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🤿 metal gear

🤿 metal gear

designing software that makes people FEEL something

Ridd
May 05, 2026

Rafa Conde is a design engineer at Retro and one of the most creative designers I’ve ever met.

I still remember where I was when I first saw the video on his personal site 😂

In this episode we unpack what it means to design experiences that make people feel something. He’ll probably make you laugh a few times along the way too :)

Some highlights:

Finding ways to introduce delight
How to make users feel something
The power of humor in your design
How to lean into video as a superpower
Balancing accessibility and delightful UX
Behind the scenes of Rafa's side projects
+ a lot more

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

👥 FEATURED RESOURCE

My new sharing workflow

Basically all of my work starts with Claude now…

But moving out of Figma meant I didn’t have a good way to share these prototypes and get feedback.

So we built a CLI that allows you to embed the best parts of Inflight (video walkthroughs, feedback requests, pinned comments, etc.) directly inside of the prototypes you're building with AI.

It’s been my aha moment with the product so I made a ~2 minute video to show you my Inflight workflow 👇

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCES

The visible tells of AI design

There are certain styles that are design’s version of the emdash (RIP 😔). This resource lists them all out and it’s pretty spot on tbh. Looks like italicized words in headings are officially dead.

Gradient border plugin

It’s oddly challenging to get AI to nail animated gradient borders. But the gradient border plugin makes it a breeze. Good news = we’ll see more gradient borders. Bad news = they might end up on the list above 😅

Creating melt effects

Building on the above… as designers we now have to push further to create designs that are unique and not as easy to copy with a single screenshot or plugin. So I want to share this tutorial to create a melting effect on your UI. It’s by Josh Puckett so you know it’s good.

🧃 INSPIRATION JUICE

3 things I saved this week

1️⃣ Supabase announcement card

The subtle background pattern really spices up this announcement card in Supabase. Just saw it for the first time yesterday and saved it to my taste library.

See it live →