob Giampietro. The conversation was inspired by one we had while I was in New York earlier this year. Over coffee, we had talked about Notion Faces, a project he’d just helped launch that lets anybody create an avatar for themselves in the style of Notion employee portraits.
What compelled me to expand that conversation into a whole podcast episode was the fact that Notion chose to hire human illustrators (the first being Roman Muradov) to create the Faces assets, rather than resorting to generating them. In this technological moment, when the pressure is higher than ever to find things to do with AI, it struck me as a meaningful decision. Especially for a project where the scale and variability of portrait assets are key.
The tension generated by this decision inspired this issue of Doubleshot. Let’s get started.
