From blank page to brand-first: how Pablo.Design is rewriting the site builder playbook

Instead, his journey started somewhere unexpected. He was in Japan, with a friend, and a web design tool that needed building. Jack, then a computer science student, dove in. Not to become a designer himself, but to help someone who already was. And that made all the difference.

“My friend had this ridiculous eye for detail,” Jack recalls. “Even his prototypes were sharper than most people’s final work. That rubbed off on me. I started to see design not as decoration, but as a way of thinking. A way of caring. I wasn’t trying to become a designer, but I realized that if I wanted to contribute meaningfully, I had to understand how design shapes experiences. That really stuck with me.”

From blank page to brand-first: how Pablo.Design is rewriting the site builder playbook

He was building skills and becoming a creative force behind the scenes. It was a quiet process that helped him learn how to create designs and develop projects that live in his mind’s eye. All of this was the lead-up to the idea that would eventually become Pablo.Design.

Starting with your brand, not a blank slate

Every site builder promises ease with features like drag and drop, plug and play, etc. But somewhere along the way, those promises lead back to the same place.

A blank canvas and a sea of unused templates.

Jack saw this play out firsthand. A friend was trying to launch a site for their startup. They had the vision, the logo, the copy, the vibe, everything but a site.

“It wasn’t a technical issue,” Jack says. “It was design. They hit this wall where they had to make a thousand tiny decisions with things like layout, spacing, balance, visual hierarchy, and all of this with zero guidance. It was paralyzing. It wasn’t about knowing how to code or use tools. It was about not knowing where to start, or how to move forward without second-guessing everything.”

That moment lit the spark. What if the process didn’t start with a blank template? What if it started with you?

What if you dropped your logo and the site built itself around your brand?

That’s the heart of Pablo.Design.

You upload your logo. Pablo writes your first draft copy. It builds layouts that match your style. You don’t start from nothing. You react to something that already feels like you.

It’s design that respects your time and intuition.

Design for the rest of us

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the default setting for most site builders is overwhelming. Pixel values, margins, sliders that control sliders. It’s a UI fever dream.

Jack’s team wanted none of that.

“You won’t find inputs asking you to set your margin to 32 pixels,” he says. “Pablo isn’t about micromanaging every detail. It’s about exploring tone and vibe. You shuffle styles. You feel your way through. If you like something, you keep going. If it doesn’t feel right, you switch. There’s no pressure to get it perfect, because the tool is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.”

That choice is intentional. Pablo.Design isn’t built for designers. It’s built for founders, creators, tinkerers, and anyone who knows how they want their website to feel.

It’s design without the design degree. Which, honestly, feels revolutionary.

Lummi enters the frame

Even with a great builder, visuals can still trip people up. Stock photos are everywhere and nowhere at once. They fill space, but not the soul.

That’s where Lummi came in.

“We discovered Lummi in the middle of building Pablo,” Jack says. “Stock imagery felt static. Generic. Then we found Lummi, and it just clicked. It wasn’t just that the illustrations were beautiful but also how alive they felt. The way they moved with the layout, how they adapted to the color scheme, how they felt like part of the brand instead of something just dropped on top. That made a huge difference.”

Lummi’s visuals aren’t background noise. They are the visual touch that gives a project a bit of life.

Jack reached out. Pablo Stanley invited them to explore the Lummi API. A little collaboration magic followed.

Today, Pablo.Design uses Lummi to inject energy and personality into every site. But that’s just the start.

“What excites me most is how flexible Lummi is,” Jack says. “Eventually, we want to give users more control over customizing Lummi visuals. Full creative freedom, but still easy. Right now, we’re only scratching the surface. The future is letting people interact with illustrations in a deeper way — like changing the pose, mood, and palette to match their own story. That’s the kind of creative empowerment we believe in.”

This is just the beginning

Jack and his team are playing the long game. Today, Pablo.Design helps people go from zero to published. Tomorrow, it might help them grow, evolve, and scale.

“A website is just the beginning,” Jack says. “It’s the entry point to whatever you’re building. Product, community, portfolio. But it shouldn’t feel like a separate project from what you’re launching. That disconnect slows people down. It turns a fun idea into a series of checklists and tasks that feel totally unrelated to the original spark.”

The next chapter is all about flow. Reducing overhead. Removing friction. Helping creators stay in their groove. Not just at the start, but all the way through.

Short term? They’re working on expanding layout options and giving users more freedom to explore and shape things their way. And making content creation just as intuitive as design is already inside Pablo.

Made by people who care

Pablo.Design was built slowly, thoughtfully, and with carefully considered constraints. With feedback, revised mistakes, and iterations made human hands.

It’s easy to assume that tools like this come from some design unicorn factory. But this one didn’t. It came from a developer who learned design by doing, listening, and paying attention to problems and solutions. Who built the thing he wished his friends had.

“That’s always been our motivation,” Jack says. “We’re not trying to make the most powerful tool. We’re trying to make the most helpful one. Something that meets you where you are and helps you move forward.”

And that’s what makes it different.

Pablo.Design isn’t just a better way to build websites. It’s a better way to start. A better way to say, “this is me” without needing to master fifteen design tools and lose a weekend to layout hell.

It’s an invitation to begin.

One logo at a time.

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