🤿 levels of alignment

I talk to a lot of designers at the pinnacle of their career…

So I’m always trying to figure out how they’ve evolved the way they practice design over the years.

Once I hear the same answer from a few different people I start to pay attention 👀

So here are a few trends I’m noticing for how the best designers get alignment on their teams 👇

🤝 WITH LOVABLE

I’ve taught thousands of designers Figma so I’ve made as many prototyping noodles as anyone…

But now that I’m building my ideas in Lovable it is really hard to go back to the old world…

Nothing compares to sending developers a real, functional preview link

And it’s so easy with Lovable. Like… really easy.

You can add screenshots and describe anything you want to build and it happens like magic.

I’m having as much fun building my ideas with Lovable as any other point in my career and they just launched Lovable 2.0 so you can start building today just click the link 👇

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

Behind the scenes of devouring details

The “🐐” emoji is overused at this point but if anyone is deserving it’s Rauno from Vercel.

That’s why all eyes are on his new interaction design course.

Last week he shared a behind-the-scenes where he explained everything from his visual style to motion principles to naming strategy.

If you want to see what intentionality looks like this is it 👇

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

Why Deep Research is a massive unlock for designers

It’s never been easier to answer the question “what is possible?” as a non-technical designer.

So I want to share a practical example of how I used AI for Inflight recently.

For context we have a feedback flow that looks like this:

1. You share anything you’re working on with a video walkthrough

2. AI interviews stakeholders based on the feedback you’re looking for

3. We create an interactive report so you know where to focus next

My hypothesis is that a core part of our loop will be feeding insights back into Slack. But I didn’t really know what the Slack API made possible (and I didn’t want to spend a whole day reading documentation 😅).

So I used ChatGPT’s Deep Research.

First I fed it a bunch of context for the product and then I listed all of the API-relevant goals that I could think of (tip: ask it to surface interesting use cases not explicitly defined in your goals!)

Chat then generated an in-depth breakdown of how I can accomplish each goal with the API 👀

Once I understood what’s possible, I was then able to use Inflight to make a pitch for how we can include Slack as a core part of our loop.

This whole process took me an hour where ~2 years ago it would’ve required a day’s worth of research (and if I’m being honest…I probably would’ve waited until I could pass it off to an engineer to help 😅).

It’s just another example of how empowering AI can be. So hopefully this sparks some ideas of your own :)

👥 COMMUNITY QUESTION

Want to hang with me and other listeners?

For a long time people have been asking for a Dive community and I think it’s finally time…

So I’m creating a new channel for us to hang out ✌️

Tbh I don’t know what it will become. This isn’t going to be a formal thing… just an open space to share ideas, ask questions, or riff on anything really.

I’ll send invites out soon! click below to get on the list 👇

🧃 INSPIRATION JUICE

3 things I saved this week

1️⃣ Design details in the Queue podcast app

I’m a sucker for artisan apps—the ones who solve the same set of problems as the industry standard but sweat every single design detail to perfection.

My latest favorite is Queue from Eike Drescher.

It’s a visual masterpiece and worth downloading solely for design inspiration. But they also have a pretty unique take on what a podcast player should be.

Check it out →

2️⃣ Sentiment UI concepts

I’ve been experimenting with sentiment UIs for Inflight lately and came across this beauty from Valentin.

Not sure I’ve seen a gradient used for sentiment like this before 🤔 really unique approach that I’m definitely going to use as inspiration.

See it live →

3️⃣ High contrast dashboard header

This high contrast primary nav style has become pretty popular for dashboards but I haven’t seen many using a top nav instead of a sidebar.

I really like it because it feels easier to just focus on the light (or dark) part of the design vs. having the whole UI be in focus.

See it live →

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👇

Framer​ → How I build my websites

Genway → How I do research

Granola → How I take notes during CRIT

Jitter​ → How I animate my designs

Lovable → How I build my ideas in code

Mobbin → How I find design inspiration

Paper → How I design like a creative

Raycast ​ → How I stay in flow while I work

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