The Exchanges

Q So it's interesting. You're, you're designing from your head, you know, your mind. So do you not go and look for inspiration before you start pushing pixels?

A Great question. So I actually look for inspiration constantly. I never even, I never turn it off basically. So like I have a notion database and I can even give you like a YouTube link if you want to point people that way that shows how it's built. But I'm constantly, constantly, constantly dumping things in there and categorizing them and creating all these different views. Like I'm a total nerd about it. And so I have, I, you know, I don't know if you ever talked to like David Perel. He has this idea of like writing from abundance. Like you don't like go look for notes and start from the blank page. You're like constantly contributing to this database of ideas. That's kind of the way I think about it too. We're like a lot of these in my head, but only because I've saved stuff before. And if I really actually don't have ideas, my first step is I always open up my notion and I just start copying images and pasting them. And I mean, I might even be able to find, like, if we go I bet I have pages with examples. See, look, this is where I was designing the blog page. The first thing I did was like, I just went into my notion. I was like, all right, what's interesting. Paste it in. And I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. And then I'll just zoom in and like recreate a little part of that. And maybe I'll use it in a different way or something like that. But my, my very first step, if I…

AI assessment note: “I actually look for inspiration constantly. I never even, I never turn it off basically.”

Q you know, maybe it makes more sense to use something like Lucid, um, or, you know, that is, that is more friendly to CSS, for example. Like, are you thinking, are you thinking, my question is this, are you thinking about how do I make a beautiful page, or am I thinking how do I make a beautiful page that's going to connect easily with Framer or something like that?

A Great question. I'm pretty much always thinking about how it's going to be built with the disclaimer being like, I'm actually like a little bit more of a technically minded designer. Like I'm not an artist. I can't draw anything. I don't even have a, I don't even sketch things like just that part doesn't come natural to me, but I know how front end works. And so a lot of the decisions, especially as I'm fine tuning things, I'm going to use those best practices, and honestly, if you're building in Figma using auto layout, it almost just comes out of the box a little bit free, because if you can build something in auto layout, that means that it's very easy to build in Flexbox. That doesn't mean that you necessarily have to, like, you can get away with it, but It's going to like, if you don't use auto layout and you're just randomly positioning things in the frame, that's effectively the equivalent of just absolutely positioning something in CSS, which like, yeah, it's, it's, it's possible, but it's not great. It's not, it's always, you, you probably want to avoid that. Um, So even something like this, so like I have a frame, I'm going to hit shift a to turn, like if we zoom in here, by the way, hitting enter allows you to drill in, in the canvas and then shift enter is moving back up. That's like how I traverse the layer tree really, really great way to move more quickly, basica…

AI assessment note: “I'm pretty much always thinking about how it's going to be built”

Q using Figma wrong, but I've, I only have a few, a couple, a couple of plugins I'm using. When I'm watching you on Figma, it seems like you have a host of, of plugins that you're using. Um, what's your recommendation to people? How many plugins and, and, and could you rattle off kind of like the ones that you use the most that people should, should, should be using?

A So honestly, I actually feel like I use way less plugins than a lot of people. There are people that use a lot of plugins. I typically like plugins for really just two different buckets of workflows. One is visual effects, like that noise and texture, or like the smooth shadow, just like things that would be super tedious, or maybe not even like within my skillset to make, like I'm not going to make animations, for instance, that's one bucket. And honestly, Noise and texture and smooth shadow. That's pretty much it in that bucket. That's pretty much it. The other is more like workflows. And what I just showed you is like how I use the destroyer. And this is like what all my Figma files look like, by the way, is just like, you can see the design evolving, going left to right. And then I have the source of truth here that is possible through the destroyer plugin. The other one that I use All the time is a content reel, which is really, really nice. So one bucket that I'm like using all the time is just like, you want to get a bunch of related content into a page. Maybe it's populating a table. Maybe it's filling a design with images and something that is really helpful in that world is, is this kind of this combo that I use, which is twofold. One is you want to select maybe like all of the images. For instance, and I want to change the headshots across like a giant array of compo…

AI assessment note: “I typically like plugins for really just two different buckets of workflows.”