Dive Club 🤿 Sneak peek of MDS’s creative process
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Dec 8, 2025 Matt Smith, known as MDS, is a designer and maker who shares fascinating insights into his creative process. He discusses the challenges of brand-driven design and balancing personal identity. Delving into his Figma explorations, Matt reveals his meticulous work on pixel icons and the emergence of the mosaic motif. He also covers the development of a bitmap icon builder and the integration of playful animations. Ultimately, Matt highlights the importance of curiosity, exploration, and thoughtful design choices in his work.
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Carve Time To Experiment
- Give yourself permission to explore ideas without shipping them immediately so you can discover surprising directions.
- Set limits (time or scope) to avoid endless tinkering and stay productive on real deliverables.
Tiny Ideas Unlock Big Directions
- Small, focused sparks (like pixel icons) can unlock much larger creative directions and tools.
- Follow curiosity: one tiny fun idea often unravels multiple valuable concepts.
Built A Mini Mosaic Icon Tool
- Matt built a custom 24×24 bitmap icon tool inside V0 to iterate pixel icons and export code snippets.
- He used that tool to generate many icons and then imported snippets into Figma and the site.