🤿 Airbnb's new design strategy

In case you missed the big announcement… Each week I’m releasing a mini episode that breaks down a key idea from my interviews.

For example, I’ve now done four episodes that each offer a unique perspective on design at Airbnb:

• Teo Connor (VP of Design)

• Alex Schleifer (former Chief Design Officer)

• Janum Trivedi (prototyping specialist)

• Ryan Scott (designer that led a massive checkout redesign)

That’s almost 4 hours of content so the goal with this new format is to make it easier to stay up to date with the key ideas being shared :)

This first mini episode breaks down the 3 big design investments that Airbnb is making to bring soul back to the app 👇

🤝 WITH JITTER

I’m noticing a trend… The designers who are getting noticed on social media are the ones who are using video to showcase their work.

That little bit of motion is the easiest way to make your designs feel premium which is why I’m such a big fan of Jitter.

It’s like Figma but for motion design. So you don’t have to wrestle After Effects anymore to make a killer highlight reel

Jitter makes it way easier. You can import your designs using their Figma plugin and they even have beautiful templates to get you started 👇

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

7 questions to run through when critiquing a product’s design

Whenever Julie Zhou shares advice from her time leading design at FB I make sure to pay attention.

She recently posted a list of tips for giving helpful, actionable feedback. So here are her 7 questions, but she shares a lot more context in the full post too:

1. What is the user journey to get here?

2. What do we want users to feel and achieve here?

3. How important is this page/experience?

4. What is our scope/timeline/team?

5. For every proposed design change, am I confident it is better than what currently exists?

6. What can we remove from this experience and have it work just as well?

7. If we could throw all our constraints away, would we still design it like this?

I love that last one. It’s something I’ve been pushing myself to think through a lot more lately. Because it’s too easy to lock your ideation process in whatever box of constraints you think you’re dealing with. Some constraints are looser than others.

There’s a lot more context in the full post too 👇

🤝 FEATURED RESOURCE

Q&A with Atlassian’s lead design system designer

Remember Molly Hellmuth? She’s one of my favorite design systems thinkers on the planet.

So this behind-the-scenes with Atlassian is grade-A content 👇

Also if you really want to nerd out on design systems you can get $100 off her Design System Bootcamp course which is one of the top ones on Maven ✌️

🧃 INSPIRATION JUICE

3 designs I saved this week

1️⃣ Paper physical motif

I’m working on a new startup and have been thinking a lot about using paper as a motif lately (Exhibit A). So this portfolio by Zach Hamed really stood out. The entire thing is set up to look like things are casually laid on a table. It’s pretty cool ✌️

See it live →

2️⃣ Glowing icons

It’s hard to stop looking at this icon set from Yevhen 👀 Obviously the texture and elevation make for a unique icon set. But I think what I really love is the color palette. The warmth feels fresh.

See it live →

3️⃣ Example 3

Alvish is good at this design thing. I love how he was able to use inner shadows to make the button feel like a key cap. So clever.

Also this is a remix of Nikola’s remix of the Work Louder website. I love the design community 😅

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:

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