The personal portfolio site for software designer Jonas Downey.
Hello friend! I've been reading your posts on the Internet lately, and I noticed you're using a lot of AI. At first I wasn't certain, and I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt. But then, a couple of paragraphs in, after all the "load-bearings" and the em dashes and the "honest truths" and the "it's reals" — I just couldn't take it anymore. Your warmed-over AI writing is a pile of horseshit.…
Codex's self portrait. I’m writing this post because I want to say out loud what a lot of people are feeling: Working in tech during the AI transition is tough as hell. There are pressures from all sides. Here are just a few of them: Layoffs across the industry, especially reductions in management and support roles, as executives rush to replace human productivity with AI. Mandates to learn and…
I've been designing software professionally for over 15 years, and for almost all of those years, I did it exactly the wrong way. In 2013, I created prototypes in Rails to evaluate if we were making good decisions. In 2014, I made hand-coded websites since they were simple to ship and maintain. In 2016, I co-built a weather web app that eventually became a proper iOS app for the fun of it. In…
On the Figma blog: seven tips for building a team that's resilient to change.
A while ago I watched this fireside chat with Jony Ive and Patrick Collision at Stripe Sessions. Jony reflected on his experience as a college student, interacting with the original Macintosh for the first time. His feelings upon using the machine were exactly the same as mine: I need to pursue this same level of playfulness and care in my own work. Of course, Jony went on to run design at Apple…
For whatever reason that probably isn't totally healthy, I love short-form text social platforms. The mix of humor, sincerity, shitposting, and real time information is a hot mess on the best of days, but all of that frenetic unfiltered energy has an unmistakable allure. It's like being in a panopticon of bored amateur poets. Over the years, these platforms have helped me build connections and…
Recently a designer reached out and asked this: I love the visual and interaction design choices I have seen with your work. It honestly has a feeling that I can't find in other tools/sites out there. As it relates to your visual design choices (like the principles on your site "build weird things"), what has helped you get into that creative space where you feel free to experiment visually? This…
silly illustration by an AI robot Lately I’ve seen some advice on social media about design case studies. People often recommend using a formula that’s likely to satisfy most hiring managers, like this: Pick a project you worked on, and state the problem you were solving. Explain how you arrived at that problem. Explain how you tried to solve it. Explain why your eventual solution was the best.…
I don’t normally write year in review posts, but I want to start 2024 off right, so I’m doing this to close a few chapters and start some new ones. Highlights A great year at Figma Following my unexpected exits from Basecamp and Twitter in 2021 and 2022, I was adrift about work, and uncertain whether I still had the energy to care about tech anymore. My professional identity was so tied up with…
Last week, an internal memo from Shopify's CEO leaked, stating that the company is tightening its policy about employee side projects. Here's a blurb from the memo , written by Tobi Lütke: Shopify is like a professional sports team that requires our unshared attention. When you're at Shopify, we are building the entrepreneurship company for millions of entrepreneurs around the world, and that is…
Well, it happened. Elon took over Twitter, blew it up repeatedly through a series of befuddling product changes and self-owns, and now we have at least 3 other Twitters vying for attention. The newest entrant, Threads , has come bursting out of the gate with massive user numbers and a strong dose of millennial energy. Despite this (or maybe because of it) Threads feels like the first actually…
In 2022, my kid and I challenged each other to write a haiku every day. It was difficult to compose and share all these poems, so we also started making an app to help us write together. We'll release the app later this year (hopefully!) Throughout the process we gained a new appreciation for poetry and the forced economy of three lines of text. It was fun to surprise each other with strange words…
There have been approximately infinity thinkpieces about Twitter lately, so I'm hesitant to write another. But there is one aspect of this whole circus that I felt was worth calling out. Some people have been comparing Elon Musk's corporate takeover and internal upheaval with Steve Jobs' legendary return to Apple in the late 90s. Maybe if you squint hard enough and suspend all reasonable doubt you…
Right now I'm feeling raw about the big changes at Twitter , and the implications for so many wonderful, dedicated people I worked with. They've been forced to figure out new life plans due to many factors out of their control. I've been down this road before, and struggled mightily to get through it, so I'm sharing what I experienced in case it helps anyone feel a little less alone processing the…
This year I've been coaching some designer friends and hearing about their struggles and career growth. Aside from "should I code?" the second-most common question is "should I move into management?" There isn't an easy answer, but here are some tips to help you figure it out. Are you able to stay balanced in trying times? When you're a manager, dealing with tumultuous times is a core part of the…
When you’re working on a creative problem, there are two major mental modes you might find yourself working in without consciously realizing it. Expansive mode. This is usually what happens at the start of a project when you’re not exactly sure which direction to go. You expand your options by exploring a lot of possibilities, then see where those paths take you next. Reductive mode. This happens…
