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🤿 houdini

🤿 houdini

how the sauce is made

Ridd
October 22, 2025

Nelson Noa’s episode about designing the “interface for AI” with shaders is kinda blowing up…

But I’ve received a lot of DMs from people wanting to learn more about how the heck they’re creating insanely detailed animations like this 👀

So this episode is a behind-the-scenes of his workflow (including some magic in After Effects and even Houdini).

Here’s how the sauce is made 👇

🤝 WITH FRAMER

Framer just went from a web builder to a true design tool with their latest release.

They just launched Design Pages, which give you a freeform canvas to explore in and all of the tools that you might need (including vector editing!)

That way you can experiment and play without having to think about responsiveness.

And then when you're ready, you can turn any iteration into a web page with a single click.

Picture this 👇

Scale tool
3D transforms
Vector workflows
P3 color and gradient support
Curated fonts and premium icons

No imports, no copying and pasting. It’s a faster, cleaner workflow where everything happens in one place.

Start with a sketch, polish into a full design, and publish directly, all in Framer.

Design pages are a game changer and you can start using them today just click the link to get started 👇

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

Live interview with Perplexity, Vercel, and Primary

~1500 people are already registered for the opening keynote in Maven’s new AI Workflows for Design series 😮

I’ll be interviewing some of my favorite designers on the planet next Monday:

Henry Modisett (VP of Design at Perplexity)
Pranathi Peri (Designing v0 at Vercel)
Nick Pattison (Shipping some of the best brand work in the world rn)

If you want to come hang claim your spot below 👇

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

Lessons learned in AI and design workflows

Speaking of AI design workflows…

Sara Clayton recently shared an article about “hard truths and hopeful signals from a designer at Dropbox” that I wanted to share with you.

It’s a pretty interesting case study about how she uses Figma Make to prototype and test ideas.

I’m going to do a point to surface more stories (and interviews like this). Be on the lookout for some more behind-the-scenes from the Intercom team 👀

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

New tool in my stack

My technical cofounder grounded me from using Cursor anymore.

No seriously… after one of my PRs he said he’s not reviewing my work anymore unless I use Claude Code 😂

I was always hesitant because 1) VSCode feels blah to me and 2) I’m scared of terminals

Except… I was scared of terminals. Not anymore though. Because Warp is awesome.

This is not an ad. It’s just a thing I’ve learned over the last few weeks and I have to recommend it to you because it’s that good.

btw I filmed part 1 of an episode with Kyle Zantos today that’s going to walk you step by step how to build your ideas with Claude Code. He uses Warp too so it should be a good one :)

🧃 INSPIRATION JUICE

3 things I saved this week

1️⃣ Thought bubble morphs into typing

This animation is genius and beautiful. Well done Edward 👏

Check it out →

2️⃣ Duotone dashboard icons

I’ve never shipped duotone episodes into a production app before and after seeing this image I feel like that’s a mistake. Because this look niiiiice 👌