Dive Club 🤿

Mariana Castilho has one of the most impressive career trajectories of any designer I’ve ever met.

I first saw her while mentoring through Shift Nudge and within a few years she’s landed roles at Universe, Vercel, and most recently as the first designer at Pierre.

One of the keys to her growth has been investing in her skills as an engineer. So a big part of this interview is learning what it takes to transition from designer to builder.

Some highlights:

• The future of design engineering
• What makes designing dev tools unique
• How Mariana has grown as a visual designer
• What it’s like working with design celebrities
• What it means to care deeply about implementation
• How she finally succeeded her 3rd time learning to code
• How teams like Vercel consistently hit a high bar for craft
• a lot more

• Save $200 and join me in enrolling for UI Engineering 101 for designers
• Mariana’s component library UI Labs
• Mariana led the original design for v0 by Vercel
• Vercel’s Geist Design System

This week’s episode is with Janum Trivedi who makes some of the most stunning prototypes in all of design. So the main goal of this conversation is to answer the question “what makes a piece of software feel great?”

Some of the key talking points:

• The 3 levels of animation
• Shipping a major refresh of the Netflix iOS app
• Why shaders are a big deal (and how they work)
• How Janum built the download animation for Arc
• Why Janum built his own animation engine (Wave)
• Learning the principles of fluid design working on the iPad pointer
• a lot more

• Check out Janum’s demos on his website
• 2018 WWDC talk “Designing fluid interfaces”
• The Book of Shaders website
• Disney’s 12 principles of animation

Ben Blumenrose was one of the earliest designers at Facebook and has spent the last 12 years as a co-founder and Managing Partner of Designer Fund. That’s allowed him to invest in many of the design founders that you’ve heard from on this shown (like Jorn from Framer or Colin from Visual Electric).

So the goal of this conversation is to tap into Ben’s perspective as a designer turned investor. This episode creates a blueprint for people interested in designing for startups or maybe even building a company of your own.

Some highlights:

• The story of investing in Framer
• How second-time founders think differently
• Understanding your gaps as a design founder
• What it looks like to truly act as an owner at a startup
• What Ben looks for when investing in design founders
• What types of market opportunities Ben is most excited about
• How Ben transformed customer support in his first month at FB
• The things you should be learning on the job before launching a startup
• a lot more

Apply for the Designer Fund Partnership program

Imagine leading the design of an AI product that skyrockets to a billion+ dollar valuation in under two years…

That’s the story of Perplexity and today we get to hear from their founding designer and current Head of Design, Henry Modisett. Some of the highlights from this conversation:

• What it takes to thrive as a founding designer
• Why Henry likes hiring designers who can code
• The challenges of designing dynamic interfaces
• Why Henry didn’t want to anthropomorphize the AI
• The initial creative direction for the Perplexity brand
• The keys to making a consumer product cognitively fast
• Why Henry built a mini design system as his very first step
• a lot more

SHOW NOTES

• Ivan (CEO of Notion)’s tweet about not having a design system
• Perplexity’s incredible brand designer named Phi
• We talked about how booking.com is a masterclass in optimizing UI

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Starting with a design system

Before Henry had any idea what the Perplexity product would become, he built a component system in React as the first step. The goal was to give himself a toolbox to make it easy to assemble new features. Many components are obvious (ex: you know you’ll need a grid, type system, color system, buttons, etc.). We don’t have to overcomplicate design systems. They’re the thing you invest in to move fast… not the thing you invest in once you have most of the interface figured out.

Empowerment through code

When you write code, you develop a stronger emotional attachment to the product. You’re also empowered to continually make improvements without having to go through engineers. The more removed you are from what ships, the easier it is to dish blame on someone else for an experience being janky.

“Having designers that can code is a hack…quality just happens”

Velocity is everything

Henry makes a point to prioritize velocity over exploration, debate, visual design, etc. And a big part of what makes that possible is empowering designers to make decisions. If it’s a UX question, the designer needs to make a call (”go with your gut and if you want to change it later you can”). This is also why having designers who can code is key. Nothing is cemented. You don’t need permission to iterate after something ships.

Dynamic UI systems

At the root of Perplexity are UI systems that display dynamic content based on what the user searches. That means as a designer you can’t possibly mock up all use cases. You have to think about interfaces as slightly abstracted (ex: “entity comparison” which can work for comparing dog breeds, restaurants, etc.). Part of designing a dynamic system is you have to be ok with percentage outcomes. Sometimes the formatting isn’t going to be perfect.

You’re designing the system, giving AI the tools to use, and hoping that it works most of the time.

This week's episode is with Ryan Scott who was an early designer at Doordash and then spent years as a design lead at Airbnb. Nowadays Ryan teaches hundreds of designers ranging from seniors to VPs how to make a bigger impact at your company.

This episode is jam-packed with insights about:

• What it’s like presenting at Airbnb CRIT
• Ways to unlock your credibility as a designer
• How to mitigate risk when presenting your ideas
• What it takes to speak the language of the business
• Types of “PM-y” questions that designers should be asking
• How Ryan led a massive redesign of the Airbnb booking flow
• The right (and wrong) way to make a case for investing in UX debt
• How to talk about your work in a way that resonates with non-designers
• a lot more

• Get $100 off of Ryan’s course “Describing the ROI of design”
• Ryan’s case study on redesigning the Airbnb checkout flow
• Past interview with Alex Schleifer (Chief Design Officer at Airbnb)

Investing in my personal brand has been the best investment I’ve ever made in my career. So I wanted to find the perfect designer to give a personal branding masterclass and I think it’s Oliur.

