Dive Club 🤿

This week's episode is with Derek Briggs and we're doing a deep dive into how he's raising the bar for craft as a principal designer at Shopify.

Some highlights:

- Scaling impact as a principal IC at Shopify

- Creating systems for greatness to happen

- Sweating the details on the http://shop.com carousel

- The custom easing system Derek built for Shopify

- Building custom data pipelines to uncover opportunities

- Why Derek thinks design engineer is the most important role today

- + a lot more

James McDonald is one of my favorite visual designers on the planet… but recently he took on his first ever contract where he’s responsible for both designing AND building his ideas from scratch.

So I used it as an excuse to get him back on the show to learn his tactics for creating stunning web designs with Claude.

It’s a ton of screen-sharing and a heck of a behind-the-scenes into his process.

Some highlights:

- When James reaches for Figma vs. Claude

- How James builds custom mini design tools

- How James finds visual motifs to build around

- James's strategies for animating designs with AI

- How James explored the visual language for Onlook

- + a lot more

This week's episode is a behind-the-scenes of the Inflight design journey. So I invited my co-founder Kyle Barber (designer at Tinder, Facebook, and Airchat) to share what it's actually like designing a startup today.

Inflight Pitch Episode (the SPC pitch we mention in the fundraising section)

I’ve seen a lot of custom AI tools on this show…

But this week’s episode with Myles Palmer (Design Director at Metalab) might take the cake.

Myles is the perfect archetype for what it looks like to be curious as a builder today and in this episode he gives us the ultimate behind-the-scenes look at the internal tooling system he built at Metalab.

This week's episode is with Rhiannon Bell (VP of UX for Google Search) and we're doing a deep dive into what it takes to design for AI at the scale of Google.

Some highlights:

- The design decisions that unlocked AI Mode

- What it takes to design at the scale of Google

- Designing dynamic component systems for AI

- How AI is shaping the practice of design at Google

- What we can learn from the top designers at Google

- What skills are becoming more valuable for designers

- + a lot more

This week's episode is with Danny Martinez and we're doing the ultimate deep dive into design hiring and what's happening in today's job market. Danny has the perfect vantage point as the CEO of Decimals—the platform that powers everything I do with the Dive Talent Network. So this episodes is about as practical as it gets.

- What companies want in a “design engineer”

- The biggest green and red flags from hiring managers

- How the best teams are iterating on the hiring process

- Examples of portfolios getting hired in the talent network

- Why brand design is the most difficult design role to hire for

- How to attract the most in-demand designers as a hiring manager

- The interaction design example hiring managers keep highlighting

- + a lot more

This week's episode is with Geoff Teehan—co-founder of the legendary design agency Teehan+Lax, longtime design leader at Facebook, and now Chief Design Officer at Lightspark.

Some highlights:

• How Geoff has navigated multiple cycles of change
• What the “parking spot” phase of software looks like
• Why Geoff plans to only hire 4 designers at Lightspark
• The design backstory behind Geoff’s viral Dialed game
• How Geoff brings consumer principles into enterprise design
• ＋ a lot more

This week's episode is with Nev Flynn and we're doing a deep dive into how he's bringing artful expression into enterprise design as the Head of Design at ElevenLabs.

Some highlights:

• Inside look at ElevenLabs internal brand tools
• Why Nev is prioritizing specialists over generalists
• What Nev looks for when evaluating a design portfolio
• How they built a shader orb system for 40 million voices
• What happens when non-designers are designing with AI
• How the team is making their design system agent-native

• a lot more

This week's episode is with Ed Bayes and we're doing a deep dive into how designers at OpenAI prototype the future of Codex/ChatGPT Work.

Some highlights:

- How prototyping at OpenAI has shifted recently

- The design challenges of bringing Codex into ChatGPT

- How Ed thinks about the spectrum of dynamic interfaces

- How Codex thought about their information architecture bets

- Why Ed structures design teams around personas not features

- The traits of the designers making the biggest impact at OpenAI

- + a lot more

The Bitter Lesson (http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html) — ML essay he referenced on scaffolding and model releases

This week’s episode is with Evil Rabbit who is the founding designer at Vercel and an iconic figure in the design community.

He shares his design journey (which started with his first job in Argentina at 12 years old)

So he’s going to share his journey in design and what it was like

Some highlights:

- What it takes to design an iconic brand identity

- How Vercel’s new Creative Studio team operates

- How he landed his first design job at 12 years old in Argentina

- Why Vercel is shifting from designing assets to building tools

- What he learned from working directly with Guillermo (Vercel CEO)

- + a lot more

Grok Bot has been going viral the last two weeks so this week's episode is a behind-the-scenes of the design journey with John Bai (who was the first NYC design hire at Cursor).

He screen-shares a ton of agent interaction pattern ideas as well as his unused concepts for the Grok Bot onboarding flow.

Some highlights:

- The prototype that led to the Grok Bot mascot

- Why John realized chat was still the right UX for AI

- How John uses agents to streamline his Figma work

- Comparing John's onboarding concepts for Grok Bot

- Why John still starts his design explorations in Figma

- What it took to turn AI agents into a consumer product

- Why no two designers at Cursor have the same tools/process

- + a lot more

Ridd mentioned Colin Dunn’s episode ("informed simplicity")

This week's episode is with Patrick Morgan and we're doing a deep dive into the prototyping environment he built for Sublime Security.

What started as an attempt to organize his team’s prototypes ended up becoming a new type of AI design tool. It's a great example of how designers can level up the team by building thoughtful internal tools.

