Need Grammarly for Design

“Once you can name something, you’re conscious of it. You have power over it. You’re in control. You own it.”
Robin Williams

I am a technical co-founder at a startup. But then, I also spend a lot of time writing and designing - emails, content marketing, decks, updates to clients, dashboards, product feedback, product features - and the list goes on. These are non-traditional tasks for me; tasks that I hadn’t done much in my corporate career and I don’t have academic training in them. Writing code is one thing - but communicating, especially visually, is something I am still coming to grips with. A startup’s biggest strength is agility. Its ability to change directions swiftly and innovate to meet customers’ demands is a regular phenomenon. But a startup also has limited resources, especially in terms of access to talent and money. Good and experienced designers are almost always out of reach. It means I have to also double up as a designer. So, here I am: I don’t know what I don’t know in design!

For written/textual content, there are wonderful tools like Grammarly and Hemmingway, that provides actionable insights to improve the article. One gets both a) “why” there is a problem in a specific sentence (eg: grammar is not right; too many adverbs in the article, etc) and b) fix the issue with a click of a button(in most cases).

Here’s a screenshot from Hemmingway for the initial draft of this article.

But what about visual design? How could I get actionable critique and insights to improve it? My dashboards? Slide deck? What about my product design itself?

We need a Grammarly, but for design. Who’s building it?