He’s built a massive audience across YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc. and he shares his hard-earned knowledge in this episode:

• Oliur’s keys to growing on social media
• Different ways to create leverage in your career
• How he (accidentally) landed a billion-dollar client
• How you can get more confident putting yourself out there
• Specific ways to build meaningful connections with other designers
• What designers need to know to get better at marketing themselves
• a lot more

• Oliur cites James McDonald as an example of someone sharing their work
• Oliur’s iPhone presets and high income streams videos
• We talk about his friend Ali Abdaal (YouTuber, Podcaster, NYT bestseller)
• Jason Levin’s iMessage screenshot of Travis Scott performing
• I referenced Jack Butcher’s “this is pointless” graph
• Dan Petty’s “That Marker Pack”
• The old Audience Building course on Maven (RIP)
• Turkish designer Oguz (Oliur talked about the power of his aesthetic)
• Gabe Valdivia’s new app Almanac that he built with Cursor

This week’s episode is with Maheen Sohail who is a senior staff designer working on generative at Meta. She joined as one of the earliest designers on both the VR and AI teams, so a big part of this discussion is about navigating ambiguity when there’s no clear playbook to follow.

We go deep into:

• New types of interface patterns for AI
• The unique ways she thinks about prototyping
• Ethical considerations when designing AI produdcts
• How Maheen explores AI models through side projects
• Why the goal posts for what it means to be a designer are shifting
• a lot more

⭐ KEY TAKEAWAYS

Nobody knows what they’re doing

This is especially true when you’re designing products for emerging technologies like AI. It’s easy to look at people working on these AI-native products and assume they have it all figured out… but we’re all still learning and exploring what’s possible. This came up in George Kedenburg’s episode too.

Curiosity > everything

I asked Maheen what traits are more important than curiosity for people interested in designing AI products. Her answer? Nothing.

The importance of passion projects

There’s a trend I’m noticing in these interviews… the designers who are creating cutting edge use cases for AI are the ones actively exploring the technology with side projects. Reading essays isn’t the way to learn. You have to want something to exist in the world and use that as a reason to figure out what’s possible. For Maheen it was using AI models to colorize images of Pakistan. For Nate Parrott it was using AI to hallucinate in HTML.

• Maheen references Alex Cornell’s storytelling abilities
• Maheen’s demo for animating drawings (it’s very fun)
• We referenced Colin Dunn’s episode about the importance of naming in AI products
• Maheen’s colorized photos of Pakistan
• Maheen’s FakeID podcast
• Meta’s AI release
• Maheen raved about the Rosebud journalling app

After 8 years designing at Meta, George Kedenburg III pulled a 180 and joined Humane as a design lead. So this conversation is a deep dive into designing AI products and how the role of product designer evolves in an AI-native company:

• How to become a creative problem solver
• How George navigates ambiguity at Humane
• Why there’s no such thing as an edge case with AI
• What George learned while using AI to learn Python
• How AI is reshaping the landscape for software design
• Why George created a Slackbot to prototype his ideas
• Why designing AI products is a bit like designing a kitchen
• a lot more

Pushing past the pixels

The real value of design is being able to look at an ambiguous situation and understand what you should explore.

Rectangles so happen to be the most common way to express that value. But the real skill is creative problem solving.

Working at a company like Humane forces designers to contribute design thinking beyond the pixels.

Prompt design > prompt engineering

If the AI model is a chef, then you’re responsible for designing the kitchen.

You don’t know what the user will order, so it’s a lot of trial and error to ensure you have the right data on hand at the right moments.

It’s no different than thinking through drop-off in an onboarding flow. Which is why George views working with these models as “prompt design” rather than “prompt engineering”

There are no AI edge cases

When you’re prototyping AI products, your prototypes don’t “break” or “fall over” like they do in Figma. That’s because the boundaries of what exists in the prototype become much blurrier.

Instead of designing contained flows, you’re laying a foundation and allowing the model to extrapolate out from there. There are no more hard edges.

George mentions Claude Artifacts as an example of someone putting the pieces together in the right order

Visual Electric has quickly become my go-to product for image generation and in this week’s episode we get to learn from the founder and designer, Colin Dunn. The whole discussion is an excellent look at the design founder journey as well as a deep dive into AI-native creative tools. We get into the weeds about:

• Visual Electric’s big bet to take on Canva
• The hidden challenges with designing AI products
• Colin's approach to early user and market research
• The art and science of raising funds for your startup
• Where the value will accrue in the landscape for creative tools
• Where Colin draws the line between abstraction and power in UX
• The wild backstory of how the company was named “Visual Electric”
• Lessons learned learned from early startup ideas that were shot down

Key takeaways:

1. AI is like electricity. Once we gained access to this new form of power, we immediately replaced candles with outlets. But it took 50+ years before the microwave and other staple household appliances were invented. When electricity came on the scene in the late 19th century it would’ve been impossible to imagine these types of products. Colin believes the electricity layer will quickly become commoditized, and instead is solely focused on building “appliances” for AI. Because someone is going to build the oven, the sewing machine, the coffee percolator, the electric can opener, etc. It might even be you 😉
2. Choosing the level of abstraction is one of the core challenges with designing AI products. Most users don’t want to be burdened by all of the knobs and levers of the AI model. That’s why it’s essential that we define new patterns and mental models that make AI easy to understand. But you have to be careful, because “the more you abstract something, the less control users have over it”. One example Colin shares is why they’re considering combining the “reference slider” and “creativity slider”. It simplifies the UX but at the cost of control. And striking that balance is one of the challenging parts about designing Visual Electric.
3. Language is an awkward medium for visual ideas. We need more effective ways to provide visual inputs if we want to generate high quality visual outputs.Want to get early access to Visual Electric’s new product? 👉 Click hereColin talks about his great his experience with User InterviewsGreg Rosen was the investor who helped Colin in the early daysJess Lee is the Sequoia partner they met withTom from Manual led the branding and chose the name “Visual Electric”Here’s Manual’s case study on designing the Visual Electric brandVisual Electric’s brand story page (which Ellis Hamburger helped with)

The Arc browser is one of the best products I’ve downloaded in the last few years which is why I’m so excited about this interview with their founding designer, Nate Parrott.

