🤿 favorite designer of 2024

Sam Peitz quickly became my favorite designer to follow in 2024.

He’s sharing some of the most creative explorations in the whole design community right now so if you’re not familiar then check out his experiments like TextOS, his scribble running app, and assorted letter prototypes.

So this week’s episode is a deep dive into his creative process and a look at the intersection of art and product design. We talk about:

• Sam’s go-to source of design inspiration

• The power of setting the right constraints

• What Sam has learned about building with v0

• How to think creatively and design out of the box

• How to position yourself for the type of work you want to do

• a lot more

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

🤝 WITH DESSN

There’s a lot of talk on this show about quality and velocity and the biggest hack I’ve seen is having designers who can ship directly to production… (literally interviewed someone from Shopify yesterday who said just that)

And now Dessn is making this possible for designers everywhere without having to write any code.

Everyone is talking about how LLMs can 10x developers…

But Dessn is laser focused on how LLMs can 10x designers 🚀

It’s one of the tools I’m most excited about right now and they’re giving early access to the Dive community 👇

🎓 KEY TAKEAWAYS

How to build your ideas with AI tools

1 — Acting on inspiration

Like Jason Yuan, the majority of Sam’s design process happens in his head (he says sometimes 90% or more).

As a result he might only spend ~40 minutes in Figma before publishing a viral concept.

His #1 piece of advice is you have to act immediately once you finally “see” the design (don’t add it to your notes app or a product backlog).

Because the longer you wait the more the surface area of the idea expands. All of a sudden you’re strategizing entry points instead of simply making the thing in your mind’s eye.

You can’t wait for your logical brain to kick into gear.

2 — Software as artistic expressions

Software has historically been expensive. If you’re going to invest the time to build something then it better make money and have the potential to scale.

It didn’t take long for the economic incentives of software to cap artistic expression.

But what happens when people like Sam can spend a single afternoon creating an app that is designed specifically for his grandma?

As code becomes cheaper and easier to write, an explosion of niche software products is imminent. Many of these products will tap into a level of human expression that simply doesn’t exist in our scale-dictated world.

And this is only the beginning…

On the heels of AI is a new spatial medium. What does an AR art museum built entirely out of dynamic shaders look like?

I don’t know… but I’m excited to live in a world where the lines between art and product design begin to blur.

3 — Positioning yourself in today’s market

Sam spent many years working in brand design and built an impressive portfolio that showcases his visual skills.

But you can’t find it anywhere 🤔

That’s because Sam is intentional about only sharing the kind of work that he wants to get hired to create. And it’s working! He’s received multiple high profile product design offers from his Twitter profile (and he only started in March).

His story reminds me of an inflection point in my own journey that I wanted to share with you today :)

As soon as I graduated college I knew that I wanted to work in education. So one afternoon I mocked up some ideas for a product that helps parents with homeschooling.

Months later someone found those designs on Dribble and I received an offer from Bootcamp to lead design on a new product suite. I kinda hate science tbh but it got my foot in the door! And eventually that experience helped me land the role as the founding designer at Maven.

That little set of three mockups changed everything for me :)

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

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