🤿 new not more

Last week I asked Maheen Sohail (senior staff designer at Meta) a simple question:

“What traits matter most for designers in an AI world?”"

She answered immediately → Curiosity.

We could all benefit from asking “what if?” a bit more often. Because we’re capable of a lot more than we were before.

• Exhibit A: Gabe Valdivia launching an app even though he “can’t code”

• Exhibit B: Helen Tran adding file management to her side project in a language she can hardly read

• Exhibit C: Watching an 8 year old build a Harry Potter chat interface in 45 minutes 🤯

The Cursor FOMO is rising 📈

RECENTLY ON THE TWITTER BIRD…

So I got a DM this week from someone who was listening to me talk about how I use Raycast and finally downloaded it for themself…

All the DM said was “sh*t this is gonna completely change the way I use my computer isn’t it 😆?”

Once you realize how much Raycast streamlines the way you use your computer you simply can’t go back.

I use it for clipboard history, my portal to AI, window management, searching for Figma files… everything!

So if you’re still on the sidelines… I can’t recommend Raycast enough 👇

📺 THIS WEEK’S EPISODE

Navigating ambiguity in AI design

This week’s episode is with Maheen Sohail who is a senior staff designer working on generative at Meta.

She joined as one of the earliest designers on both the VR and AI teams, so a big part of this discussion is about navigating ambiguity when there’s no clear playbook to follow.

We go deep into:

• New types of interface patterns for AI

• The unique ways she thinks about prototyping

• Ethical considerations when designing AI produdcts

• How Maheen explores AI models through side projects

• Why the goal posts for what it means to be a designer are shifting

• a lot more

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

My takeaways

1) Nobody knows what they’re doing

It’s easy to look at people working on these AI-native products and assume they have it all figured out… but we’re all still learning and exploring what’s possible. This came up in George Kedenburg’s episode too.

2) The importance of passion projects

There’s a trend I’m noticing in these interviews… the designers who are creating cutting edge use cases for AI are the ones actively exploring the technology with side projects.

Reading essays isn’t the way to learn.

You have to want something to exist in the world and use that as a reason to figure out what’s possible. For Maheen it was using AI models to colorize images of Pakistan. For Nate Parrott it was using AI to hallucinate in HTML (which led to Arc Search).

3) Bringing personas to life

Maheen is using Eleven Labs to make user personas feel more real than ever before.

🔗 FEATURED PORTFOLIO

What we can learn from Atilla’s portfolio

I came across this portfolio site recently and it’s quickly risen to the top of my inspiration list.

A few reasons I love it:

1. He leads with an animated sizzle reel 🔥

2. The narrow content column (500px) is such a classy look

3. He gets specific in his hero section (“early-stage startups”)

4. JetBrains Mono is an excellent font choice (Alex Cornell says it’s his favorite)

5. The subtle progressive blur underneath the bottom nav shows off some visual/technical savvy

6. All of Atilla’s work is visible on the home page (and a lot of it is animated which makes it even more engaging)

7. Having a single font size (15px) across the entire site is a flex (just ask MDS). It also demonstrates that you understand how to use white space and contrast to create hierarchy.

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

Creating new, not more

Last month Will King did a little research project where he asked a group of designers (myself, Julius Tarng, Thiago Costa, Logan Liffick, and Jonathan Kim) two simple questions:

1. Where do you gravitate to when you’re looking for inspiration?

2. How do you process external inspiration and integrate it into your work?

It’s the first time I publicly admitted to recording my TV because Netflix intros are one of my favorite sources for inspiration 😅

🧃 INSPIRATION JUICE

3 designs I saved this week

1. Card hover effect

Everything about this Gilverse Design site is sick. But the pattern that stood out to me was how Gil reveals an image background in the hover state of this project card. He also uses a lot of subtle motion to really bring this to life.

Definitely a pattern that I plan on making use of at some point 👀

See it live →

2. Subtle checkered button background

I spent too long trying to recreate this button from Tyler the other day. I love the subtle checkered background and bottom glow.

Turns out it was a bit harder to get right than I thought 😅

Check it out →

3) Mixing paint with gradients

For the first time in my career, Visual Electric has unlocked my ability to execute on art direction.

As a result I’ve started saving a lot more designs that look like this…

Not only does Solya crush it on the image and gradient, but the subtle inner shadow in the top middle of the input is a nice touch too 👌

Check it out →

🤝 WITH JITTER

How I’m using Jitter’s new audio feature

After seeing what Fons Mans made with Jitter’s new audio feature I decided that I had to get in on the action…

So I moved our entire preview template into Jitter 👇

It’s 10x better lol. We were doing some jank transitions with .pngs from Figma and now it’s so easy to create a fluid wave and matching text animations.

You can check out the final product here.

But more importantly it might be time to start asking yourself what you can make next because it’s never been easier 👀

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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