This conversation, we get an inside look at what makes design at the Browser Company so unique. We discuss:

• How Nate went from engineer at Snap to the Browser Co.
• Why design at Arc prioritizes fingerprints > consistency
• How Nate collaborates with engineers on Arc
• The story behind Arc Search’s hook feature
• The Browser Co’s culture of prototyping
• How Nate balances intuition and data
• a lot more…

• Nate’s gamified personal website
• A24 film studio
• Nate references the Co-Star astrology app and the old Zenly app
• Patrick Moberg (the designer on Boosts)
• Karla Cole (the designer who pulls inspiration outside of tech)
• Nate’s feeeed RSS app

This week’s episode is with Dan LaCivita who is a co-founder of Play—a new way to design mobile apps using native iOS materials. As soon as I saw this app clip I knew it was a big deal and that I had to interview him to learn more.

So in this conversation we go deep into:

• How to unlock the skill of interaction design
• What Apple’s sandbox unlocks for designers
• Why they decided to launch Play as a mobile app
• The importance of keeping your hands in the clay
• How AI might impact the future of interaction design
• a lot more

• Dan mentions his cofounder JoonYong Park
• The App Clip that first blew my mind

Gavin Nelson is currently designing the Linear mobile app in addition to the best app icons on the internet. So this episode is a deep dive into prototyping and interaction design:

• Gavin’s journey learning SwiftUI
• How Gavin got into designing app icons
• How to design physics-based interactions
• What it’s like designing for power users at Linear
• Why interaction design is so important for mobile apps
• Why Gavin uses code almost exclusively for prototyping now
• When it makes sense to prototype at the beginning of your process
• The interplay between custom and stock components in mobile design

• Things by Cultured Code
• Janum shows interactions in the Netflix mobile app
• Episode with Brian Lovin (who Gavin worked with at Github)
• Episode with Alex Cornell (who started the design of the Linear mobile app)
• Parallax effect from the Linear onboarding screen

If you watched last week’s episode, then you heard Jordan Singer say how visual search was actually the “killer feature” (not generative AI). What’s interesting is that this feature was actually a mid-project pivot.

So in this episode we get the full behind-the-scenes of visual search from design engineer Vincent van der Meulen:

• Why they decided to pivot
• How Vincent went cowboy mode
• A look at the future of design engineering
• What good design looks like in an AI world
• Why visual search is a big deal for future AI tools
• How Vincent used video to get Figmates excited about his idea
• a lot more

• Marco and Jordan from the old Diagram team
• Matt Dailey was the engineer that proved designs can be represented as images
• 2024 Config Keynote showing Vincent’s Uber example for visual search

Live from Config, this episode with Jordan Singer follows his journey from the Diagram acquisition all the way to Figma’s 2024 AI release. We go deep into:

• What didn’t ship at Config and why
• How they navigated the early idea maze
• How the role of designer will be impacted by AI
• What it will be like designing dynamic interfaces
• What makes Jordan’s new role at Figma so unique
• Why renaming layers was such a big internal debate
• Why the sparkle icon will become the new floppy disk
• The surprising pivot that led to Jordan’s favorite AI feature
• How Jordan prototypes by hacking on top of the Figma code base

• The old Diagram website
• Figma’s new AI landing page
• Figma’s blog post introducing AI
• Figma’s 2024 Config Keynote

This week’s episode is with Kathy Zheng who is currently the Head of design at a Web3 protocol called Optimism. But before that she was the first designer at Patreon and went on to spend over 6 years at Github.

So the goal of this conversation is to look at how Kathy grew as a designer while at Github and identify the specific milestones on her journey to reaching senior and eventually staff designer.

We get into the weeds about:

• How the role of staff and senior designers differ
• The traits shared by the best designers at Github
• How to give your ideas a chance to become memes
• How to avoid conversational spinout on your project
• How to identify opportunities using systems thinking
• How Kathy is growing as a design leader at Optimism
• Specific techniques for storytelling and presenting ideas

Some of the people mentioned in this episode:

• Max Schoening (former Head of design at Github)
• Brian Lovin (bookmarking repo project)
• Kat Fikui (coworker at Github whose .readme we mentioned)
• Connor Sears (old manager at Github)
• Jack Conte (Cofounder of Patreon)

When you think about storytelling in design... Alex Cornell is often the person that comes to mind. And that's a big reason why he's one of the most requested guests on the show. So this episode is a deep dive into the finer details of communication. We talk about:

• The story behind his startup Cocoon
• How Alex leverages his background in video
• Alex’s precision and obsession with language
• Why Alex left linear to work on generative AI at Meta
• Why getting buy-in for your ideas is kind of like a math proof
• Behind-the-scenes of the wild videos Alex made at Facebook
• Lessons learned designing the Substack and Linear mobile apps
• The mental models Alex uses to construct compelling narratives
• a lot more

• Alex’s startup Cocoon
• Alex’s famous Chevron vs. 3 Dot video from Facebook
• Alex’s favorite monospace font is Jet Brains and his favorite serif font is Tiempos
• Klim is Alex’s favorite type foundry
• We discussed the dual-panel approach in the Amie mobile app