Some highlights:

• How Patrick hacks low-fidelity styles with AI
• Patrick’s vision for agent-native design handoff
• How Patrick built a canvas to organize prototypes
• The design principles that guide how the agent prototypes
• How Patrick built a system to port over production frontend
• How the brand team uses Design Studio to build internal tools

• a lot more

This week's episode is with Kyle Zantos who is officially the first person to make three appearances on Dive Club 🫢

Seems like AI totally transforms the design process every few months so Kyle and I play a little ping pong and share some of the workflows that we've been having success with lately.

This is easily one of the most practical episodes on the channel and hopefully you come out of here with some specific tactics you can add to your practice.

Some highlights:

- 5 use cases for designing with HTML docs

- How you can build a UX writing environment

- My new Supercut MCP workflow for prompting

- How Kyle explores with node-based workflows

- Strategies for brainstorming UX ideas with Fable

- How to decide when to invest in a personal design tool

- + a lot more

- Terminal Graph app (by Caden Williams, Internet Development Studio, Pike Place, Seattle) -https://terminalgraph.com/

- Supercut MCP - https://supercut.ai/agents

- Emil Kowalski - https://emilkowal.ski/

- Jakob Krehel - https://x.com/jakubkrehel

- Jhey Tompkins - https://x.com/jh3yy?lang=en

Did you know Claude Design started off as a side project from one person?

That's what this week's episode with Nate Parrott is all about. He shares the origin story along with a ton of examples of how he's using Claude Design in his own workflow.

Some highlights:

- Nate’s tips for getting the most out of Claude Design

- Storytelling and communication tactics for designers

- How Nate views the landscape for design tooling today

- How “weatherman mode” turned into a killer voice mode

- How Claude Design went from side project to launch in ~3 months

- Examples of how Anthropic designers build artifacts across mediums

- + a lot more

Claude Design (Anthropic) - https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs

Charlie Deets (https://x.com/charliedeets) has designed Safari, Arc, and now Dia…

Needless to say he knows a thing or two about designing browsers 😅

So in this week’s episode Charlie shares the principles that guide his design practice and takes us on a tour of some of the finer craft details inside Dia.

Some highlights:

- Charlie’s tips for presenting design work

- How to protect your special sauce as a designer

- What makes Apple’s decision-making culture unique

- The differences between designing at Apple vs. The Browser Co.

- Why Charlie is spending more time in Figma and less time prototyping with AI

- + a lot more

- Nate Parrott episode on Dive Club (first design hire at the Browser Company): https://www.dive.club/deep-dives/nate-parrott

- Gabriel Valdivia episode on Dive Club: https://www.dive.club/deep-dives/gabe-valdivia-2

Pablo Stanley (https://www.pablostanley.com/) has built as many creative tools as anyone in our industry.

So in this episode he gives us a behind-the-scenes of his latest creations (including how he prototyped the all-new design mode in Vercel's v0).

We go deep into:

- The two types of design builders at Vercel

- Pablo's approach to prototyping the new v0

- Behind the scenes of Pablo's custom design tools

- What historic artists teach us about AI and creativity

- How Pablo gets people excited about his ideas with Loom

- The moment Pablo realized “I don’t design like this anymore”

- Efecto: Pablo’s design tool with shaders, ASCII effects, and AI agents on the canvas (https://efecto.app/)

- hilos: Pablo’s team chat that ships code (https://hilos.sh/)

Jason Yuan (https://x.com/jasonyuan) has one of the most fascinating minds in design so naturally I like to keep tabs on what he is creating 😎

This episode is a deep dive into Jason Yuan’s creative process for Hivemind (his new social intelligence product).

He screenshares dozens of unused concepts, novel art directions, brand identities, and everything in between.

Some highlights:

- The journey of designing Dot

- Why Jason doesn’t believe in user research

- The surprising sources Jason uses for design inspo

- building a system to generate infinite branded images

- How Jason thinks about art direction and world building

- + a lot more

It kinda feels like how design operates at Anthropic is consistently 3-6 months ahead of the rest of the industry.

As a result, Meaghan Choi (https://x.com/meaghaneschoi) (Design Lead for Claude Code) has quickly become a staple guest on this show.

In today’s episode we go deep into her design process, how she uses the new Artifacts feature, how the shape of designer is evolving, and a lot more…

Some highlights:

- Designing experiences that don’t have UIs

- How Meaghan collaborates with Claude Tag

- What it’s like designing the Claude Code CLI

- The shape of designers that will thrive in the coming years

- Collaborating with the models for execution vs. brainstorming

- + a lot more

Meng To (https://x.com/MengTo?lang=en) is one of the people I keep tabs on to see how he's evolving his workflow as he builds his ideas with AI.

So I sat down with him to get a look into what his process looks like now… (spoiler: he’s moved everything to Codex)

We do a ton of screen-sharing and go deep into his strategies for prompting, how to get better outputs from the models, and more 👇

Some highlights:

• Why Meng built his own local Notion tool
• Why Meng writes 0% of his own code now
• Strategies for http://design.md and http://agents.md files
• How Meng uses GPT Image 2 to brainstorm UI design
• How Meng’s workflow has evolved in the last 1.5 years

• a lot more

This week we are going behind the scenes of Config 2026 with Loredana Crisan (Figma’s Chief Design Officer) https://www.linkedin.com/in/loredanacrisan/

We talk about Figma’s vision for AI, why design is having “an identity crisis and a renaissance at the same time,” and what it means to use AI to express what’s already in your head (not outsource creativity to it).

It’s a clarifying conversation about taste, tools, and the future of design 👇

Some highlights:

- Designing systems not screens

- Loredana’s mental model for AI as a tool

- Building your own tools and mini apps in Figma

- What Figma is learning in their own UX research

- What types of designers Figma is hiring right now

- + a lot more