Any industry sites or blogs you read on a regular basis, or anything else you read for inspiration?
I hit up Designer News and Hacker News from time to time. I’m not a big news site/blog follower but I do like to either read books or go interact with tangible things to get inspired such as the Exploratorium or observing on nice bike ride around the city.
Here’s a few books that I’ve appreciated through the years:
There’s something new and amazing coming out every day. What’s something awesome you’ve seen recently that you’re dying to share, or something you’re excited about?
I would love to plug my own clothing line here, instead I’ll share a health app called Lark. Credit goes out to Matt Herzog, my boy at Coach.me, for telling me about it. It’s an awesome AI powered tracking app that hooks into iOS Health Kit that talks to you, asks you about things and tells you about your activity. The beauty of this app is that you’re not asked to enter in data in a sterile way. It feels like someone is on the other end giving you feedback about what you’re doing, without having any pressure to keep the conversation going. I love it.
I think voice and AI is the future, which only makes the movie Her that much more interesting as we are not that far off in how we interact with devices in the future.
Be ridiculously hungry. I got some of my gigs by just going out and meeting the right people, constantly being around them, and showing them how bad I wanted a gig.
What advice would you give to someone trying to break into the industry?
Be ridiculously hungry. I got some of my gigs by just going out and meeting the right people, constantly being around them, and showing them how bad I wanted a gig.
Think about the long run. It’s easy to get caught up in the startup shit storm, with news of rounds being raised, acquisitions occurring around you, and valuations that make unicorns look prevalent. Be focused on your path and your journey.
Being a great designer doesn’t mean pixel perfect designs. The goal of a designer is to help convey an idea, whether it’s eliciting an emotional response with an album cover or helping a consumer purchase the right type of milk. Therefore a designer should look at themselves as a problem solver that happens to do communicate in an artistic way.
What do you think is the future digital design?
Seamless integration across everything. Technology will learn about us, and will translate from our plates and refrigerators to our activity tracking apps and to the gym. Before you make that bad decision to get a liter of coke at the movies your apps will warn you or even stop you from purchasing them with your phone.
It’s going to be weird but we’ll adjust to driverless cars at some point as well.
I think as for workflows, design tools will be powerful enough to replace engineers. We are seeing this to some extent with Weebly and Squarespace empowering non technical crowds.
For designers we are seeing the first batch of these tools, such as Framer.js and Pixate. While they are deemed prototyping tools, we’ll begin to see a slew of production based tools that should lead to more interesting developments and experiences. We’re going to empower ourselves to solve bigger and more global problems.