I’m Arun Venkatesan, and this is the arun.is newsletter, where I share my current obsessions, inspiration from around the web, behind-the-scenes content, and more. 

This week’s issue covers a few big updates:

• What's new
• New job
• InfiniteCanvas.tools

What's new 

After months of not posting to arun.is, it's great to be back at it again. The latest essay is a deep dive into Apple's new Metropolitan watch face. This one was quite tricky because this face isn't based on a single type of watch like the others I've written about.

In the design process, I had a bunch of fun leveraging the SF dynamic font and SVG morphing to create the animated feature image.

In addition to the new post, I've made some under-the-hood improvements to the site. During the redesign process earlier in the year, I left two technical challenges unfixed: the slow build process and outdated dependencies. While writing the last post, I peaked at my build times and they had ballooned to 80+ minutes. After some poking around, I found out the only solution was to spend a few hours upgrading dependencies, rewriting parts of the site, and then switching to Netlify. Now, builds take just over 20 minutes!

New job

After a multi-month-long job search and interview process, I decided to join Luminai. What attracted me to the company:

• Founder and early employees have grit
• Problem where design can provide leverage
• Deep focus on the customer
• Market with clear, growing needs
• Chance to yet again find product-market-fit

I just finished week three, one of which was spent in the woods on a retreat with the team. I couldn't be more pumped to jump back into company building.

InfiniteCanvas.tools

I've been hinting at this project for some time in this newsletter and I'm proud to announce it here. 

Alongside the team at Muse, I worked on a website to focus energy around the growing class of apps using infinite canvases. The project began as a vague idea and I had a lot of fun honing in on a direction. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

That's it for this issue. As always, this is my personal email, so feel free to respond directly.

Stay curious,
Arun Venkatesan