How we built Sunday's survey design agent

Creating a survey should not mean rebuilding your brand from scratch.

That was the thought that kept coming up inside Primefold, long before a single line of code was written for what would become our Survey Design Agent. Teams would spend hours picking colors, hunting down the right shade of blue from a brand guideline PDF, resizing a logo, second guessing a font, all before they'd written a single question. The survey itself, the part that actually mattered, kept getting pushed to the end.

We wanted to flip that order, so we taught Sunday to design.

Where the time was going

Every feature at Primefold starts with the same question: How does this save our customer time?

Before developing the new design feature, we had a more specific question: Where is the gap between having an idea and seeing it become a finished, on-brand survey? 

Design kept showing up as that gap. It wasn't that people didn't care about design. It's that designing was taking the time the questions needed. The team started sketching what it would look like if Sunday simply understood a brand the way a designer would, by looking at it, rather than asking a customer to manually translate their brand into settings, sliders and hex codes.

Sarah, one of the engineers behind the feature, remembers the goal starting somewhere simpler: "Our general goal was to really simplify the editor so it's easier to use. There are less options, but the idea was to create an editor that produces a consistent design throughout the survey, with better navigation between the intro, survey, and outro pages as well. We wanted to enable users to have a few, important customization controls for a streamlined editing experience that still creates beautiful surveys with the same design all the way through."

What Sunday’s design agent actually does

You don't need a brand guideline to start. Sunday works with what you have:

1. Your website. Hand Sunday the URL and it reads your visual identity off the page: colors, typography and logo, applied to your survey automatically. No manual matching, no guesswork.

2. A sentence. No site to point at? Describe the look you want in the AI toolbar and Sunday builds the theme from that. Refining a theme you already have works the same way.

3. A brand you like. Name it and Sunday pulls what it needs from the web, then adapts your survey thoughtfully to the design rather than just copying it.

In each case, the outcome is the same: a survey that feels like a natural extension of your website or brand, not a bolt on form. You spend less time on layout decisions and more time on the questions that actually drive insight. And manual, hands on design is always still there if that's how you like to work. Sunday is a shortcut, not a requirement.

The hard part

Teaching an AI Agent to see a brand and make good design judgment turned out to be far harder than teaching it to copy a hex code.

"I really enjoy working on UI based features that you can see and experience, and trying to design it to give users the best possible experience," Sarah says. "The most challenging part was overhauling the whole editor from the ground up without endangering or changing existing, live surveys in any way. It was very tricky to still support the old data structures while simultaneously creating new ones, and I was very relieved that we had a successful release without any issues on live surveys."

What that meant in practice: getting from "extract some colors" to "apply them in a way that looks intentional" required a lot of iteration, a lot of unflattering survey screenshots on Slack and a fair amount of arguing about what "on brand" even means when the AI only has a website to go on, all while keeping every survey already running out in the world completely untouched.

Why this matters to us

The distance we wanted to collapse is the one between “I have an idea for a survey” and “I have a branded survey ready to send.” Picking a shade of blue was never the part that needed you. Deciding what to ask, and why, always was. That is what customer obsession means to us in practice. We're not telling you how your survey should look. We're giving you a faster way to make it look like exactly what you already had in mind.

All of this is live in Sunday's AI toolbar. Point it at your website, describe what you want or name a brand you admire, and see what comes back.

Next up: Our Shopify integration is live – get to know how it works, why we built it and how you can implement it on your post purchase page.

Best, the Primefold Team
Janni Mankartz | Senior Copywriter | Primefold

Any questions left unanswered? Contact us anytime: support@primefold.ai