Heewon Ahn
Designer, engineer, and occasional artist.
Founding designer at Stan, where we grew from $0 to $0M ARR in three years. Now building a new UX paradigm for
generative AI. I really like the <canvas> element, so a few of these frames are alive.
I Building
Life
Life 2020 – now
II Writing
- The Aesthetics Age Or, how vibes are everything now.
- A Visual Interface for Thought Revisiting David Canfield Smith's 1975 Pygmalion thesis to imagine what comes after chat.
- The AI Palace Economy The intelligence revolution as a universal liquidity provider for the digital economy.
- The Roman-Persian Wars Predictions on the US-China conflict, from the greatest rivalry of classical antiquity.
- The Civilization Timeline Three weeks charting the history of human civilization, by region and country.
- The Super Mario Bros. Movie Review Nintendo's brand play, and what it means for the movie industry.
III Design
- Stan I dropped out of college at 19 to help build the future of work. We scaled from $0 to $30M ARR in three years, led by John and Vitalii.
- NYBC Posters and marketing for the New York Bible Conference.
- Cornell L+R Lab Logos for the Learning & Recursion Lab, led by Prof. Kevin Ellis at Cornell.
- Logo Redesigns A personal exercise in giving famous brands a more modern feel.
- Team Ithaca Logos and banners for the Ithaca Brain Team and Science Olympiad.
- Ithaca Paintball Branding and signage for a local paintball field.
$0M
ARR in three years, led by John and Vitalii.
IV Libraries
V Games
- Platformr My personal favorite game, where you create your own platforms. 18 handcrafted levels.
- 11 Rooms An atmospheric puzzle game set across 11 mysterious rooms.
- Just Orbiting By A physics-based space game about orbital gravity and planetary motion.
- Wordchain A word puzzle where every answer begins with the last letter of the previous one.
- Trails A particle art game where gravity and motion create colorful trails.
- Super Pong A high-speed, particle-charged remake of the classic Pong arcade game.
Platformr Platformer
VI Web apps
- AI Canvas Realtime AI image generation, based on tldraw's Drawfast.
- iPhone 3D Creator A helper tool for UX designers.
- Dido UI A minimalistic UI library.
- Stan GMV Tracker A live, public dashboard tracking Stan's gross merchandise value in real time.
- Stan Remix An interactive remix of the Stan creator experience.
- Science Olympiad Website for Ithaca's Science Olympiad team.
VII Comics
VIII Research
IX Videos
- King for All (AI Teaser Trailer) A teaser for King for All, my historical novel, made with AI.
- The Future of UI in the AI Era (Inflection Fellowship 2026) My video for the 2026 Inflection Fellowship.
- 3 Fun Mini Games, by Heewon Ahn My personal game portfolio video.
- 4 Design Principles I'm Using to Build a $BN Company John's video. I appear at around the 7:32 mark.