• This week’s episode with Maggie Appleton is a deep dive into designing for AI products and LLMs. Maggie shares about her experience as the first designer at Elicit (an AI assistant for research papers) and all of the unique challenges surrounding helping users interface with LLMs.
• We also go deep into:
  • How Maggie’s grown as a frontend developer
  • Why Maggie feels like she’s in a short-run limbo
  • Strategies for improving your technical literacy
  • How writing online has impacted Maggie’s career
  • The AI-native tools that Maggie is drawing inspiration from
  • How advancements in AI will redefine her role as a designer
  • How Maggie’s new understanding of LLMs is shaping the way she designs
  • Why Maggie is more interested in the cognitive applications of AI rather than generative AI

• Maggie is currently leading design at Elicit (they’re hiring)
• “How Trello is different” is where Joel Spolsky explains the differences between horizontal and vertical software
• OpenAI’s introduction of ChatGPT-4o
• We talked about the product tldraw
• The expanding dark forest and generative AI: Maggie’s talk about the possible futures of flooding the web with AI-generated content
• Episode with Soleio where he talks about looking for “time to proficiency” in design candidates

Remember how Michael Wandelmeier told us Metalab hired a storytelling coach? Well that coach is Ian Wharton. He’s an Apple Design Award winner, CEO of Aide Health, and he teaches storytelling techniques to teams like Dyson, BBC, Huge, etc.

So this episode breaks down the key storytelling concepts that he shares in his course Sell the Idea. We talk about the importance of the inciting incident, how to empower others to share your ideas, and a lot more…

But he also presents some compelling ideas about why designers are the most suited people to start companies that solve societal level challenges. All you need is a bias toward action. So if you’ve been considering starting your own thing, there’s a lot we can learn from Ian’s journey as a design founder.

• Ian’s course Sell the Idea (use the code RIDD at checkout for 30% off)
• Ian’s personal website
• Ian’s business Aide Health
• Mackinnon and Saunders (the stop motion company Ian worked with)

~6 months ago Amy Lima was laid off and has been preparing for this episode ever since. So in this interview she gives us an inside look at her process for landing a dream role at Duolingo. If you’re looking for your next role then this conversation is quite the playbook. She has the job hunt process down to a science.

Some topics covered:

• Avoiding burnout amidst the chaos
• How Amy negotiated her Duolingo offer
• Amy’s advice to proactively prepare for a layoff
• The ways Amy iterated on her portfolio presentation
• How Amy’s career coach shaped her interview strategy
• Some hard lessons learned during her job hunt process
• How Amy measured everything in her application process
• a lot more

Show notes:

• Amy’s layoff announcement post
• Career Compass
• Charlotte Burns (Amy’s job hunt coach)
• Levels (transparency database + salary negotiation tools)
• Amy’s job announcement post

Sponsors:

• Framer: How I build websites
• Jitter: How I animate my designs
• Raycast: How I do everything on my computer

• Julius Tarng is the ultimate generalist designer.
  • He started the design tools team at Facebook where he made a massive impact on products like Origami.
  • He then freelanced as a design engineer for companies like Felt, Anthropic, and even prototyped some of the early AI features for the Arc browser.
  • Now he’s in his first-ever engineering role at Linear.

  So this conversation is a deep dive into what it looks like for designers to approach their work with an engineering mindset. We talk about Julius’s deep background in prototyping, how he collaborates with designers at Linear. And we also get into why the current state of design engineering is a missed opportunity.

  If you’re looking to grow as a software designer then you’ll love this episode.

Show notes:

• Julius’s twitter
• Felt — a better way to work with maps
• Daniel Smith (Linear designer that Julius pairs with)
• Origami (Facebook’s prototyping tool)
• Brandon Walkin (ex: Facebook, Apple, now at OpenAI) who made the adaptive pointer for iPad.
• What are GPUs and Shaders? (Julius’s tutorial video)

When it comes to design founder stories, Raphael Schaad’s is one of the best. So this episode is the first-ever telling of how Raphael designed and built Cron (which became Notion Calendar). We talk about:

• Sketching on paper vs. sketching in code
• Why shipping quality software is like camping
• How Raphael identified the MVP of the problem
• What it was like building Cron in YC during COVID
• Why you should design dialogues as first-class citizens
• Why Raphael didn’t invest much in the Cron landing page
• The differences between a design toolkit and a design system
• a lot more lessons from a successful first-time design founder

• Raphael’s Twitter
• The OG Cron website
• Screenshot of the Cron dialogues in Figma

Alex Schleifer was the long-time Chief Design Officer at Airbnb where he grew the team from ~35 to over 600 people. So this conversation is an inside look at what makes design at Airbnb so special. We discuss:

• How to create a culture of decisiveness
• Why great design leaders are like chefs
• How to succeed in executive CRITs at Airbnb
• How designers should prepare for an AI future
• What it means to operate with a “first team” mindset
• What it takes to achieve Airbnb’s level of craft at scale
• Which elements of the Airbnb culture you can instill for your team
• a lot more

Alex’s Twitter and Linkedin

Alex’s “People vs. Algorithms” podcast

Mentioned Airbnb alumni:

• Katie Dill (Head of Design at Stripe)
• Ethan Eismann (SVP Design at Slack)
• Karri Saarinen (CEO at Linear)

• Noam Segal has led research at companies like Meta, Airbnb, Wealthfront, Twitter, and most recently Upwork. He also teaches the #1 user research course on Maven. So this episode is a masterclass in user research. We discuss:
  • How to conduct better interviews
  • The keys to an effective research plan
  • How to become a masterful research storyteller
  • How AI is creating a new wave of research tools
  • When to rely on qualitative vs. quantitative tactics
  • The modern user research tools you need to know about
  • How to ensure research is integrated in the product process