Recently I asked my design pals on Twitter about their background in psychology, sociology, or human-computer interaction. Of course you can’t draw scientific conclusions from social media polls, but the results roughly matched what I would have guessed based on my own experience. Only about 20% of designers had formal training in these areas, with most identifying as self-taught. Maybe it’s just…
I entered my software design career with a hybrid computer science and art background, so my creative process has always been programmatic. For nearly 20 years my medium of choice was the web, where I taught myself to to build my own stuff, first with plain HTML, then with CSS, then PHP, JavaScript, Rails, and all sorts of other tools along the way. Later on I dipped into building native apps with…
Earlier this year I unexpectedly left a job I’d been doing for a long time, and I learned a lot from that experience. One of the sillier but important lessons is that mixing my work and personal data on the same computer was an absolutely terrible idea. Obviously there are tons of advantages to just using one computer. One device is much simpler, and everything is always right where you need it.…
Greetings, fellow design job seeker! If you're feeling rusty or uncertain about how to succeed in finding a new role, this is a writeup for you. A few months ago I left my job of almost 10 years, and landed rather dramatically into a job market that I didn't know how to navigate. To figure it out, I interviewed with a lot of companies and learned on the fly. Having gone through all of that, I came…
Recently Twitter launched a nice design refresh, and one of the changes was particularly controversial. The Follow button's styling was visually reversed from its previous design: I’m convinced this was a mistake because I don’t think anyone would intentionally do something like this. It’s like turning on the lights when they are off. Obviously makes no sense. I bet it will be fixed ASAP. [Before…
I've been running the iOS 15 beta releases on my iPhone, and the most noticeable change is a major redesign of the core UI in Safari. Apple has been iterating on this in the open, so I thought it might be fun to write up a little critique, as if I was working on this feature and trying to decide if it's production-ready or not. Note: this post is about iOS 15 beta 4 . It will probably be out of…
I believe that any creative pursuit—whether it’s art, design, music, poetry, or whatever else—requires willful vulnerability. Interrogating the world around you, facing things you’re scared of, learning about other people’s struggles, internalizing all of that, digging deep within yourself, and using your experience and compassion to make something positive. This means lowering your defenses.…
Is there any project worse than making a website for yourself? That wasn't a rhetorical question. The answer is NO, there is almost nothing worse. The project requirements are garbage and the client nitpicks everything. In my many years of working on the web, I’ve created dozens of personal sites, ranging from a basic single page to an exhaustive library of all my past creative work. And I was…
The past couple of weeks have been tough, for no specific reason. I've been generally unfocused and lacking confidence. I haven't been as productive as usual, and I don't have an exact explanation for it. For me, this sort of thing is cyclical. I've been through it enough to recognize when it's happening. Sometimes I'm riding high and cranking stuff out, and other times I'm very much not. I know…
This is grandpa's orchid. Grandpa was an avid gardener, and he kept a batch of lively orchids in his basement. When he passed away a few years ago, most of them didn't survive in his absence. We retrieved this one, and now we take care of it. Software is a bit like this house plant: its wellbeing depends on the folks who constantly tend it. Without us around, it gradually erodes. The app Weather…
Lately I've been thinking a lot about how products get started. As a designer, there's one important choice you have to make at the beginning of a project, which sets the stage for every other decision you'll ever make… 💰💰💰 How you'll make money. 💰💰💰 That's it. That's the only thing that matters. Your entire future, and every single one of your design choices, will be forever defined by this…
Yesterday I got an email asking how we came up with simple designs for Basecamp and HEY, so I thought I’d share the answer here. At a high level it boils down to a handful of foundational principles that affect the decisions we made: Always choosing clarity over being slick or fancy. We aim to make the UI totally obvious and self explanatory, by keeping individual screens pared down to the…
@ Quartz
A few years ago I helped design the search feature for Basecamp. We’d invented a unique Mad Libs-style interface, and I was rather fond of how it turned out. About six months later, other folks at the company had a new idea for the search UI, and they replaced my design with a completely different version. The new version was much faster to use, and worked better in every way, but I was still…
Everybody knows that perfect is the enemy of good , but it’s one of those tenets that’s easy to say and hard to live by. When you’re working on a creative project, there’s almost always something you wanted to do better, or some little detail that didn’t quite live up to your standards. That can be tough to accept. This is why thoughtful project scoping and timeboxing is so important: if you don’t…
One of the things I love about flexible remote work is the freedom to step away from something whenever I need to. Right now I’m exploring designs for a new product idea. R&D work like this depends on having good mental and emotional energy. Sometimes you have it, sometimes you don’t. When you’re energetic and motivated, great things happen spontaneously, in unpredictable bursts of inspiration.…
The Book of Life (1898) There’s a term we use in software design called the happy path . It describes a best-case scenario, in which customers use a product exactly as intended, without bumping into any edge cases or uncommon problems. This includes the interface you see when you sign up, setup steps you have to complete, and so on. For software designers, a happy path is also an extremely…
…and it doesn't have to be this way.
