EP 73: What I'm Doing This Summer (And Why I Want You to Join Me)
What I'm Doing This Summer (And Why I Want You to Join Me)
- ChatGPT is gone — permanently. The move was not about the product but about the company. The current stack is Claude and Gemini, and that is where things are staying.
- The way AI actually gets used here has almost nothing to do with a chat thread. It is branded apps, dashboards, and custom AI-powered tools built specifically for design business workflows.
- The AI App Studio inside the programs is growing — every tool built by a working designer, for working designers. Not by a tech company guessing at what the industry needs.
- Field Day is a 9-week summer AI learning program starting Tuesday, June 2nd — beginning at square one and building every single week, with live sessions, study halls, and hands-on implementation built into every class.
- Open enrollment class pricing is dropping from $149 to $79. The economy is hard and more designers should be able to access the training.
- A fully rebuilt, highly interactive new website is in progress and coming soon.
First: An Honest Catch-Up
This is one of those episodes that starts with a pause. If the site has felt a little scattered lately, if the programs have felt mid-evolution, or if there has been a general sense of loose ends not quite connecting — that is real, it is known, and it is actively being fixed.
April alone meant being home for maybe ten days total. Two kids — a four-year-old about to start kindergarten and a nine-year-old hitting the end of the school year — and a schedule that has not stopped moving for close to two years. The work is genuinely loved. But there is a point where you have to actually catch your breath or you stop doing it well. This is that point.
One thing worth understanding about how this all works: no presentation gets given twice. Literally ever. AI changes fast enough that by the time something is built and taught, there is already something new to report on. That means constantly learning, testing, breaking, fixing, and teaching all at the same time. There is no ready-made curriculum for this. The training material gets created by living inside the technology first.
This summer is the season for finally building what has been visible for two years but just out of reach — whether because of time, the pace of everything else, or because the technology itself was not quite there yet. That moment has arrived. This episode is about what that actually looks like.
On Leaving ChatGPT
Made Instagram official a few months ago and worth saying plainly here too: ChatGPT has not been opened in over three months, and there are no plans to go back. This is not about the product. The product does things, including image generation, that are genuinely impressive. It is about the company, the leadership, and the direction things are heading. The motives of the people running it are not trusted, and pointing designers toward a platform that cannot be fully stood behind is not something that works here.
There is a core principle at play: the teaching is never built around one specific tool. The skills worth learning are transferable — how to think in prompts, how to identify workflow bottlenecks, how to build something that actually solves a real problem in your business. Those skills work across any model, any platform, whatever shows up next. The point is never "you have to use this app." The point is always "here is how to think about this."
The current stack is Claude and Gemini. Claude has genuinely changed a lot about how the work gets done — it is hard to say enough good things about it. Gemini handles images and video beautifully and integrates with Google in ways that make sense for how everything is already organized. Together those two power essentially everything being built right now, both personally and for client work.
How AI Actually Gets Used Here (It's Not What You Think)
This is probably the most useful part of the episode for anyone who has been sitting in a chat thread wondering why it feels like there should be more to this. The chat thread is almost never where the real work happens. It gets opened occasionally — to see what is new, to check how other people are using something, sometimes for video credits. But the actual work lives somewhere else entirely.
What is actually happening is app building. Not app store apps — web-based, AI-powered tools that solve specific, real problems in a design business workflow. The process: identify a task that is time-consuming, monotonous, or just genuinely hard to do well. Figure out what the AI needs to handle it. Build a beautiful, branded interface around that so the tool is easy to use without needing to understand what is happening under the hood.
Some of these are dashboards that pull in information from a spreadsheet or a calendar and present it in a way that is actually worth looking at. Some are single-task tools — like taking a fabric URL, scraping the product details, applying it to a frame with correct scale and texture, and producing a print-ready output — the kind of thing that takes a designer an hour to do manually, done in two minutes. Some are brand voice builders that walk through articulating your voice and tone so thoroughly that any AI model can be trained on it, and the constant re-editing after every output finally stops.
The tech gets learned by breaking it constantly. The tools get built from the designer's perspective — not from a tech perspective looking in. That distinction is exactly what makes the difference between something impressive and something actually useful.
The AI App Studio — What It Is and Why It Exists
The AI App Studio is the growing library of apps that live inside the programs. Certificate members and Field Day enrollees get access to all of them. These are not published publicly, not in any app store, and not monetized separately — the API usage gets paid out of program fees, which is part of why pricing is being adjusted this summer.
Each app is built to do one specific thing really well. Not trying to replace an entire workflow — trying to take one task that designers have always done the slow, manual way and make it faster, cleaner, and more accurate. Outputs are customizable in most cases: add your own logo, adjust the format, make it feel like yours instead of something generic off the shelf.
