7-Year Designer Who Can’t Code Made a Game With AI. What Happened.

I can’t code.

Seven years as a designer — Seoul, New York, and now, I’m serving in the military.

I learned color theory, typography, negative space. I understand all of that. But pointers? async/await? Why npm install randomly breaks? No idea. I just guess.

And yet I built Glowtris. A Tetris-like game that runs in the browser. And this blog.

I did it by talking.

What vibe coding actually means to me

People use the term differently. For me it goes like this:

Know what you want → describe it to AI → AI builds it → look at what came out → say what’s wrong → fix it.

The key part: AI does the labor, but “that’s not right” still comes from me. From whatever’s been trained into my eye after seven years of looking at design work.

It’s not magic. It doesn’t do everything while you sleep. But it’s completely different from being stuck because you can’t code. It’s closer to having a very fast developer who constantly needs art direction.

The color system

I started with one constraint: feel like a futuristic neon arcade game, but readable for 20 minutes without eye strain.

First prompt:

“Make the background very dark navy, almost black. Neon glow colors for pieces are cyan, magenta, yellow, green. UI should feel like a dark sci-fi interface — clean, minimal, glowing.”

Claude Code gave me CSS with #000000 for the background and rough neon colors. Problem: pure black kills glow effects. Glow reads best against dark blue-black, not absolute black. I pushed back.

“The background feels flat. It needs to be very dark, desaturated navy — something like #04041e. The piece glow should look like it’s actually emitting light.”

Second result was much closer. And the #04041e I threw out casually became the actual production value. Sometimes you guess right. Lucky.

Typography

The logo font is Orbitron — heavy, geometric, sci-fi. It reads “space game” from a hundred meters away. Exactly what I wanted.

But Orbitron at body size is unreadable. I needed a completely different voice for content.

For Korean: Pretendard. Cleanest Korean sans-serif I know. For English body: system-ui. For monospace elements: JetBrains Mono.

“Headers and logo: Orbitron. Body and UI: Pretendard for Korean, system-ui for English. Monospace elements like category tags: JetBrains Mono.”

Display / body / mono — three-font system is a standard design pattern. Claude knew it and implemented it correctly. The well-worn paths are well-worn for a reason.

Light mode was added late but became the default

Glowtris is dark. The whole brand is built around glow on dark backgrounds. So the blog started dark too.

But reading it on my phone in daylight felt uncomfortable. I wanted it to work in the light without losing the brand.

“Make the blog default light mode, dark mode as an option. Tone should feel like a proper tech blog.”

In light mode, the glow colors swap to #2563eb — confident and technical without needing a dark background. The dot grid hero is borrowed from Vercel’s aesthetic — everywhere in modern tech, but it reads as “infrastructure, information, nodes.” Subtle enough not to scream about it.

Dark mode keeps the original #00c8ff cyan and dark navy. Same brand, different colorway.

What prompting couldn’t fix

There’s always stuff I had to adjust manually.

Spacing. AI-generated spacing is always too tight or too loose. I tighten logo tracking, add breathing room around section dividers, reduce card padding. Years of looking at things calibrates your eye.

Type scale. Default suggestions are mathematically correct but visually flat. I always push heading sizes up and body down slightly to increase contrast between levels.

Color relationships. AI can nail individual colors but misses how colors interact across contexts. Active button text needing to invert between light and dark mode — I had to say that twice.

Microinteractions. Default hover states are always too subtle or too dramatic. I want 0.15s ease, no scale transforms — responsive and confident. The industry standard for a reason.

The thing

Every decision has my opinion behind it.

Working with Claude means expressing those opinions in plain language and watching them render immediately.

Something felt off. I said so. Saw what came back. Said what was still wrong. Kept going.

There’s one thing prompting can’t do. Taste. The thing in your brain that screams “no, #04041e, #000000 is wrong.” Why a dot grid feels like infrastructure. Why three fonts need to know their place and stay quiet.

Claude is fast. But if you don’t know what you want, it’ll just make something. Might be beautiful. Might be a disaster.

That part’s on you.