If you search the Internet to learn about A/B testing , you’ll find scads of articles bursting with tips for cranking your business performance into the stratosphere. You’ll get blazing hot secrets like… BOOST YOUR CONVERSION RATE BY 300% WITH THIS TINY TWEAK and… DESTROY YOUR COMPETITION USING A STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT SHADE OF BLUE …and it just keeps going like that, into an overenthusiastic…
Illustration via The British Library “How much time left until I’m dead?” I try not to think about that question, but yet, it’s always there, hidden away in my mind’s attic, nestled alongside all the other intentionally suppressed memories, which, despite my best efforts to keep them stowed, tend to stubbornly reappear in my subconscious against my will. I’d better get to work. Work staves off my…
Synoptic Table of Physiognomic Traits Recently I took a monthlong sabbatical from my job as a product designer. When you take 30 days away from work, you have a lot of time and headspace that’s normally used up. Inevitably you start to reflect on your life. And so, I pondered what the hell I’m doing with mine. What does it mean to be a software designer in 2018, compared to when I first began my…
Photo by Sanwal Deen Hey there, tech designer person. Have you noticed the increasing number of vague specializations we’ve invented for ourselves? Here are a few I grabbed from a job board 10 minutes ago. UX Designer UX/UI Designer UI Designer Graphic Designer (UX & UI focus) Visual Designer Digital Designer Product Designer Presentation Designer Front End Designer Web Designer Bleh. What’s the…
Software designers and developers are all about NEW . We like to experiment with far-out ideas and make shiny things. Our livelihood depends on it. We’re so addicted to NEW that sometimes it clouds our judgment. We love NEW and everyone else should too, so we force heavy-handed product changes onto our customers without much explanation. And if they didn’t want that? Or if they got needlessly…
A few tips to help your app co-exist on iOS and Android.
The Convair Model 118 Flying Car . Apple announced iPhone 7 this week, and without missing a beat, the tech press decried it as dull . Tech pundits seem to have this same argument cued up every time Apple launches something that’s not game-changing innovation . I think they’re totally missing the point. There are two ways to update an existing product: Make a brand new version that’s unlike…
One of the things I love about making software is that it’s a deeply mental exercise, chock full of heady processes, abstractions, and interconnected pathways. You can fill your brain with the practical nuts and bolts side of it—research, strategy, prototyping, programming, UI, operations, and more. Lots more. And if that’s not enough? Indulge yourself in metrics and performance. Every last detail…
Why perfection and speed may not matter as much as you think.
When you have a newborn baby, your home life descends into temporary chaos. There’s crying and messes and strange liquids everywhere, plus doctor appointments, grocery store runs, and endless laundry. And that’s not all: new moms need lots of support and ample time to recover . But since Americans keep prioritizing EXTREME PRODUCTIVITY and individualism over everything else, most working parents…
This week, Instagram updated their logo, and right on cue, the Internet exploded about it. This is not a post about that. Rather, this is a post about how we all critique design in public. For example, this tweet got a lot of traction, especially from designy people: Behind the scenes on the new Instagram logo pic.twitter.com/WPld3t0rJF — Cody Sanfilippo (@codysanfilippo) May 11, 2016 And…
Illustration by Nate Otto Beautiful. Fresh. Clean. Simple. Minimal. These words have been dominating design discourse for a while now. In case you’ve managed to miss them, check out this review of portfolio websites over on Creativebloq. The word beautiful is used 6 times, and simple 11 times. In one article. Designers use these words to describe their values, goals, and results. They plaster…
Getting a side project done— eventually .
One of my favorite career stories is this one from Michael Beirut: I designed little magazines when I was in the third and fourth grades, and I made logos for my friends’ bands when I was in the seventh grade. I could do hand lettering, and if someone wanted an animal in the logo, I could do that; if someone needed a poster for the school play, I could do that, too. All along, I had no idea that…
This year, 2015, marked the 20th anniversary of the first time I stuck some HTML on a server and put it out for the world to see. (Sorry about that one, world.) Twenty years! Twenty years is a long time to do anything, especially in tech. Given how fast things churn, it’s rather unbelievable that I’m still gainfully employed to write HTML for anything at all in 2015. I’ve been reflecting on this…
Delight is a word interaction designers have been throwing around for the past couple of years. Some people think it’s an overblown buzzword, while others believe it’s a subject worthy of an entire conference. One part of “designing delight” is about turning otherwise mundane tasks into funny or interesting moments. On the UI side, this might include adding thoughtful animations, cutesy or clever…