Dive Club 🤿

This week's episode is with Tom Johnson (https://x.com/tomjohndesign) (staff designer at Vercel) who just released one of the coolest personal sites (https://www.tomjohn.design/) I've ever seen.
So he's going to give us a behind the scenes of his portfolio journey that led him to create a fully simulated world generator for his camper travels. It might be the most robust set of tooling I’ve ever seen a designer create on this show. And that sparks a lot of questions about what it really means to be a designer these days.
Some highlights:
- How Tom’s workflow has evolved as a builder
- How Tom accidentally turned his portfolio into a game
- Why Tom built a skill to show his prompts in case studies
- How experimenting with 3D unlocked new possibilities as a designer
- + a lot more
- Tom's portfolio (https://www.tomjohn.design/)
- White Knuckle case study (https://www.tomjohn.design/content/whiteknuckle)
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Chapters
0:00 Intro
4:28 How it started: case study
9:13 What the models were good (and bad) at
16:03 How working in 3D levels Tom up as a designer
17:08 White Knuckle
20:11 How Tom build White Knuckle
25:16 How this is shaping his ientity as a designer
26:10 Lost breadcrumbs / Gretel
26:54 Adding prompts to your case studies
30:41 Building a custom video tool for shorts
33:14 Noticing what's wrong
36:09 How our design workflows are changing
43:32 Identity when AI makes
50:02 Prompts in public

This week's episode is with Derek Briggs and we're doing a deep dive into how he's raising the bar for craft as a principal designer at Shopify.
Some highlights:
- Scaling impact as a principal IC at Shopify
- Creating systems for greatness to happen
- Sweating the details on the shop.com carousel
- The custom easing system Derek built for Shopify
- Building custom data pipelines to uncover opportunities
- Why Derek thinks design engineer is the most important role today
- + a lot more

James McDonald is one of my favorite visual designers on the planet… but recently he took on his first ever contract where he’s responsible for both designing AND building his ideas from scratch.
So I used it as an excuse to get him back on the show to learn his tactics for creating stunning web designs with Claude.
It’s a ton of screen-sharing and a heck of a behind-the-scenes into his process.
Some highlights:
- When James reaches for Figma vs. Claude
- How James builds custom mini design tools
- How James finds visual motifs to build around
- James's strategies for animating designs with AI
- How James explored the visual language for Onlook
- + a lot more

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.