For Pangram’s founding designer, mindfulness is a design principle — one she’s carried from brand identity to product strategy
By: Na Chen

When tasked with creating a brand identity for an artificial intelligence-detection tool, founding designer Fanyi Pan wanted the product to feel approachable, trustworthy, and even warm. The result was a visual system filled with textured illustrations, organic shapes, and playful colors.

Named the “Field of Wisdom,” the welcoming brand identity was Pan’s brainchild for Pangram, a leading start-up that detects A.I.-generated content for educators, publishers, and anyone who appreciates genuine content in an age inundated with A.I. slop. The company’s products are capable of identifying content as human-created, A.I.-generated, or A.I.-assisted with 99.98 percent accuracy.

“The goal of my design was to ease cognitive load and draw users in, creating moments of pause and curiosity,” said Pan. She turned away from the metallic, futuristic style synonymous with A.I. tools, concerned it would intimidate everyday users. Instead, she went with a fuzzy, fluid, and colorful visual language. Take, for example, one of the four illustrations, each created with a specific user group in mind: it depicts two people studying in a high-ceilinged library, surrounded by tall bookshelves and expansive windows overlooking pink blossoms and a snow-capped mountain in the distance.

The imperfect edges, pastel colors, and tactile paper grain have not only breathed life into Pangram’s branding but also earned Pan industry-wide recognition. In 2025, the “Field of Wisdom” stood out from nearly 11,000 submissions from 66 countries and won the iF Design Award, one of the most prestigious and largest design competitions in the world. It has also won gold awards from the MUSE Design Awards and the London Product Design Awards, respectively, and a silver award from the New York Product Design Awards.

While Pangram’s detection model does the heavy-lifting in the background to discern A.I.-generated content, Pan wants her users to feel a sense of playfulness and joy when they use Pangram’s products. When designing the latest feature, an A.I. image detector that was released in July, she superimposed pixelated visual elements onto the pastel design, evoking the whimsical, nostalgic aesthetics from the early Internet era. For one of the sample images that users can use to test the tool, she included an admittedly doctored yet adorable cat-puffer fish, which garnered millions of views on X and prompted a slew of content creators to post jovial screenshots of their experiments with the image detection tool. The initial popularity of the post led the social media team at Pangram to capitalize on the momentum by launching the “Is He Real” campaign.

Yet Pan’s role extends well beyond design. As the founding designer and product manager, she has played a significant role in shaping both the brand language and its products from the ground up. She leads product strategies by charting the product roadmaps and prioritizing tasks. Working closely with research, engineering and marketing teams, and business leaders, she is involved in every stage of product development from early exploration to launching products to market. Pan also manages a team of contract designers and illustrators at Pangram, making her one of the company’s key creative and product leaders.

During her tenure, Pangram has drawn more than 764,800 sign-ups as of August and raised $9 million. “In an age of highly-capable A.I. tools, we are more tempted to take the shortcut and let A.I. think on our behalf,” said Pan. “What’s most meaningful about Pangram’s work is that it prevents people from over-relying on A.I. and losing the ability to think independently.”

Pangram’s mission to mitigate the proliferation of A.I.-generated content aligns with Pan’s design philosophy: both technology and design are conduits for bringing mindfulness to daily activities. She started her design journey as an architecture major at Syracuse University before earning a master’s degree in interactive media from New York University and transitioning into product design. The architectural way of thinking remains evident in her digital work, where she constantly considers how users move through a system, what they encounter throughout the process, and how she can shape the experience to be more intentional.

Outside work, Pan exercises her design beliefs through an extensive body of personal work and collaborations with artists. She currently serves as the art director for Chan, a Buddhist magazine exploring meditation and mindfulness in an ever-changing world. Her project “Primary Care Tree,” an installation that reimagines trees as healthcare providers, was exhibited at the “Very Work in Progress” interactive art festival in New York in June. In 2025, her work appeared at the Anat Ebgi gallery in New York. Her earlier pieces were shown at the 4C Gallery in Los Angeles and IIDRR in New York. Together, they show Pan’s commitment to designing objects—both physical and digital—that carry emotion and shape a viewer’s experience.