• Noam’s modern research tech stack:
  • Sprig
  • Genway
  • Dscout
• Steve Portigal’s book: Interviewing users (how to uncover compelling insights)
• Mr. Beast’s YouTube
• Lenny’s Podcast with Judd Antin: The UX research reckoning is here

Helen Tran was an early designer at Shopify and is now leading product design at AngelList. But in between those two roles she also ran her own startup for three years. So the goal of this conversation is to figure out how that period of time impacted her design practice so we can all learn how to design with a founder’s mindset. In this episode we discuss:

- How Helen is approaching design leadership differently this time around

- How Helen constructors hypotheses to influence product strategy

- Why Helen made sacrifices to her production skills

- The keys to designing in a pre-PMF company

- The #1 way to help founders

- + a lot more

Helen’s website - https://helentran.com/

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿

🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub N

ow you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪

Today we're talking with designer and entrepreneur, Hunter Hammonds, who has grown 5 different agencies to millions in revenue in less than a year. So in this episode we walk through the different stages of building an independent design business—starting from positioning yourself as a solopreneur all the way to scaling operations to 7 figures. We get into the weeds about:

- Hunter’s framework for selling yourself on a landing page

- The tactics OffMenu uses to convert more leads to customers

- Why Hunter thinks MRR is a misguided metric

- What operational fat you can trim to increase margins

- How you can improve your sales calls

- + a lot more

- Petr Knoll - https://twitter.com/iampetrknoll (design partner OffMenu)

- Christian O’Brian - https://www.linkedin.com/in/obrienchristian/ (CEO OffMenu)

- Sahil Bloom - https://twitter.com/SahilBloom (partner OffMenu)

- Agencies

- Instrument - https://www.instrument.com/

- Basic - https://www.basicagency.com/

- Ueno - https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/06/twitter-acquihires-creative-agency-ueno-to-help-design-new-products/

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿

🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

Ready for a masterclass in positioning? Nick Pattison has been working for himself for well over 10 years... but recently he's laser-focused on running 1-week brand sprints (and it's working). So this episode is a deep dive into his new freelance playbook:

- The automations that allow him to focus on sales and creative direction

- Lessons learned from running 25+ brand sprints at $15k each

- How Nick focuses on growing his creative muscles

- His strategies for presenting work to clients

- Why he stopped writing proposals

- + a lot more…

- Nick’s agency: Primary Studio - https://primary.studio/

- Nick’s talent company: Stellar - https://www.stellar.work/

- Nick’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/thenickpattison

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿

🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

This episode is the ultimate design founder story. Dennis shares all of the ups and downs along his journey to build Amie—a new productivity tool that captures your emails, calendar, and to-dos in a single beautiful product. Some of the highlights:

- Where Dennis draws inspiration

- The traits Dennis looked for in early hires

- What Dennis looks for in design candidates

- The backstory behind Amie’s viral website launch

- How Dennis balances his intuition with product feedback

- How Dennis thinks about innovating vs. capitalizing on familiarity

- Things 3 app - https://culturedcode.com/things/

- Stefan - https://twitter.com/_animify the Amie design engineer

- Devin - https://www.cognition-labs.com/introducing-devin—AI coder

- Brian Chesky interview - https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-approach on Lenny’s Podcast

- The Amo app - https://amo.co/

- Dennis’s custom Amie pants - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GEoOIsjW0AUYiTj?format=jpg&name=900x900

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿

🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪

Over the last few months, design engineering has by far been the #1 most requested topic. So I wanted to get the inside scoop from the team at Vercel to learn more. In this episode we get to hear from:

1. Glenn Hitchcock - https://twitter.com/glennui (Director of design engineering)

2. John Pham - https://twitter.com/JohnPhamous (Lead design engineer)

The goal of this conversation is to help people understand the role that design engineers play and to outline a path you can take to develop some of these skills. We talk about:

- The strategy behind Vercel’s new website

- Why Vercel built a design engineering team

- How designers collaborate with design engineers

- What Vercel looks for when hiring design engineers

- How Vercel is always building with re-usability in mind

- + a lot more - Maggie Appleton’s quote on software creation from our group interview

- https://anthonyhobday.com/blog/20240122.html

- vercel.com/ship

- Framer components - https://drams.framer.website/ (inspired by Dieter Rams’ design principles)

- Screwball scramble - https://us.tomy.com/screwball-scramble/

- Dead Simple Sites - https://deadsimplesites.com/

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿

🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪

Since the beginning of my design career, I’ve looked up to Metalab. So this interview is a special one because we get to learn from their Head of Design, Michael Wandelmeier. We go deep into how design works at Metalab and talk about specific strategies around:

- Mike’s go-to storytelling tactics

- The importance of opinionated design

- When they ignore constraints on a project

- The unique way they map out user journeys

- Tips for driving alignment on complex projects

- How they use the “ridiculously early hypothesis”

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿

🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪

One of the tools I'm most interested in right now is Relume. 200k+ people are using it to design and build websites faster with AI. They have a massive set of Figma/Webflow components which allows them to take a unique approach that “respects the process” of web design. In this bonus episode, their co-founder Adam gives us an end-to-end demo where he sitemaps, wireframes, designs, and builds a full website in ~30 min. We then get into the weeds about:

- How the web design process will evolve with AI

- What this means for the role of designer

- His journey as a design founder adapting to AI

- Where Relume is headed next as a company

👀 Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿

- Relume’s Figma library - https://www.relume.io/figma-library

- Relume’s Webflow library - https://www.relume.io/components

- Galileo - https://www.usegalileo.ai/explore (another AI tool we mentioned)

🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪

Rich Arnold was the Head of Design at Vine, a design lead on the early Instagram Stories team, and now he works as a design manager at Coinbase. So this episode goes deep into:

- How Rich grew as a storyteller at IG

- Why we cant let data be the designer

- The importance of “zooming out” in your work

- How to grow your creative problem solving muscles

- What it takes to design successful consumer products

- Ian Spalter (Old Head of Design at Instagram) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianspalter/

- Rus Yusupov (Cofounder of Vine and HQ Trivia) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus_Yusupov#:~:text=Rus%20Yusupov%20(born%20May%204,and%20CEO%20of%20HQ%20Trivia.

