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🤿 building ideas at Shopify

🤿 building ideas at Shopify

+ what I'm stealing from the Craft design system

Ridd
January 31, 2025

The first product I ever designed end-to-end was a plugin for Shopify merchants (thankfully I can’t find any screenshots 😅).

As a result, Shopify’s design team has always held a special place in my heart and it makes me happy to see their work so widely recognized in the industry. I mean just look at their Editions if you haven’t already… it’s pretty incredible.

So over the next couple of months I’ll be doing a deep dive into design at Shopify.

To kick it off, this week's episode is with Anthony Menecola who is a longtime staff product designer at Shopify.

We talk about ways you can make a bigger impact as an IC and what it looks like to strategically broaden your “T”.

One of the big themes of this episode is Anthony’s journey becoming more technical and contributing to the Shopify code base so if you’re interested in building your ideas I think you’ll get a lot out of this one.

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

🤝 WITH RAYCAST

As if Raycast could get any better… they just released a feature that I’ve been wanting for years and it’s a 10/10 👀

It’s called Raycast Focus and it helps you stay in flow by blocking distracting apps and websites.

It’s goal based, works in your browser, and is always a keyboard shortcut away. And my favorite part is they have a little floating bar to give you a quick glance of how much time is left in your goal.

I was already paying for a different product and cancelled it yesterday because Raycast Focus is way better 😅

It’s just another reason why you should definitely download Raycast if you haven’t already 👇

🎓 KEY TAKEAWAYS

Inspiration

I’ll be honest… between getting sick, my daughter’s 1st birthday, and a million Inflight demos I don’t have my key takeaways ready today 🙈

So instead I just wanted to take a second to say thank you. Seriously.

I consider myself incredibly blessed to be able to call my hobbies “work”.

Every day at least one person sends me a kind DM talking about the impact that Dive has had on their career. But here’s the thing…

I’m learning more than anyone 😅

Every episode has something I can pull out. Like remember how last week Balint talked about how Craft built a design system that makes it easy for components to inherit a theme?

I liked the idea so much that I immediately explored what it would look like for the Inflight design language. Maybe the primary button hover state reveals a bit of the page theme?

And maybe that theme is dictated by the UI you upload?

I’m still figuring it out… the point is that as I enter 2025 I’m feeling incredibly grateful to be able to make a career all about learning from the people who inspire me most.

Thank you for joining me on that journey ❤️