Image Creation Agent: A faster way to get to custom editorial assets
Trust and human judgment are foundational to our business model; that isn’t corporate jargon. People who read San Antonio Review expect quality writing and to see our perspective reflected in the voice of our contributors. That’s the job of an editor. And one that readers trust us to do. Part of publishing a piece is…
We’re Not For Everyone: The story of an automated submission process
Prior to designing and building an automated submission and approval workflow for San Antonio Review, we tried off-the-shelf solutions such as Duosuma. This change wasn’t so much about a technical upgrade; it was about building a system aligned with our values. Just as I want to approach integrating agents in a way that maintains the…
What AI Shouldn’t Touch: Designing for trust in an automated publication workflow
San Antonio Review is a small publisher that primarily publishes on digital channels, though it also occasionally publishes in print. We talk about our work as an experiment in prefigurative politics—the practice of building institutions today that embody the values of the world we hope to see tomorrow. What does this mean in practice? We…
How Do You Go From Design Vision to Shipped Product Without Dedicated Engineering Resources?
I designed the Poetry Explorer; now it was time to build it. As I’ve covered before, I’m a product designer, not a developer. I’m not completely lacking in technical skills. I can read Python well enough to understand what’s happening. I can write HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP to various degrees, but I can’t architect a production-grade backend from…
Designing the Character of Poetry Explorer: Voice, Boundaries, and Safety
Now that I had the data schema designed, I started thinking about how the Poetry Explorer would interact with users. This was the most challenging part of the project. I’ve spent years creating personas, but always as representations of system users, not as representations of the system itself. And they represented people, not non-human entities.…
How I Designed Poetry Embeddings for Semantic Search: Combining Human Judgment with LLM Classification
My dog died recently. It was sudden, but not unexpected. He was 15 and suffering from advanced kidney disease. When I was considering approaches to structuring and classifying data for the Poetry Explorer, I began to think about scenarios like this. I want to be able to find poetry by saying, “My best fuzzy friend…
Mood as a tool for poetry discovery
Poetry discovery is difficult for the same reasons content discovery has always been difficult: We publish a lot of poetry at San Antonio Review, enough that it gets lost in the shuffle. Readers find poems through social media, search engines, the homepage, or browsing by issue. That’s fine for new work, but poetry is evergreen.…
VAQUITA DESIGN 