Sarah Smaili's Work | ContraWork by Sarah SmailiSarah Smaili
Designer focused on aesthetics
Every freelance designer knows this brief.
Two budgets in the same email. A deadline that is "January, maybe February". Two founders who disagree about the logo. And somewhere in the middle: "can we make the cancel button harder to find?"
Most of us price it anyway. I have. It rarely ends well.
So for the #Base44Challenge (https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/all/?keywords=%23base44challenge&origin=HASH_TAG_FROM_FEED) I built Flowstate.
You paste a messy client brief, and Flowstate:
→ separates what the client actually said from what is only a guess, with the exact quote next to every fact
→ names the gaps and the risks, including the ones nobody wants to say out loud
→ drafts the questions to send first
→ turns the answers into a scope and a proposal you can edit line by line
Three rules I didn't want to break:
1️⃣ Nothing invented. If the AI can't find the sentence behind a fact, it tells you.
2️⃣ Questions before price. A proposal stays a draft until the critical questions are answered.
3️⃣ You approve everything. Nothing is sent on your behalf.
My favorite moment while testing: it flagged the hidden cancel button as an ethical and legal risk. After the client's answer, the plan changed to a simple pause option instead.
Sara (https://www.linkedin.com/in/saraesmaili/) and I built it from scratch in five days, on the free plan, with no backend. Most of the time didn't go into new screens. It went into making the AI honest and consistent with itself.
Try the sample project here: https://lnkd.in/eed6Hurw
(https://lnkd.in/eed6Hurw)Would love to hear how you deal with vague briefs today.
#ProductDesign (https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/all/?keywords=%23productdesign&origin=HASH_TAG_FROM_FEED) #Freelance (https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/all/?keywords=%23freelance&origin=HASH_TAG_FROM_FEED) I made a short AI film with @Sarah Smaili for the CapCut LA Challenge on Contra 🦉
It started with a TV show I loved as a kid. I wanted to capture that feeling of a small fantasy world where anything can happen. (The letter-delivering owl is a little nod to Harry Potter.)
I’d wanted to try AI video for ages, and it turned out to be much more design work than I expected.
What made the difference:
➡️ We wrote the story first, then used Claude to break it into scenes
➡️ Each character had a character sheet and one fixed prompt, reused in every shot
➡️ For every shot, we described what should happen and what shouldn’t
➡️ Image references alongside the text worked far better than text alone
The hardest part was keeping characters consistent from shot to shot while still matching the picture in my head. Most of that was solved before we generated a single frame, through careful planning and clear, detailed descriptions.
Huge thanks to @Sarah Smaili for making this with me. Watch the journey below and let me know what you think! 
