Jeff is a product design leader, coder, writer, and letterer. He writes about design, books, technology, creativity, and any other topics that interest him.
My friend Titus reached out a while back to do some brand work for his new venture, Square in a Circle . He’s branching out into life coaching and voiceovers, and needed an identity that could hold all of that together. Right away he had a strong reference point: the lyric “Square in a Circle” from the Seal song Whirlpool . The line resonated with him because it captures this…
The idea of AI replacing product designers isn’t scaring me. It’s actually having the opposite effect: I’m embracing it. Take my job AI! I’m done with it! What follows is a mix of thoughts of where I’m at personally in my career, and observations on industry trends. On the personal side, I’ve become more and more disillusioned with product design. It can be a shit role where you’re stuck between…
This image tells the story: the uptick in commits is me designing and shipping with Claude Code. I’m using it daily. Likewise, my usage of Figma has fallen significantly. Claude Code lets me describe the intended user experience — the use cases, expected behavior, how a feature might evolve — and it figures out how to build it. This is basically how I’ve always worked with engineers.…
I used to spend weeks, sometimes months, writing case studies. Going through notes, screenshots, Figma files, project docs—trying to find a narrative thread and pull together something coherent. Then the writing and editing and refining and eventually publishing something that’s probably too long anyway and that hardly anyone reads in full. In fairness, I spent too much time on it.…
Let’s start with some stats: I read 13 books this year, which is 2 fewer than last year. 4 of those were fiction, which is 1 higher than last year! Not having a behemoth like Infinite Jest backing everything up helped me knock down 33% more fiction books. As usual, Art/Design/Creativity books dominated my mindshare (7 in total). As usual, you can view my entire list and what I’m…
Earlier this year I read The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control by Katherine Morgan Schafler and really really enjoyed it. The quick pitch is that it’s a book to help perfectionists embrace their perfectionism as a strength, rather than “tamp down” those tendencies as society would have us do. There are, of course, negative ways perfectionism can show up, like…