🤿 designing v0

Hope you had a merry Christmas! I’m combining the Thursday/Saturday emails into one the next two weeks so this issue is pretty jam-packed 👇

We've heard a lot on this show about designers becoming builders using tools like v0 which is why I’m so excited about today’s episode…

We get to do a deep dive with Pranathi Peri who is leading the design of v0 at Vercel!

We cover a lot of ground including:

• How to grow your taste and intuition quickly

• How Pran thinks about the design language of v0

• Pran’s personal experiments using 3D and physics

• Why Pran wants to bring “onboarding roulette” to v0

• How Pran showed potential without having extensive experience

• What it’s like collaborating with engineers like Shadcn and Rauno

• + a lot more

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

Soleio (early Facebook) and Diego (VP of Design at Ramp) both shared how they try to hire for slope over intercept.

This means they place more weight on someone’s ability to learn new skills than what they’re currently bringing to the table.

But how do you communicate that as a candidate?

Well Pran is obviously doing something right because in a few short years she was able to:

1. Convince Github to hire her even though she’d never had a design role

2. Convince Graphite to hire her as the 2nd designer when they originally wanted someone super senior

3. Lead design for v0 which is easily one of the most exciting products in tech right now

So beyond designing for AI, this week’s episode highlights one of the more impressive career arcs I’ve seen in all of design 👇

🤝 JITTER

My favorite animation tool Jitter just had a game-changer of a release.

They just dropped their first set of community templates created by some of the best designers and studios I know.

And get this… they’re all free 🤯 You don’t even have to download anything because Jitter is like Figma for animation design.

Just head to their new community page and find an animation that you love and then you can remix it in a single click ✨

💡 KEY IDEA

The detail designers often miss

Craft is so much more than a shimmering landing page or micro animation…

It’s sweating all of the tiny details and having a thorough understanding of the edge cases in your product.

But there’s one detail most designers miss… 👀

So this ~5 min episode highlights one of my favorite ideas ever shared on the show from Raphael Schaad (founder of Cron and now the Head of Calendar at Notion).

It’s a great example of what it looks like to obsess over the craft of your product 👇

If you want to get the full Cron story can find Raphael’s episode here.

And this episode also pulls in part of my conversation with Julius Tarng about his time at Linear.

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

How to make something great

Ryo Lu (early designer at Notion) is one of the design thinkers I look up to most.

It’s not often that he writes articles but when he does, I drop whatever I’m doing and get a note pad out. Here’s an excerpt from his latest intro so you can get a taste:

If that doesn’t make you want to read his 7 ideas for creating great products then I don’t know what to tell you 😅

🤝 VISUAL ELECTRIC

After 14 months, Trevor Nielsen cancelled his Midjourney account.

Why you ask? Well… he found a tool that he likes even more after listening to Dive Club. It’s called Visual Electric — a new image generation tool that’s built specifically for designers 💪

1. It’s the most photorealistic image generator out there (even more realistic than Midjourney).

2. They have a bunch of beautiful predefined styles

3. It’s super easy to iterate because the experience happens on an infinite canvas just like Figma

Honestly the whole product is the epitome of taste and I use it for absolutely everything.

Trust me on this one… you’re going to want to use the exclusive code DIVECLUB to get your first month free 👇

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

The 10 Best Moments of UX

I’m typically the last person to share a UX Planet Medium listicle… but honestly this one is really freaking good 🔥

It’s a breakdown of 10 of the best UX patterns from 2024 (including some great examples of how to frame the value of your product in upgrade/cancellation flows).

🧃 INSPIRATION JUICE

3 designs I saved this week

1️⃣ Multi-step flow illustration

I’m pretty obsessed with the depth effect that Derek Briggs created here. Even the typography is interesting. Normally I’m wary of using 4 separate styles for 4 pieces of text but this kinda works.

Check it out →

2️⃣ Cora feature cards

If you haven’t seen the Cora website yet then the entire thing is worth a scroll. It’s landing page storytelling at its finest. But I want to specifically call out these cards because there’s a lot of interesting things happening:

1. Aligning the text in the middle card to the bottom adds a lot of visual interest

2. The smaller, darker shadows make the cards feel more like physical items

3. It’s rare to see gray textured backgrounds that are all unique yet feel cohesive

See it live →

3️⃣ Fun way to design avatars

You’ve probably designed a row of avatars 50+ times by now… which is why I saved this design! Because the luminosity effect + oval shape produces a pretty fresh take 👀

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👇

Dessn → How I ship like a design engineer

Framer​ → How I build my websites

Genway → How I do research

Jitter​ → How I animate my designs

Play → How I design mobile apps

Raycast ​ → How I do most things on my computer

Visual Electric → How I generate imagery

Thanks for reading! I'm working hard to bring you the best design resources on the planet 🫶

If you want to go even deeper you can always:

☞ Read all ​ideas​

☞ Watch all ​episodes ​

☞ Learn ​advanced design tactics​

P.S. if you were forwarded this email you can ​subscribe here