Brand Design on a Budget: Google Stitch, Design Principles & Live Split Testing — Conversion Monthly

In this Conversion Monthly, Danny McMillan is joined by Dorian and Matt Kostan (no Sim this episode — he's on holiday) for a live, practical session on building brand-quality design systems fast and for free.

Dorian opens with a tight crash course in the three design fundamentals that separate professional Amazon listings from amateur ones: font pairing, grid and layout, and colour theory. He then demos Google Stitch live, building a full design system from a wooden utensil listing in real time. Danny shows a more automated route — using Perplexity to control Stitch autonomously and generate a complete brand kit from just a product title, bullet points, and a reference image. Matt rounds it off with a live Product Pinion split test of the new designs against the original listing — and the results deliver the session's sharpest lesson.

The big takeaway: pretty is not enough. Information + design working together is what converts.

Key Topics

• Google Stitch for brand design — Free AI design tool that generates full brand guidelines, font pairings, and mockups from reference images and prompts
• 3 design fundamentals every seller should know — Font pairing, grid and layout, colour theory with a contrasting action colour
• Perplexity + Stitch autonomous workflow — Danny demos letting Perplexity control Stitch end-to-end with zero manual input to generate a full brand kit
• Coolers.co — Free colour palette tool with a visualiser and AI colour bot (Matt)
• UX and design laws applied to Amazon — Miller's Law, Fitts' Law, Jacob's Law, Occam's Razor translated into listing and brand site decisions
• Product Pinion live split test — New designed variants vs the original listing, with real shopper results in under 10 minutes
• Live test result — The original information-heavy image outperformed the prettier redesigns early on; lesson: strip information at your peril

Timestamps

• [00:00] Intro — Danny opens, Sim is out, format overview
• [00:48] Dorian: Why most Amazon listings lack design consistency
• [02:00] The 3 design principles: font pairing, grid/layout, colour theory
• [04:30] Font pairing explained — serif vs sans-serif, how world-class brands use them
• [07:00] Colour theory — complementary colours plus one contrasting action colour
• [08:30] Live Google Stitch demo — wooden utensil set, design system generated from brand brief + images
• [10:00] Stitch output: colour palette, font pairings, layout mockups
• [12:17] Matt: brand guidelines used to cost $1,000+ — now free in Stitch
• [13:00] Dorian: live Figma iteration — cleaning up the infographic using new design system fonts
• [17:00] Matt: information hierarchy lesson — measurements vs benefits on infographics
• [19:30] Dorian: "mouse text" and anchoring — what to leave in, what to strip out
• [20:33] Matt: Coolers.co overview — free colour palette generator and visualiser
• [22:00] Matt: UX/UI design principles applied to Product Pinion and Amazon listings
• [25:12] Danny: Perplexity + Stitch autonomous brand kit demo — Z Kitchen brand from s