- 9 hours ago
- 3 min read
Creative technologist and co-founder of Brik, Yeal Renous, on building tools around ideas - and designing with more freedom.
Your names: Yael Renous
Role: Creative technology lead and co-founder of Brik
Product: brik.space
Tell us a bit about yourself, and how did you find your way to a creative career?
I’m a creative technologist. I studied computer science and visual communications, and later earned my masters in Interactive Media at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Early on, I focused on designing and developing interactive installations and experiences at the intersection of art and technology. A couple of years ago I joined Studio Video, a design innovation team, as a creative technology lead. That’s where we founded Brik.
Tell us about Brik.
Brik builds a custom design tool around your idea, with controls designed specifically for it - so you can shape, refine and export your designs anywhere. It gives you the freedom to experiment, push the idea in different directions, and make creative decisions yourself.
How did you come about this product?
The team’s methodology is built on pure experimentation and one simple direct: start with the vision, then figure out how you’re going to do it. We're early adopters by nature, so when AI exploded, we tested it through that same lens. We kept hitting limitations with the existing platforms and tools, so we started building our own custom setups for our projects - that was the first version of Brik.
At a certain point, the visual outputs were so strong and the workflow felt so liberating that we realized that we have a real product on our hands. All we had to do was put a clean interface on top of it and make it available to a much wider community.
What started as an internal lab experiment became Brik: a platform that’s fun to design and create with, that adapts to what you’re trying to make.
What inspires you?
For me, it's about taking completely different pieces of technology and finding unexpected ways to make them work for my creative process. When you force tools to interact in unintended ways, you stumble into happy accidents you could never plan for inside standard software.
Existing software shapes what we allow ourselves to imagine, limiting our thinking to whatever buttons are on the screen. The real excitement is realizing you don't have to accept those boundaries. You can take raw tech, bend it to match how your mind actually works, and unlock an entirely new way of creating.
Why is this the right moment for Brik?
The distance between wanting something and having the software to actually hold it has shrunk. Think about it: if you imagined something existing tools couldn't do, you had to compromise: shrink your vision, pass it to someone else... Now, AI flattens that technical layer completely. If the tool doesn't exist, you just build it.
Brik also feels very community-driven. Was that intentional?
100%. We wanted to foster pure, bottom-up optimism where independent creators inspire each other and share capabilities. On Brik, creators can share the actual tools they built, and allow others to remix them, into their own vision. There is nothing more exciting than seeing someone else take a system you built and use it to create something you never could have predicted.
What was the biggest challenge?
Honestly, the biggest challenge was internal - unlearning our own habits. We spent years getting comfortable with specific tools, so forcing ourselves to let go of that and rethink how design interacts with technology from scratch. But that's exactly what allowed Brik to exist.
How do you see Brik’s future?
Brik belongs to a new era - you can finally realize your vision without hitting a technical ceiling. It's about giving artists full agency over their craft, not replacing them. And honestly, what excites me most is NOT knowing what tomorrow looks like. At any given moment, I can just build it my way.
Thank you, Yael!
