Take five with POV Budapest: how Perplexity designs using Perplexity — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Every era of design has been shaped by its tools. At POV Budapest 2026, Perplexity’s design team argued that designers can now shape the tools too. For the identity refresh, the team used Computer to build its own design tools. These included a type specimen that set each round of a new Grilli Type family in real layouts, a gallery for comparing related images, and a layout tool with the brand’s type and spacing rules built in. Those tools now carry the team’s thinking across Perplexity. Designer Daisy Lee explains how, and why a guidelines PDF “is where the thinking goes to die.”

TBI Hi Daisy, it’s great to be speaking with you after POV Budapest. How are you?

DL Really good. My job at Perplexity is basically trying to give curiosity a shape, a colour, a typeface. Budapest was a room full of people who know exactly how hard that is, because they’ve made the same kinds of decisions themselves. Seeing it resonate with them was the best part of the trip.

Really curious people don’t stop at an answer.

TBI Perplexity started as an answer engine and now offers the Comet browser and Computer. How has that expansion changed what the brand needs to do?

DL Not as much as you’d think. Perplexity has always started with a question, and that’s still true. But really curious people don’t stop at an answer. They’re in a never-ending cycle of learning, refining what they know, and acting on it. As AI got more capable, following them from the answer into the action was the natural next step, and that’s what Computer is. The symbol had been saying it all along, too. Those intersecting windows read as a lot of things coming together in one place, which is exactly what it takes to get from a question to finished work. So the mark stayed, and it just picked up a second job.

TBI The refresh feels confident and premium. How did you want Perplexity to feel, and what mattered most in translating that into the design?

DL We wanted it to feel considered, the way a good answer does. Every element got a specific question rather than a redesign. How heavy does the symbol need to be to hold at small sizes? Where do softer corners add depth without changing its character? The answers were small on purpose, and most people will never consciously notice them.

What mattered most was the slider. Change too little, and nobody notices. Change too much, and people ask who you are. Confidence, for us, came from knowing exactly how much to leave alone.

TBI The brand has been rebuilt using your own product, Computer. What did that look like day-to-day?

DL Computer builds on whatever expertise you bring to it. We’ve spent years looking at letterforms and spacing, so we could describe a problem down to the glyph, and it could take that and run further than we would have on our own. The place we wanted it to run was the tooling, not the identity itself. So we asked it for instruments to see our own decisions: a specimen that put every round of the typeface into real layouts, a gallery that put related images side by side, a layout tool with our type and spacing rules already in it. Each one exists because someone on the team got curious about a problem the rest of us had learned to live with.

Everyone is going to have their own working relationship with AI.

TBI What did Computer get right, and what had to be decided by hand?

DL Computer got the speed right. Two type pairings side by side, 10 layout variations, a working prototype in minutes instead of days. What it cannot tell you is whether any of them are good. Does this layout hold the right tension? Does this letterform have the right personality? Two options can follow every rule and feel completely different. Computer put the possibilities in front of us. Choosing between them required taste, craft and instinct, and that part stayed with us.

TBI When a tool can handle research, exploration and production, how does the designer’s role change?

DL Curiosity is fundamentally human. It’s the last thing AGI will be able to do. So the designer’s job becomes deciding what is worth asking. Nobody told us the typography lost its personality once you were inside the product. We noticed, and that observation became a typeface. Nobody asked for an image gallery. One of us got tired of not being able to see the archive, and that frustration became a tool. Give the same tool to 10 designers, and you will get 10 different results, because each of them will notice something different. Everyone is going to have their own working relationship with AI, and that relationship is becoming part of a designer’s practice the way a sketchbook once was.

TBI The refresh includes a custom typeface. How did you approach that?

DL It started with the observation I just mentioned. Our old system used Instrument Serif for expression and FK Grotesk for utility, but inside the product almost everything was FK Grotesk. We wanted the identity and the product to feel like they came from the same place. With Grilli Type, we built a family that connects them. PPLX Serif brings more voice into the Answer, where reading is central. PPLX Sans keeps the interface clear. PPLX Mono handles code. Narrow Serif gives marketing room to be loud.

The decision I would repeat on any project is building the specimen while the typeface is still in development. Each new round from Grilli went into the same tool, so we were comparing versions in real layouts instead of remembering how last month's felt. It changed the feedback. Before, we would say a letterform felt slightly off. After, we could point to the glyph and the setting and show them exactly what we meant.

TBI Perplexity answers more than 1.5 billion questions a month. How do you build a brand system that holds up at that scale, across every surface and language?

DL At that scale, our team cannot be in every room, so the thinking has to travel without us. With images, we went back to the ones people already recognised as Perplexity and looked for what they had in common. Four behaviours kept showing up. Focus, layers, movement, angle. Now any designer can hold a new image up to those four, even when the subject is something none of us anticipated. Language taught us where our own judgment runs out. In developing Korean and Devanagari extensions with Grilli Type, we relied on native-reader feedback rather than forcing Latin conventions onto other scripts. A system at this scale is never finished. New situations keep showing us where it needs to evolve.

TBI How is the design team set up inside Perplexity, and how closely does it work with product and engineering?

DL As close as a design team can sit to a product. I work on identity, typography, image direction, colour and the internal tools, and all of it has to ship inside the product. Engineers and product designers are the hardest critics the identity has, and the work is better for it. They build the product, and we build our tools on top of it. We use Perplexity to design Perplexity, and every loop makes both a little better.

TBI What does the arrival of tools like Computer mean for how studios and in-house teams work?

DL Design has always had a scaling problem. You can add people to a team, but you cannot copy judgment from one head to another. Every new designer interprets the system a little differently, and the industry’s answer was the guidelines document, which squeezes that judgment into rules and loses a lot in the squeeze. The PDF is where the thinking goes to die. Computer gives us a better way to pass judgment. A tool can carry the reasoning, the ranges and the exceptions, and it can be in a hundred rooms at once. 

For in-house teams, that is how a handful of designers keeps up with a company that ships every day. For studios, it changes what a handover is. Clients get working software alongside the guidelines, so the identity keeps behaving the way the studio intended long after the engagement ends.

TBI POV’s 2026 theme, ‘The Act,’ proposes that an identity is now as much about how it behaves as how it looks. How are you thinking about that within your talk?

DL Most of the work that carries our identity isn’t made by designers. When non-designers at Perplexity need to make a deck or social media assets, they can either come to our team or use a tool that has our thinking built in. We built the tools so the second option is the easy one. That is how we read ‘The Act.’ An identity is defined as much by what other people can make with it as by what we make ourselves.

Designers can now shape the tools.

TBI What do you hope the audience took away from the talk?

DL Andy opened the talk by showing how every era of design was shaped by its tools, from lead type to Figma to the AI defaults we all recognise today. The new part is that designers can now shape the tools too. Every designer in that room has a problem they have quietly worked around for years. We hope they go home and build the thing that fixes it.