🤿 alien space metal

“Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?” is officially the most popular article I’ve ever written 😅

So this week’s idea is part 2…

Because I have a lot more thoughts on the future of designing with AI.

Right now I see two big issues as well as two exciting opportunities 👇

A BIT LIKE MAGIC

If 5 years ago someone told me that I could copy and paste my designs from Figma to a live website, I think I would’ve lost my mind lol.

But that’s exactly what it’s like building websites with Framer today.

All you need is the Figma to Framer plugin.

1. Select the layers you want to copy

2. Run the plugin

3. Paste into Framer

4. Publish your designs to the internet

It’s a little bit like magic 💫

📺 THIS WEEK’S EPISODE

Pushing past the pixels

After 8 years designing at Meta, George Kedenburg III pulled a 180° and joined Humane as a design lead.

So this week’s episode is a deep dive into designing AI products and how the role of product designer evolves in an AI-native company.

One of my favorite parts of the interview is how George started prototyping in Python and even created a Slackbot to share his ideas.

If you want to level up as a creative problem solver then this is the episode for you…

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

Here are three of my favorite takeaways:

1) Moving past rectangles

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.

2) 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”

3) 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.

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

How Julius built Project Dependencies for Linear

Remember how Julius Tarng was telling us about all of the edge cases in the project he was building at Linear?

It’s why I wrote the article “How to spot tiny design decisions”.

Well, the feature just shipped!

Julius shared a fun behind-the-scenes where you can really see all of the thought that went into the different states and interactions. It’s also interesting to see what came out of Linear’s “internal roast” 👇

🧃 INSPIRATION JUICE

3 designs I saved this week

1. Unique card direction

Theresa Duemler shared some scroll-stopping cards as a part of her recent showreel. The shape, color, imagery… it all comes together into something that I immediately want to try in my own work 👌

Check it out →

2. Shopify’s scroll-over sections

I have no idea how it took me so long to discover Shopify Editions. There are sooo many delightful details in those sites and this is one of my favorites.

The page is broken up by these themed scroll-over sections that make the whole site come alive. Plus I love the art direction of the videos 🙌

Check it out →

3. Calendar icons

I spent an hour last weekend trying to recreate these calendar icons from Farrel Putra. The more you zoom in the more impressive the details are.

Check it out →

🤝 WITH FRAMER

Behind-the-scenes of how Framer built their new website

Framer’s new home page pretty much broke design Twitter last week.

So we made a bonus episode that pulls back the curtain on the whole process. I think my three favorite parts are:

1. Seeing how Jurre used their new Fetch API to display dynamic data on the home page even though he’s not an engineer

2. Learning that they design Framer inside of Framer and all of the UI on the home page are real components

3. Seeing how Jurre uses masks instead of radial overlays to fade out content

This level of access is so rare so I hope you enjoy the video 👇

Meet the Dive partners 

I made a list of my favorite products and asked them to come on as sponsors of the newsletter/podcast. They said yes 🥹

The #1 way to support Dive Club is to check them out👇

Jitter​ → How I animate my designs

Framer​ → How I build my websites

Maven ​→ How I invest in my career

Raycast ​ → How I do pretty much everything on my computer

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