Archive

Meaningful endeavors

Maybe it's happened to you. You reach a point where you pull up short and don't know the point of all your endeavors. Life is like that at times. It continues, relentlessly, and seems to demand, eat up, take everything you've got. At some

AI Rules for Product Designers

I was recently listening to a podcast episode from Cal Newport, where they outlined AI rules for developers. Namely, that a developer should approach AI use carefully, with intentionality, in a way that will ensure they aren't losing the abilities they have, and are benefitting from where AI

Blending new and old product design

It's been a year since I called the death of Figma. I'm still not sure if I was right, but the stock market seems to agree with me at the moment. Since then I've spent most of my time designing, and developing, with Claude

Delight in mundanity

Some days creativity is easy. I know what I want to get done, and all the pieces come together in the right way. I might be tired, I might be worn out from the effort, but it's effortless. I love those days, and they're part of

Writing right

Other than earlier's post, it's been a while since I wrote. A funny thing happens when you get out of the habit. Your next post—those next words you plan to publish, grow larger in estimation. You start to imagine they must be perfect, that the

Really building

Last week I decided to try something. I had an idea for a new app, pulled up Claude Code, and began building. The concept wasn't theoretical, I knew what I had in mind, and wanted to get to a solution immediately. Now, roughly a week later, I have

Quick deployment

The web has come full circle. Twenty years ago I'd build a website in Flash, or HTML, and chuck it online via FTP. The result was messy, prone to getting hacked, and not anywhere close to professional. But, what it lacked in production-ready quality, it made up

It's not too late

You might feel like the world left you behind. Somewhere, in the chaos of the last month, year, or decade, everyone moved on and figured it out—and you're the last one holding the bag. Two seconds on Instagram will reveal that others are happier, richer, funnier, smarter,

The guessing game

Building software is a massive guessing game. You hope that what you're building will help somebody solve a problem. You don't know, though. Until your code hits the real world, gets used by people with real needs, it's all just theoretical. Time and again

Make something wonderful

If you're following this blog, you're probably the type of reader who creates things. You find joy in taking atoms—or the digital representation of them—and pushing against entropy. It's your mission in life to bring pieces together (alright, that's a

The human bottleneck

There's been a lot of talk about finding ways to 10x productivity amongst folks in tech. I've been part of that conversation, trying to identify how I can speed up what I do. This, of course, juxtaposes with my desire to slow down, have deep work

A time for learning

I've been writing a lot about product design the last year or so. With all these new AI tools I'm constantly wrestling with where design can fit in. Well you know what? I'm almost settled on how I feel; even if I'm

A different tactic

I've had an internal goal for the last year to write 750 words each day. Some days I meet that goal, some days I get overwhelmed and my writing goes nowhere. Earlier this week I was encouraged by my friend to focus on a specific topic on this

Product design's future

Over the last year, I’ve been trying to figure out what’s going to happen to product design as a field. I started my career as a graphic designer, and I loved it. But after a few years, I realized it wasn’t a great path to really build

Google Omni and Product Design changes

Refocusing this blog For the last few weeks I've been wondering what to write about. It's not that I have nothing to say, but rather that the things I want to say don't quite match how I want to say them. A recent episode

Product design thinking

Like many other designers in the industry, I was mostly self-taught. When I was starting, there wasn't really a field of product design for taking classes. We had to figure it out from others along the way, along with our own musings and trial-and-error. I

Joy in a hobby

Over the last four years I've found a new hobby: basketball. And funnily enough, I don't even playExcept. It's important to have something we care about that isn't motivated by a financial return. Me? I like getting lost; spending time diving into

Doing a hard thing

It might just be that I'm getting old, but I appreciate what I've had to struggle for. Back in community college my brother and I attended a few semesters together. In one English class, a summer condensed course, my first essay came back with a ton

We need your brain

Last week I was working through a challenging design problem. I needed to create a new set of screens for an app. Because of some limits on the hardware used for the app, there's a lot of constraints on how the problem can be approached. The designs are

Slow reading

Last month I bought a new e-reader. I've been following the cycle of new devices over the years, and have been particularly interested in small screens. I have a Kindle Paperwhite—and it's fine. But it's not pocketable, at least not if you