Vibe Coding as an Apparel Designer
Jun 16, 2025
The design world is evolving fast—and vibe coding is at the forefront. Vibe coding means describing your creative ideas to an AI, which then writes the code for you. This approach lets you focus on creativity and rapid experimentation, instead of getting bogged down in manual programming. No matter your discipline, these tools can dramatically accelerate the development of designed products and processes.
My Experience: Building a Size Chart Navigator with Perplexity Projects
Recently, I put vibe coding to the test for my senior capstone project. Pattern grading isn’t my strongest skill, so I needed a solution to streamline the process. Using Perplexity’s new “Projects” tab, I created a size chart navigator that made it easy to communicate product specs with my team and print charts for fit sessions. Sharing the project link meant everyone stayed on the same page, and the user-friendly interface simplified collaboration.
Interact with the project: https://lnkd.in/g7_2m5ZV
How to Use Perplexity’s "Labs" Tab
Unfortunately, the "labs" tab in Perplexity is behind a paywall, but in my opinion, its well worth it. The student membership is only $4.99, really good value if you ask me.
If you do have Perplexity Pro, follow these steps to build any project you desire.
Access Labs (Projects)
On the Perplexity website or app, select “Labs” from the mode selector
Describe Your Project
Follow best practices of prompt engineering, such as setting a persona and clearly describing your vision.
Let AI Build
The AI researches, generates code, and assembles the project components for you, usually under 10 minutes.
Explore the Output:
You can click over to the "app" tab to interact with and link the project
Helpful if you want to share your creation with others, in my case, I could make this size chart and share it with the design team to help them integrate it on the website, or the rest of the technical design team so they know how to evaluate the fit.
Prompt Engineering Tips:
Some of the ways you can improve the output of your requested project is by mastering prompt engineering. Here are some tips:
Use a "persona" when crafting your prompt. Starting with the words "Act as.." or "You are.." can help a lot because they give you information you may not know. For this project I said "You are a professional athletic wear designer, specifically for men's wear"
Understand that it's not going to be perfect on the first prompt. Usually you have to do some trial and error and adjusting of the output, this is typical, it cannot read your mind. With the project/labs section it's important to remain patient because the generations take about 10 minutes, but you can build off of these.
Provide it with data and information that you already have. One of the helpful ways I did this is using my in class notes to help feed my answers, notes from my textiles class, pattern making, and other notes from reading text books have been helpful to make answers more accurate. Provide it with resources you know are accurate.
When designing some sort of interactive app, you have full creative control! Provide color ways, functions, in the prompt say "Give me a perfect user experience for this app, make it easy to pick up and follow". The power of these tools is that you can make it yours, take advantage of that and tell your story.
Endless Possibilities for Designers
Perplexity Projects isn’t just for size charts. Here are some other ways designers can leverage this tool:
Interactive Dashboards: Visualize collection performance, trend data, or customer feedback in real time
Automated Reports: Generate product spec sheets, tech packs, or market research summaries in minutes
Mini Web Apps: Build tools for fabric calculators, fit session scheduling, or feedback collection
Data Visualization: Turn raw data into compelling charts and infographics for presentations
Content Planning: Create dashboards for social media content calendars or campaign tracking
The Takeaway
Vibe coding and Perplexity Projects are redefining what’s possible for designers. These tools empower you to bring any vision to life, no advanced coding required. As designers, we’re the storytellers and problem solvers. With AI as our creative partner, the only limit is our imagination. So, what’s stopping you? Start building, experimenting, and shaping the future of design, one prompt at a time.