These apps come out of real operations — real business logic, real design decisions, real problems being solved. The goal is a library that grows into what professionals actually want, built by someone who has been in this industry for over a decade and knows what the real problems are.
Field Day: 9 Weeks of AI Learning This Summer
Field Day starts Tuesday, June 2nd and runs through July 28th. Every Tuesday, 10am–12:20pm Eastern. Nine weeks, beginning at square one and building every single week. Sessions are recorded and available after.
The name is intentional. Field day has always been about doing things hands-on, trying stuff in real time, and walking away having actually accomplished something — with other people you like, in a context that makes it fun. That is exactly the model here. Nine weeks instead of one afternoon, because there is genuinely that much to cover.
Every session runs in 20-minute cycles: 20 minutes of live teaching, then 20 minutes in the chat while you go try what was just shown. The cycle repeats three to four times per session, covering a different topic each round. Two hours of watching someone explain things is not the goal. Watching, doing, asking, and implementing in alternating chunks throughout the morning is.
Week one starts with Claude. By the end of that first session the tool is set up, the interface is understood, and there is at least one repeatable task identified in the business that Claude can handle. From there, each week adds a layer — week five covers Canva. The curriculum builds on itself, so designers who have been around for years will find something new each week, and designers starting from zero will have their feet under them before anything gets complicated.
Study Halls — The Part That Makes It Actually Stick
After each weekly session there are two study halls. Sixteen seats each. Open forum. This is not a replay of the lesson — it is targeted help on where you actually got stuck. The expectation is that the class has been watched and implementation has been attempted before showing up. Coming in without having tried the material first is a waste of everyone's time, and that gets called out directly.
But if the class was watched, something was tried, and there is a specific wall — that is exactly what study hall is for. Questions that come up after actually attempting something are almost always more useful, more specific, and more memorable than questions asked before anything has been tried.
Two sessions run after each class so there are time options. They fill up — if a particular week is already looking complicated, Canva on week five tends to generate a lot of questions — grab a seat before the day of rather than the morning of.
Field Day Pricing
All Field Day enrollees get access to the AI App Studio. Registration is per person — it is interactive and tied to individual login.
Open Enrollment Classes Are Getting More Accessible
The certificate program is in Q2 right now and enrollment is closed for this cycle. But open enrollment classes — the standalone classes that run between semesters — are open to everyone, and some carry IDCEC credit for 1.5 CEUs if attended live.
Starting after Q2 closes, the price on those classes drops from $149 to $79. The reason is simple: the economy is hard right now and more designers should be able to access this training. That is it. The cost of running the AI App Studio is going up as the library grows, and the economics are being restructured so the barrier to get in the room is lower rather than higher.
Certificate members already have those classes included — nothing changes there. For anyone who has been watching from the outside and the price has been the sticking point, it changes when enrollment reopens.
Worth noting: nothing is ever the same twice. A class taught three months ago is a different class now because AI has changed. Attending the same topic in a later semester is not a repeat — it is an update.
Why Things Have Felt Scattered — And What's Being Fixed
Everything gets built before it gets taught. No system gets taught that has not been lived inside first — tested, broken, rebuilt, understood. That means programs are sometimes in flux while the work of figuring out what actually works is happening. That has been visible externally, it is known, and it is not something that gets glossed over.
This summer is the consolidation phase. Two years of exploring, testing, building, and iterating is being pulled into a structure that is stable and scalable. The mind map has been drawn. The team is in on it. The AI App Studio is expanding. The program structure is being streamlined. All of it is happening at the same time as Field Day — which is fitting, because that is exactly the kind of parallel-processing that this work always requires.
A new website is in progress. Highly interactive, built to engage rather than just display, future-forward in a way that feels right for what is coming. Hopefully it is live soon. The caveat that always applies: everything takes ten times longer than you think it will. That is just how it goes.
If you have been waiting for things to settle, this is the summer. And Field Day is the best entry point into what comes next.
Jenna is the go-to educator for design professionals who want to use technology without losing their creative edge. A designer turned tech advocate, she's a nationally recognized speaker, podcast host, community builder, and custom app builder based in Charleston, SC.
Her previous company, eDesign Tribe, was acquired by Mydoma Studio in 2021–22. She started teaching AI to designers at the end of 2023 and has not stopped since.
Format: Every Tuesday, 10am–12:20pm ET. 20-minute live sessions with 20-minute Q&A breaks, cycling 3–4 times per session.
Study Halls: Two sessions after each class, 16 seats each, live only.
Pricing: $249 (9 weeks) · $397 (9 weeks + 3 study halls) · $99 (single study hall) · $999 (Team Pass, up to 5)
Included: Access to the AI App Studio for all enrollees.
Disclaimer: This blog was written using AI as a recap from the recording then edited by the author for accuracy and details.