Dive Club 🤿

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