Chris Ashby

Dear Startups,

It doesn’t matter if your Figma is a mess. I’d be more worried if it wasn’t.

As designers the aim shouldn't just be to make more money.

The aim should be to deliver better results for your clients.

When you do that, making more money comes much easier.

One of the most powerful things you can do as a founder to amplify the impact of your designers is to give them ownership of a RESULT rather than a PROJECT.

This allows them to identify the best way to reach that result, and present ideas back to you that can often be better than your own.

Just a friendly reminder for all the founders and designers out there:

Success is not just your yearly revenue number.

Don’t compare yourself to others, and take time to reflect on what success means to you 😌

Take care of yourselves ❤️

Just got off a customer discovery call that was 🔥.

You can do all the online research you want. But nothing beats talking to an exact ICP match.

#buildinpublic

If you want to make an impact as a designer one thing you can do is go from a project to a partner mindset.

Approach work as a partner in its success rather than just as a project you need to finish.

This not only enables you to do better work, but also opens up future work opportunities.

Nice! I’ll check it out, thanks 🙌

Anyone got some good design newsletters they would recommend?

True, it’s a different tool for a different use case for sure.

As AI tools evolve and mature, we need to see education focusing more on teaching:

- developing taste in a field of expertise
- deep knowledge in a field of expertise
- application of critical and creative thinking

Soon the days of learning specific software or how to apply skills will be gone

For sure. I’m interested to see what a ‘job role’ looks like in this world where any functional task can be completed by AI and only creative and critical thinking remains.

Maybe roles will converge to less defined titles and we’ll work in smaller teams of more generalist problem solvers.

Fair play, it makes sense. The more experienced you get the more critical and creative problem solving becomes part of the role, and I think that’s so true with anything.

Job roles are just labels but ultimately a lot of high-level work is the same thing just in different applications.

If both design and development (and countless other roles) are just different forms of creative work, and the tools being built with AI allow us to more fluidly move between them, then the rigid processes we have traditionally followed such as the double diamond, etc, probably don’t apply any more.

Very true, I think the nature of creative work should be more flexible and less rigid then.

We think of design or development as following a process but a lot of the time it’s just a mess all over the place until we get to the best answer. And that’s what creativity is and always has been.

That’s fair, my thought maybe comes from an ill-informed perspective of development in that case! I feel like at a holistic level all of these roles are just ‘creativity’ just applied in different ways, right? And we’ll need different tools for different types of people and types of creative work

I don’t think AI coding tools like bolt.new will ever replace tools like Figma

Building/code is a naturally convergent activity

To build well you need to know what to build

Design is a naturally divergent activity

A lot of design is exploration to find the right ideas. Then you can build.

Thanks 🙏

Beginnings of a Design Theory starter pack go.bsky.app/RtJKdde

Reposted a couple of good ones I’ve found on my profile

Love this pack! Would love to be added 🙏

Huge influx of UX design people on here, which is awesome. I have a starter pack for active accounts if you want to follow them! go.bsky.app/2NKjZdu

(let me know if you want to be added)

Great pack! What does a guy need to do to get on the list? 😉

I've created a starter pack with people who design and build (digital) stuff.

There are talented people like @joeyabanks.bsky.social, @sarahedo.bsky.social, @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com, @fonsmans.com, @una.im, @rsms.me, @gavin.social, and many more.

Who else should I include?

Whenever something like the Jaguar rebrand happens, part of me always hopes that the people on the inside know something we don’t, and that somehow it’s wildly successful.

Jaguar is still ‘the old man’s car’ but I hope there’s something smarter than just repositioning to a younger demographic here…

a picture of a little girl and a man with the caption see i told you it was a superpower ALT: a picture of a little girl and a man with the caption see i told you it was a superpower

Design specialisms are dying. Design generalists are becoming more and more in demand.

Design across a wide range of disciplines to solve business problems is becoming the new designer superpower 🦸

What Chris said 👇🥳🎉

Never knew there were AI trolling accounts. A great use of carbon emissions I’m sure 🤣💀

Looking for the same thing here 👀

Fun stuff 🤣

a man says " you know what let 's just start over " while waving his hand Alt: a man says " you know what let 's just start over " while waving his hand

Bluesky’s success is testament to the power of starting from scratch even if it’s just with the same idea