🤿 hideous files

The last two weeks with Inflight have been the most exhilarating of my entire career…

So I want to use Dive Club  to provide unprecedented levels of access to life as a design founder.

I’m talking about the messy behind-the-scenes, hideous Figma concepts, and all of the winding turns that we've taken to get where we're at today.

This is gonna be as raw as it gets.

And hopefully by shining a light on some of the things I'm learning, it turns into a video series that you want to keep watching ✈️

🤝 WITH JITTER

Look I’m not a motion designer…

But while designing Inflight I’ve been using Jitter for everything and it’s honestly a cheat code.

I’ve been creating Lottie files, micro animations and show reels for Twitter and I didn’t want to use After Effects because it would’ve taken me all day to figure that stuff out…

But there’s no steep learning curve with Jitter. The whole product is super intuitive.

They even have incredible community templates that I’ve been using to jumpstart my project 🚀

So even though I wouldn’t consider myself a motion designer I feel like Jitter gives me super powers. Just pushed this one to production yesterday :)

I can’t recommend this product enough 👇

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

Post-chat UI

Remember when Kyle Turman talked about all of the non-chat explorations done at Anthropic?

I like that clip because it highlights a very clear shift I’ve noticed in the industry…

A year ago we were quick to bash chat as “lazy” design. But now we’re seeing the versatility and power of chat. Turns out it’s a pretty good primitive after all 😅

The reality is that per usual the answer lies somewhere in the middle… so I want to highlight this article that lists patterns for interacting with AI other than chat.

It also talks about the final boss being completely generative UI 👀

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

Physicality: the new age of UI

Apple dropped the liquid glass bomb this week 💥

Some of it is a bit questionable I’ll admit…

But it’s impact is about to be very real—we’ve officially entered the era of glass UI. And there will be big time highs and lows…

Anyway…I want to make sure you’ve seen this article from former Apple designer Sebastiaan de With where he breaks down the history of Apple design and some (mostly accurate) predictions for where iOS might be headed next…

Sebastiaan worked on skeuomorphic design elements of early iOS versions so it’s a pretty fun take in retrospect :)

Based off the announcement yesterday it definitely looks like “tactile realism” is about to be the vibe moving forward so before you dive into Figma I recommend:

1. checking out the anatomy of a water droplet 😅

2. trying this technique to get close in Figma

🧃 INSPIRATION JUICE

3 things I saved this week

1️⃣ Glass button on white

Speaking of glass UI… there are a ton of more subtle explorations in this thread if you’re looking for more inspiration like this button 👇

Check it out →

2️⃣ Glassy card style

Kailash applies a similar aesthetic to this card UI. Pay attention to the border styles because we’re about to see a LOT more of this soon.

More glass goodness →

3️⃣ Clean dashboard empty state

I came across this beautiful work from Ali in my quest to find the perfect dashboard empty state style. This whole concept is 👌

Check it out →

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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