reSee.it Podcast Summary
From painting canvases to prototyping interfaces, Steve Ruiz’s journey reframes how art, code, and design collide. A Chicago-born artist with an MFA in painting and drawing, he pivoted from running a studio to exploring design, prototyping, and small open-source fixes, ultimately landing in the world of product tooling. After moving to the UK in 2015, he taught himself to build interactive demos, learning Framer’s early tools and embracing the practice of prototyping as a way to test ideas quickly. His work at Framer, Play, and a side open-source obsession with arrows sharpened a taste for making design decisions by building, testing, and communicating them through visuals rather than words. That curiosity yielded Perfect Arrows, a library that turned tiny geometry problems into snackable content, and then culminated in a telestrator project for live screen drawing. He created Teal Draw and Perfect Freehand, formalizing a design-leaning rendering approach that could render on the web canvas and be integrated into other products. Public threads on Twitter showcased the mathematical thinking and aesthetic judgments behind every stroke, attracting users, sponsors, and early corporate interest.
As Make Real emerged, Teal Draw evolved from a developer tool into a platform-centered canvas capable of embedding websites via HTML iframes, then iterating on those builds with AI. A breakthrough came when GPT-4 with vision made the canvas itself the input: users could draw, annotate, and have an AI assistant produce updated HTML, then re-embed the result without leaving the canvas. Sawyer Hood at Figma contributed to early prototypes, and a wave of excitement followed as teams used Teal Draw to prototype end-user experiences, annotate designs, and even deliver working demos through iframe-based outputs. The product’s open-source model attracted sponsorships, queries from large firms, and a growing sense that a collaborative whiteboard would become a core, commoditized feature in many apps.
That momentum pushed Ruiz toward a seed round, then a startup around Make Real and Teal Draw. He embraced partnerships with corporate sponsors and investors while preserving open access for non-commercial use, aiming to balance community value with sustainable growth. London became the base, a small team formed, and a strategic shift towards a Mapbox-like model emerged: Teal Draw would provide undifferentiated canvas capabilities that other products could embed, rather than becoming a stand-alone consumer app. The GPT-4 with vision era reinforced a path toward AI-assisted collaboration on canvases, where real-time, multimodal prompts could help design, prototype, and iterate inside a shared workspace. He envisions a future where the canvas is the hub for AI-driven ideas and production.