Every decade a new application comes along, unlocking new possibilities for designers. Photoshop’s mind-bending features like the magic wand, clone-stamp, and liquify tool minted a whole new generation of digital designers. Sketch took the baton by shipping a radically simple tool for the purpose of designing user interfaces that helped us become focused UI/UX designers. Figma took the world by storm by compounding design with the power of real-time collaboration.
Many people say it’s the skill, not the tool, that makes a designer – and they’re right. But what a designer can become can either be accelerated or throttled by their tool of choice. Tools shape thought. "The medium is the message," as they say. Now we find ourselves standing at another inflection point where design wishes to evolve but is lacking the tools to do so thoughtfully.
A new and exciting school of design thinking is being born in Toronto. Not in Silicon Valley. Not in New York. Here. Today, Falcon – a product of The Design Compute Company Inc. – announces its Alpha launch alongside a $1.5M USD pre-seed funding round co-led by BDC, White Star Capital, and MaRS IAF. Canadian capital is backing a Canadian vision that will be exported to the world.
It took me a long time to earn the grit, point-of-view, and tenacity to start a company. I wanted it to be the product of my philosophy on work and life, and while I've felt that philosophy for a long time, I wasn’t able to articulate it until now.
I set out to build a new genre of software – to reimagine the very foundations of how we think about design tools. I wanted to draw from different pools of inspiration and come up with something new. Something strange. Something you've never seen or felt before.
The first issue I realized was that the primitives in design tools are all wrong. We design products and software, but our tools have no understanding of such concepts. When you design, there is data, business logic, products, features, states. In today's tools, there are projects, pages, and layers. The mismatch represents a deep epistemological problem. The rift isn't simply between design and code, but between the concepts that exist within design tools and the concepts that exist in real-world software. In my search for answers, I looked to dev tools. Back in 2015, my dear friend and co-founder of Shepherd Mohammed El-Mahallawy taught me front-end, and I realized my experience with dev tools had been superior to design tools: IDEs that lint your code for syntax errors, hot reload so you see changes in real-time, terminal commands that automate tasks. Having an idea, building it, and seeing it play out in real time was euphoric. It brought me back to using Kid Pix all those years ago. In hindsight, that's where my philosophy really began to mature. I knew that code and command lines – computing in the purest sense – would have a critical role in the future of design. Many have observed that something about Falcon is fundamentally different. It's because we question everything. From design to operations to finance to legal, we leave no stone unturned. We set out to lay new primitives and pioneer our own philosophy on how to think about design.
Design is not simply what exists or what could be. Design is what should be.
Today's design landscape is far too passive, treating design solely as decoration or optimization. Design is not simply "aura." If design is to fulfill its potential as a force for change, it must reclaim its active, aggressive stance toward shaping reality.
The best designers have always known what should exist. They can see it, articulate it, defend it. They need the ability to execute that vision without compromise. I continuously return a quote by Paolo Antonelli, “Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.”
Design engineering represents the next evolution, moving design from the world of thinking to the world of doing. Design engineers are opinionated, intellectual, and possess a clear point of view. They understand that true design power comes from controlling the entire creative stack, from concept to production-ready code, refusing to surrender agency at the moment of implementation.
Despite the clear need for this evolution, today's design landscape actively prevents the emergence of the design engineer.
Design today is isolated. It sits apart from other disciplines. That isolation creates low-context design: design that looks good but doesn't understand the system it lives in. "AI-native" design tools let designers move faster, but they fail to put the designer on the pedestal they deserve. Most tools chase "simplicity," but what they really mean is reduction. They offer one-shot prompts and magic boxes, gimmicks that chase short-term attention rather than long-term mastery. They hide complexity instead of teaching you to shape it.
Designers work in one environment, engineers in another, with handoffs that lose fidelity, intention, and precious time. You spend weeks perfecting an interaction only to watch it dissolve in translation. By the time feedback cycles complete, the original vision has been negotiated away, death by a thousand compromises.
The fragmentation of tools mirrors a fragmentation of identity, leaving designers without full agency and engineers without full context. Designers are neutered at the moment their work matters most: when it becomes real.
We need a new guard of people, new designers, completely new products, and new brands that reflect this integrated vision. This new guard is emerging from Toronto: a city building its own philosophy, on its own terms. What starts here will be exported to the world. The role can't exist if the environment doesn't support it.
Design becomes powerful when it has high context, when it can see into other disciplines. We imagine a world where you can design a piece of software, edit the code, work on the motion elements, add sound, and tune the motion all in the same place. We call this compound design. When design stops being a narrow skill and becomes a full way of working, new possibilities start to appear.
Design has always been trapped inside its own box. Falcon opens that box. Compound design is what happens when all creative disciplines sit side by side. You can move between them freely. You can build something that feels alive. Falcon merges disciplines until the boundaries disappear.
The future is one place to craft ideas. A place where design, data, motion, and code come together. Falcon makes design engineers.
Falcon is not about ease. It's about literacy. The more you use Falcon, the more you learn to think in systems, not mockups.
"People want godlike results without godlike effort." We've watched a wave of products chase gimmicks. We're not playing that game. We know where the dead bodies are. We know what people say they want and what they actually use. Falcon is a long-term bet. We expect to be wrong in the short term. That's fine. But excellence is the capacity to take pain. The way we handle that pain will decide our outcome. We'll build what we believe in, stay patient, and let time do its work.
Falcon engineers serendipity. We build systems that make creativity inevitable. Not through magic prompts or one-click solutions, but through tools that respect your capacity to grow, to master complexity, to become world-class.
Design is what should be.
And Falcon will be the tool to pioneer that change.