Dive Club 🤿

Experienced designer Soren Iverson discusses his satirical designs, overcoming creative blocks, collaborating with Duolingo, growing your product sense, and the importance of consistency and building an online network.

Kathryn Gonzalez, DoorDash's first designer, shares insight on building a design language from scratch and designing a 3-sided marketplace. Topics include taking smaller steps when selling and scoping infrastructure work, the importance of understanding restaurant workflows, investing in design and infrastructure, embracing chaos in the early days, and future plans after DoorDash.

Niko Klein and Garrett Miller from Figma's prototyping team discuss the advanced prototyping release at Config 2023, collaboration with engineering, balancing power and simplicity in the expression builder, the development of the inline preview feature, using variables in prototyping, and the future of prototyping in Figma.

In this episode, Marco Cornacchia shares how he accidentally created a new trend of animated bento grids, the process of brand transformation through website design, showcasing design work on a portfolio website, the journey of unexpected success, the role of a designer at Diagram and the potential of AI in design, transitioning from a startup founder to a multi-billion dollar company, and practical tips for becoming an attractive first hire at a startup.

Three guest designers discuss strategies for professional growth as individual contributors. Topics covered include traits of top ICs, becoming a collaborative designer, leveraging communication strengths, growing as a product designer, focusing on problem-solving, and seeking feedback to grow as a designer.

James McDonald, creative designer and branding expert, discusses his creative process and reimagining the Clerk brand. Topics include establishing visual languages, incorporating motion in web design, exploring motifs, web design trends like perpetual motion buttons and giant CTAs, and the perfect amount of animation.

Brian Lovin, Founder of Campsite, discusses his journey as a two-time design founder and shares key insights from hundreds of interviews. Interesting topics include strategies for sharing work and getting feedback, the problems with post-COVID design process, and the three values he's instilling in the design culture at Campsite.

David Hoang, a product designer, discusses the future of the industry and how designers can prepare for it. Topics include AI in Figma, creating a more accessible web, the rise of the design founder, dynamic interfaces' impact on design systems, and the trending title 'software designer'.

Expert Erik Kennedy breaks down landing page design techniques on popular websites like Lemonade, Formcarry, Stella Domo, and Runway. Dive into creating top-notch hero sections, avoiding design mistakes, and showcasing testimonials effectively. Learn about the crucial first five seconds of a landing page, optimizing design with subtle animations, and enhancing layouts with typography and design elements.

Design team at Loom discusses their design process and takeaways from their recent AI launch, including prototyping, collaboration with cross-functional teams, using Figjam for feedback, developing a visual language for AI, documenting edge cases, and pivoting mid-project. They also explore interdisciplinary collaboration, designing upgrade flows, managing different user experiences, product usage and QA process, and future plans for the Loom product team.