- Lapse (Mobile App) - https://www.lapse.com/)

If you’ve dabbled in design systems then you’re no doubt familiar with Brad Frost and atomic design. He’s laid the foundation for design systems teams around the world. So in this discussion we talk about the types of challenges he faces at Big Medium and how he’s envisioning the future of design systems:

• Why we should build a universal design system
• How Brad is using AI to elevate design systems
• How design systems designers can succeed in an AI world
• The highest leverage activities for DS designers to do
• How designers can communicate better with engineers

One of the most requested guests has been Gabe Valdivia. He was an early designer at Facebook, a designer manager at Google, and has led design for different startups over the years most recently as the head of design for Patreon. But in the last year he's made the jump to start his own practice and position himself as a fractional design partner for early stage teams. So a lot of this conversation gets into the weeds about what it's like to design 0 to 1 experiences. We talk about tactics for speed, storytelling, prototyping and a lot more...

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿

🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

As soon as I read No More Boring Apps I was hooked. Andy Allen immediately became one of my design heroes and now I use his Not Boring apps daily. So this conversation is a behind-the-scenes of his journey, an analysis of the state of software design, and a glimpse of where we’re headed next as an industry. Some highlights:

- The design tools Andy is most excited about

- Andy’s advice for people wanting to learn 3D

- The differences between good and great design

- The 4 things needed for design to have cultural impact

- How AI will empower us to deliver tailored software at scale

- Why the future of design tooling might mirror the game industry

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿 🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪

In this episode we get to hear from Jenny Wen who is the person who originally designed and brought Figjam to market. This conversation is full of inslights like:

• How Jenny attacks ambiguity early in the design process
• What we can learn from Figjam’s product strategy
• Jenny’s framework for adding delight to a product
• How to create visuals that stand out in a sea of confetti animations
• Strategies for facilitating live workshops in Figjam
• What Jenny looks for in design candidates
• Jenny’s vision for the future of Figjam

This episode expands on 8 key insights that I took away from interviewing designers like Soleio, Kevin Twohy, Molly Hellmuth, Soren Iverson, etc.

1. A unique way to stand out as a design candidate

2. How to grow as a vision caster

3. The question every freelancer should ask clients

4. The curse of knowledge in web design

5. When systems thinking is most important

6. Strategies for Figma variables

7. The Craft Flywheel

8. How to know which details matter

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿 🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

Soleio made a name for himself as the 2nd design hire at Facebook and eventually went on to lead design at Dropbox. Now he invests in extraordinary software startups like Figma, Framer, Vercel, Perplexity, Replit, Universe, tldraw, and dozens more worldwide. So in this discussion we go deep into:

- The fascinating story behind project Motion

- How Soleio’s skillset evolved during his time at Facebook

- When it makes sense to invest in craft (and when it doesn’t)

- what Soleio looks for when hiring designers

- How startups can attract the top design talent

- Why Soleio is so excited about spatial computing

- The type of companies Soleio is looking to invest in next

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿 🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪

Galileo recently broke design twitter with the launch of their new generative AI tool for builders. So in this episode we talk with their co-founder and lead designer, Helen Zhou about:

- Her journey as a design founder

- Why user research for AI tooling is unique

- How AI will change the day-to-day role of a designer

- Her response to concerns about LLMs and creativity

- The potential breakthrough use case for UI generation

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿 🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪

Webflow has had as big an impact on design as any company over the last decade. So this episode is an inside look at their design culture, rituals, and key insights from their Head of Design, Kevin Wong. Here’s a preview of some of the ideas we cover:

- How Webflow executed a massive rebrand leading up to their conference

- The different types of prototypes for driving alignment

- The role of design systems in their latest visual refresh

- How designers can handle situations where stakeholders disagree

- Ways to improve the way you share your work via Loom

- The rituals and processes used by designers at Webflow

- How design casts vision with “north stars”

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿 🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪

In this episode we get to hear from Ryo Lu who was one of the very first designers at Notion. This conversation is an inside look at the Notion design process, how they think about product, and a lot more:

- How Notion approached the user research process for AI

- Strategies for improving your systems thinking

- How design at Notion sources feedback on meaty problems

- How Notion thinks about their design system

- What Ryo is looking for in your portfolio

- How to operate outside the traditional “design” role

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning

🤿 🌐 dive.club

🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪

In this episode we’re talking with Molly Hellmuth who is the creator of UI Prep where she has an incredible newsletter, design system, and course where she’s taught hundreds of designers all over the world. This discussion gets into the nerdier side of Figma 🤓 We talk all about:

- When it does and doesn’t make sense to adopt variables

- How to make sure you don’t invest in a Figma strategy that you later regret

- Molly’s favorite Figma plugins for design systems

- How she’s building components differently in V8 of her UI Prep design system

- Her journey as an independent creator

- + a lot more

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿 🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

There’s a new design super team emerging at Clerk and in this episode we get a behind-the-scenes from the leader, Derek Briggs. We get into the weeds about:

- How Derek assembled an A-list team from scratch

- Why Derek pushed for a dedicated UI engineering team

- How Clerk is approaching their massive redesign

- Why Derek doesn’t believe in design deadlines - The business case for prioritizing quality - Derek’s #1 piece of advice for younger designers - + a lot more Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿 🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

