Aphantasia and Code: How I Design Visual Software Without Being Able to Picture It

Close your eyes. Picture an apple. Is it red? Yellow? Is it in a bowl? Is there a shadow on the left side?

Most people can see an apple in their mind immediately. I can't. I've never been able to. I'm part of the ~4% of humans with aphantasia — a condition where the mind's eye is genuinely blank. No images. No movies. No mental rehearsal. Asking me to "visualize" something is like asking a blind person to describe a sunset.

This would be unremarkable except that I run ZSky AI, an AI image and video generation platform. 35,000+ creators. Seven dedicated GPUs. Image in 2 seconds. Video in 30. I spend all day building a product whose entire purpose is to help people see things.

The irony is not lost on me.

How I actually design UX

When I started building ZSky, I assumed I'd be at a permanent disadvantage. Most design advice assumes you can hold a UI in your head, rotate it, modify it, critique it — all mentally. I can't. My design process has to be physical.

Here's what actually works for me:

1. I draw badly on paper.

Not wireframes. Not Figma mocks. Actual pencil on paper, ugly sketches. The act of putting marks on a physical surface externalizes what I can't hold internally. It doesn't matter that the drawings are bad — they're load-bearing. I literally cannot think about a layout without them.

2. I build before I design.

While most designers iterate on mocks, I iterate on working code. I'll throw together a janky HTML prototype in 15 minutes, click through it, feel what's wrong, delete it, rewrite it. The working prototype replaces the mental image. If a designer spends 2 hours in Figma, I spend 2 hours in a text editor. The output is different but the thinking happens in both.

3. I take screenshots obsessively.

Every time I'm comparing two design options, I need both on screen at the same time, not sequentially. No "remember what it looked like a minute ago." If I can't see both simultaneously in my actual visual field, I can't compare them.

4. I test on myself, hard.

I use my own product constantly, because muscle memory is real to me in a way mental models aren't. I know the click path of every flow because I've physically done it 500 times, not because I can trace it in my head.

Debugging visual bugs without mental imagery

The hardest part isn't design. It's debugging. When a user reports "the button is weirdly offset when I hover over it," a sighted-minded developer can often imagine the issue and locate the bug before opening the file. I can't do that. I have to physically reproduce it, screenshot the broken state, screenshot what it should look like, and compare them side-by-side.

This is slower. Objectively.

But there's a compensating advantage: I never trust my mental model. I always go verify in the actual running UI. Bugs that slip past visualizing devs (because they pattern-match on a mental model that doesn't match reality) often don't slip past me, because I don't have that mental model to begin with. My first instinct is always to open the page and look.

Why I built an image tool I can't visualize

This is the question everyone asks. Why would a person who can't picture things build a product whose entire purpose is to help people picture things?

Because the camera was the first thing that let me see.

For most of my life I thought I had no art in me. I couldn't draw from imagination. I couldn't sketch a face from memory. I couldn't do the thing every art teacher expected of me. I was convinced I wasn't a visual person at all — until I picked up a camera in my late twenties.

The camera changed everything. Because a camera doesn't ask you to imagine anything. It asks you to look. To notice. To frame a real thing that already exists in the world. For someone with aphantasia, that's a different cognitive motion than drawing from imagination. It's extraction, not projection. And it turns out I was extremely good at extraction.

I became a professional photographer. I got shortlisted for the Sony World Photography Awards. I spent a decade as a fashion shooter.

Then AI image generation arrived. And here's what nobody talks about: text-to-image AI is the first visual medium in human history that's specifically better for people with aphantasia. You don't draw from imagination. You describe in words. You watch the machine extract a version of it. You iterate. You pick the best. It's camera-like — you're the eye, the prompt is the shutter, the AI is the film.

I knew I had to build one that didn't feel like a tool designed for people who could already see their ideas. I built ZSky for the 4% of us who can't.

What I'd tell other developers with aphantasia

If you have aphantasia and you're working in visual or front-end development:

1. Externalize ruthlessly. Your IDE is your mind's eye. Your screenshots are your memory. Never try to hold a visual state in your head — it won't be there.
2. Build before design. Working prototypes are faster for us than mocks.
3. Trust your compensation strategies. The rest of the team thinks you're "unusually meticulous" about verification. It's not meticulousness, it's survival. Lean into it — it catches real bugs.
4. Accept that some tasks are slower and some are faster. Mental rotation tasks are slower. Code review for logic errors is often faster, because we don't pattern-match on remembered shapes.

And one more thing. For a long time I thought of aphantasia as a deficit. A missing sense. Something broken. That framing held me back.

It's not broken. It's different. And once I started building for myself — for the way my mind actually works — I built something that 35,000 other people found useful too.

Whatever your brain does differently, it's probably also a lever. You just have to stop comparing it to everyone else's brain and ask what you can build because of it, not in spite of it.

— Cemhan

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I run ZSky AI, a free AI image and video platform built by an artist with aphantasia who healed from a TBI through photography. If you have aphantasia or TBI and want full access, the One Million Minds Eye program is a free lifetime Ultra tier for the first 1,000,000 people who need it. No medical documentation required. Honor system.