You design a great visual in a tool, and there are still a few steps to get it in front of everyone. Download the file, open your planner, upload it again, write a caption, customize it for each platform, and then publish. A lot of creative momentum is lost in the time between completing a design and putting it into operation.
Daniel Futerman and his co-founder wanted to close this gap when they built a buffer integration Hidden elephantan AI design workspace for creative teams. This is the story of what they built and why they built it Buffer APIand what it changes for the designers, agencies and social teams that use it.
Meet the hidden elephant
Hiding Elephant is an AI design workspace built by designers, for designers. It combines AI image and video generation with professional editing, vector tools, automation workflows, live collaboration, shared assets and a brand intelligence layer so ecommerce brands, agencies and social media teams can produce on-brand content faster without giving up control of the details.
Daniel had a creative background. Before Hiding Elephant, he ran a motion design studio called Amigo Motion, where control over the creative process was everything. When the AI generation came along, he was amazed at how fast it was, and then frustrated at how little control it gave him.
Take a simple example. When attempting to create a specific shirt design, he could describe the general idea in a prompt but could never achieve the exact shapes, layout, and details he had in mind. AI was great for exploration and ideation, but designers still needed a way to use it without losing their craft. That’s why he and his co-founder built Hiding Elephant around this idea: combining the speed of AI with the editing tools and precision that designers actually expect.
Why they developed a buffer integration
Daniel is refreshingly blunt about why they built it: Content creation only gets you halfway there. Hiding Elephant is strong at helping teams create content, but once an image existed, users still had to get it out into the world, and that meant leaving the platform.
A large portion of Hiding Elephant’s users manage brands and post on multiple social media channels. For agencies, ecommerce brands, and social media teams, this is how they build awareness, get product visibility, and stay in front of their audience. Sharing their designs on social media created friction in the workflow: creating in one place and then publishing somewhere else.
What integration does
When the integration is connected, a user can create branded images and videos in Hiding Elephant, restyle them for different aspect ratios, and publish them to their social accounts via Buffer with a single click.
The brand intelligence layer doesn’t just move files – it also writes the subtitles. Hiding Elephant analyzes the image, combines it with what it already knows about the brand’s voice, tone, and visual style, and generates platform-specific posts: shorter for X, longer for LinkedIn, and so on.
This is important for teams that juggle more than one customer. A design agency managing five brands can set up brand intelligence for each brand, create branded visuals, generate captions in each brand’s voice, customize content per platform, and send everything directly to the Buffer queue or save as a draft for review.
Built on top of the Buffer API
The core integration took less than a week to build. Daniel’s team is deep into AI development, so implementation was quick. Most of the time afterward was dedicated to testing, quality assurance, and refining the experience before release.
The construction itself went smoothly.
“Buffer’s API and documentation are clear, so setting up and getting started was straightforward,” says Daniel.
The edge cases required more work. Each platform has its own character limits, supported media types, and publishing rules. Therefore, the team integrated these validations into their workflow to make publishing easy for users.
Daniel is clear about why they used Buffer instead of connecting to each platform themselves:
“With Buffer, our users get access to all of their connected social accounts through one integration. Direct access to each platform would have meant managing separate OAuth flows, rate limits, media specifications, and platform-specific APIs. Buffer abstracts all of that behind a single integration, allowing us to focus on what makes Hiding Elephant unique.”
Maintaining publication on all social platforms involves ongoing costs, and a product like Hiding Elephant doesn’t want its engineers spending time on that. Buffer does this for you.
How does this work in practice?
The result is a much shorter path from creation to publication. The old flow was to create in Hiding Elephant, download, re-upload to Buffer, write the post, and then repeat it all again for the next asset. Now it’s about creating posts in a continuous process, making them available for sharing and publishing them across channels.
The easiest way to point out the time savings is. For Daniel, the most important thing is consistency. Because the brand intelligence layer is already doing the work, posts reflect the brand’s voice, visual style and campaign context, not just the image attached to them.
What’s next?
Hiding Elephant’s short-term focus is on video. It is one of the most powerful formats for grabbing attention and telling a story. That’s why the team is expanding its video capabilities and workflows to create higher quality videos.
Specifically for the Buffer integration, Daniel sees room to make the workflow smarter over time: syncing with previous Buffer posts, leveraging hashtag and performance data, and feeding those insights back into future captions, brand messaging, and the content itself. The goal he describes is to close the loop between creative production and performance, so teams can create faster and make more targeted creative decisions based on what actually works.
The elephant in the room
There’s a reason for the name. When AI first arrived in the creative world, there was fear that it would replace the humans doing the work. Daniel’s team took a different position.
“AI should empower creativity, not replace the creative process. We believe the best results come when humans remain in control, and AI helps them explore ideas, iterate faster, and bring their creative vision to life.”
The buffer integration fits this view. It leaves the creative decisions alone and takes care of the tedious time between completing a design and presenting it to an audience. And on a personal note, Daniel has been a Buffer user for years, so it was a partnership he was happy to be a part of.
Built on Buffer
Hiding Elephant is one of a growing number of products based on the Buffer API. If you want to build a tool and enable social publishing to your users without maintaining separate integrations for each platform, the API is for you. You can dive into the documents here: https://developers.buffer.com/
And if you’re simply looking for an easier way to publish your own content across channels, Buffer offers a free plan designed to do just that.
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