In this episode we get to learn from Tommy Geoco who has launched countless projects, sold a startup, and built an audience of almost a million designers online. This conversation has everything—here’s a little taste of what you can expect:

- The wild story behind Tommy selling his first company

- Why design tools matter more than ever

- How to become better at selling yourself

- Tons of strategies for your next side project

- Tommy’s mental model for learning as a self-taught designer

- Why Tommy doesn’t care about being novel

- Ways to improve your “taste” as a designer

- Why Tommy acquired UX Tools (and his plans for it)

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿 🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪

This episode looks at Kevin Twohy’s 10+ year journey going from solo freelancer to independent design studio. We cover a LOT including:

- Strategies for cold outreach and pricing

- Tips for getting aligned quickly with clients

- How Kevin gets plugged into a new team

- Why Kevin has started positioning himself as a studio

- A better way to take equity in client projects

- Why you should be wary of starting a productized agency

- + a lot more

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿 🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪

Lauren LoPrete shares lessons from her experience leading design systems at Dropbox and now at Cash App. We talk about:

- What design systems actually look like at scale

- Why she’s approaching documentation differently at Cash

- Her experience in the Figma variables beta

- Why Lauren is so excited about string variables

- Traits of successful DS designers that we don’t talk about enough

- + a lot more

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿 🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪

Kate Syuma was the 3rd designer at Miro and went on to become the Head of Growth Design during her 6+ years at the company. This episode is a masterclass in designing for business impact. We discuss:

- Her process for identifying the aha moment in your product

- How Kate overcame imposter syndrome in her first year

- Ways designers can ask better data questions

- Insights from researching onboarding at 80+ companies

- The importance of designing for emotion vs. solving problems

- + a lot more

If you want to learn more about Kate definitely check out: Growthmates - https://katesyuma.substack.com/ ✌️

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿 🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪

If you’ve opened Twitter in the last year then you’re definitely familiar with Soren Iverson’s satirical designs like Uber Hotbox and the iMessage typing indicator. So in this episode we get an inside look at his process and lessons he’s learned throughout his career:

• How he overcomes creative blocks
• Strategies for being consistent
• What it was like collaborating with Duolingo
• How to jumpstart your network online
• Tactics for growing your product sense
• Why Soren is learning to code

In this episode, Kathryn Gonzalez walks us through how she built the DoorDash design language as the first designer and frontend engineer. We talk about what it's like designing for a 3-sided marketplace, how to figure out the right level of craft for your product, and get an inside look at how DoorDash structures their design system.

Kathryn spent almost 7 years at DoorDash and eventually became the Head of Design Infrastructure so this episode is chalk full of wisdom ✨

This Deep Dive is a special one because we get to hear from Niko Klein and Garrett Miller from the prototyping team at Figma.

We get a behind-the-scenes look at everything that led up to the advanced prototyping release at Config 2023 as well as:

• How Niko collaborates with engineering
• The prototyping feature they didn’t think they would release
• How they balanced power and simplicity while designing the expression builder
• Traits of a prototyping culture
• Strategies for prototype fidelity
• The future of prototyping in Figma

In 2022, Marco Cornacchia was coming off of a failed startup and started working on his new portfolio. Little did he know this project would land him a role as the founding designer at Diagram, lay the foundation for design Twitter’s most viral website, and spawn a talk at Webflow’s conference 🤯 In this episode, Marco shares how he (accidentally) created a new trend of animated bento grids. And we also get a behind the scenes of what it was like being the founding designer of Diagram and ultimately getting acquired by Figma. If you’re interested in designing at a startup then you’ll love this episode ✌️

This episode is a panel discussion hosted by Maven where we talk about specific strategies that you can use to become more valuable as an individual contributor on your team. We cover a lot of ground including:

• Becoming a conduit for ideas
• Traits of the best ICs
• Framing your ideas successfully
• The fastest ways to grow as a designer
• Receiving feedback more effectively
• Moving up the value chain of ideas
• a lot more

In this deep Dive, James gives us a behind-the-scenes of his creative process and how he is reimagining every pixel of the Clerk brand. We get into the weeds of how he establishes visual languages, his approach to animation, and what he looks for in a motif.

We also discuss which design trends are worth jumping on, which ones have peaked, and which ones to avoid. If you're into branding, visual design, or landing page techniques then you'll love this episode.

In this episode, Brian Lovin talks about his journey as a second-time founder and gives a behind-the-scenes of building his new startup, Campsite. He also shares key insights from hundreds of interviews he’s conducted to learn more about what makes a great design process. We talk about: - Strategies for sharing your work and getting feedback - Why Brian thinks we’ve gone too far with landing page design - Finding the right level of craft as a design founder - Why Brian no longer thinks every designers should start a company - The problems with post-COVID design process - What he’s doing differently as a second-time founder - The three values he’s instilling in the design culture at Campsite + a lot more

In this Deep Dive, David Hoang gives us a peek into where he thinks the industry is headed and how product designers can prepare for the future. We talk about:

• What AI in Figma might look like
• How to create a more accessible web
• The rise of the design founder
• How dynamic interfaces impact design systems
• Why the title “software designer” is trending up 📈

In this episode, we analyze four different websites (Lemonade, Formcarry, Stella Domo + Runway) to help you confidently write and design landing pages that sell 💪 Listen to learn how to:

• Design a top-notch hero section
• Use layout techniques that make your design stand out
• Avoid the biggest animation and copywriting mistakes
• Showcase testimonials effectively
• + a lot more

If you want to go even deeper 👉 check out Erik's new Landing Page Academy 💻

In this episode we get to go backstage with the design team at Loom! They teach us all about their design process and share takeaways from their recent AI launch including stories about:

