"create polished visual work like designs, prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more."
I use Opus to generate Typst for that and I'm already pretty happy with that approach. It gives me a degree of control I do not have with other methods, because
1. Typst is really powerful
2. Opus is really good at surgically modifying Typst
I basically never look at the Typst code for this. Telling Opus visually what I want changed is usually good enough.
how does Opus see the output? via HTML (which Typst can output) or visual tokens?
Typst is unfairly good for doing systematic designs. I wrote a template system for a complex product catalog in a couple days. Then I modeled the clients products list (exported from their ERP) to the schema and generated a hundred pages catalog instantly with flawless layout. Traditional catalog design in InDesign is extremely prone to errors and inconsistencies, not to mention time consuming if done by hand and very brittle if done with the native automation, which does not handle tabular data very well, requiring arcane non-UTF8 encodings. With Typst, if done right and input data is properly treated once, you can wholly skip the review phase which is represents a massive cost reduction. IMO doing this kind of parametric design from a DSL, either for print or digital, is something massively underrated. Surely feels like cheating. Organizing the media files is a bit more time consuming, though, even with automation. But once you organize and standardize the media repo you’re set, as you just need to do the plumbing once.