- Prototyping and researching early concepts

- Collaborating with engineers and other cross-functional teams

- Using Figjam to gather feedback live

- Developing a visual language for AI

- Documenting edge cases and all the potential user states

- Pivoting mid project 👀

This week's Deep Dive features early-career designer, Perry Wang. Previously at Google and now working at Discord. This Deep Dive is a masterclass for junior designers looking to jumpstart their career. We cover a lot👇

This episode of Deep Dives highlights the 5 things I learned from interviewing designers like Dan Mall, Grace Walker, Adrien Griveau, Yuan Wang, and Luis Ouriach. You'll learn:

1) How to organize variables in Figma and think strategically about primitives vs. semantic tokens

2) How to price yourself as a first-year freelance designer

3) How the best design systems teams operate

4) How to level up your design portfolio and rethink your case studies

5) How to collaborate with engineers like the founding designer at Linear

It’s impossible to overstate the impact that Linear has had on the design world. So you can imagine how excited I was to have the opportunity to learn from their founding designer, Adrien Griveau 🙌

This Deep Dive is an all-access pass to design at Linear including Adrien’s approach to collaborating with the engineering team, the traits that Linear looks for in design candidates and a behind-the-scenes of Linear’s product process.

Enjoy :)

🗣 This interview was special because I got to reconnect with former team member at Maven — Yuan ✌️

Yuan led design at Twitter, Airbnb and Maven and actively coaches creative leaders in the industry ✨

In this interview we talk energy through your career, how we organize our portfolio websites and strategies for presenting work to stakeholders.

Making the jump and diving into that first year of freelancing can be pretty daunting… 🥲

I wish I could’ve had this chat with Grace about 5 years ago because she was very transparent about the lessons she learned in that first year.

In this Deep Dive, she breaks down her strategies for pricing, balancing project work, her tool stack, and a lot more...

If you’re familiar at all with design systems then I definitely don’t need to introduce you to Dan Mall. He’s as OG as it gets.

In this Deep Dive, Dan shares his take on Figma variables, where design systems are headed in the coming years, and a lot more…

Anthony Hobday, a self-taught interface designer, became an expert by obsessively studying the works of top designers around the world. 🌎

Now he is dedicated to bridging the knowledge gap for fellow self-taught designers by sharing every step of his design process.

In this episode, Anthony highlights simple yet effective techniques everyday designers can make to elevate their visual design skills to create a more compelling final product. 🔐

This episode is all about engineer turned designer Grace Ling, who scored her dream job as product designer at EA and is also now the founder of the biggest design community online, Design Buddies. Grace jumpstarted her career by putting herself out there as a content creator and using some unique tactics when applying for roles. In this interview we talk about how Grace fast-tracked her learning journey, her playbook for breaking in to a new company and practicals to stand-out as a designer in today's job market.

If you're looking to level up how you use variables in Figma then this episode is for you ✌️ Luis goes deep into strategies based on team size, provides naming guidance, and even breaks down how he thinks about structuring libraries with variables in Figma. Lastly, Luis shares a behind-the-scenes of his journey as a designer advocate and even gives a unique prediction for how AI will take shape inside of Figma.

Don't forget to follow Luis on Twitter and check out his awesome files in the Figma community

Steph Golik was an early design leader at the self-driving car startup Cruise 🚗 But 2 years ago she left to launch her own company Huddle. In this episode we're talking all about how designers can take the leap to start that next project or even raise venture funding like Steph. If you're interested in entrepreneurship or even just want to get better at selling your ideas... you're going to love this episode. 🧡

Fons was the one who originally designed the Dive brand 🤿 so this episode is a branding masterclass. We walk through a mock project and Fons goes deep into each phase of his branding process. We also discuss spatial computing, how to make you designs stand out, and strategies for leveling up your visuals 😎

In this episode, Charli takes us behind the scenes of her role as Creative Director at ConvertKit. She shares all kinds of insights about brand and marketing strategy, how to tell data stories, and how to level up as a copywriter. If you're looking for creative inspiration or ways to advance your career, then this episode is for you ✌️

If you're looking to level up your storytelling and make a bigger impact on product strategy, then this is the episode for you 💪 Femke shares practical insights from her time at Uber, WealthSimple, and now as a design lead at Gusto. We go deep into strategies for collaborating with PMs, handling pushback in design, and how designers can more effectively sell their ideas.

In this episode, Dan shares his insights on using Framer from his experience as an early adopter. He also discusses his approach to learning to code while building his own product and shares some tips for others looking to do the same. And obviously, we couldn't call it a Deep Dive without chatting a bit about the impact of AI as well as learning how Jay-Z used to influence the product roadmap at TIDAL 👀

In this episode, Mia shares stories and lessons learned from her time as an early design leader at Square and Pinterest. We discuss all sorts of practical ways to increase your influence as a designer including strategies for CRIT, how to learn from your PMs, how to prepare for an AI future, and much more... if you're looking to become more of a leader at work (even if you're not interested in management) then this episode is for you ✌️

Fonz gives a masterclass on growth design in this episode as he pulls back the curtain on designing at Netflix and what it takes to ship to millions of users. We also discuss our journies as entrepreneurs, dealing with ambiguity at work, and the importance of growing as a writer. Fonz is truly a lifelong learner and this episode is gold for anyone who wants to grow in their understanding of business 💪

In this episode, Jorn shares the full Framer story starting with his journey as an early designer at Facebook. He also provides insights into Framer’s 9-year overnight success story and a sneak peek of their plans moving forward. We also jam on the potential impact of AI on design—just wait until you hear Jorn's take on the future of design systems ✌️.