Dive Club 🤿

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

This week's episode is with Kyle Zantos who is officially the first person to make three appearances on Dive Club 🫢 Seems like AI totally transforms the design process every few months so Kyle and I play a little ping pong and share some of the workflows that we've been having success with lately. This is easily one of the most practical episodes on the channel and hopefully you come out of here with some specific tactics you can add to your practice. Some highlights: - 5 use cases for designing with HTML docs - How you can build a UX writing environment - My new Supercut MCP workflow for prompting - How Kyle explores with node-based workflows - Strategies for brainstorming UX ideas with Fable - How to decide when to invest in a personal design tool - + a lot more - Terminal Graph app (by Caden Williams, Internet Development Studio, Pike Place, Seattle) - https://terminalgraph.com/ - Supercut MCP - https://supercut.ai/agents - Emil Kowalski - https://emilkowal.ski/ - Jakob Krehel - https://x.com/jakubkrehel - Jhey Tompkins - https://x.com/jh3yy?lang=en

Did you know Claude Design started off as a side project from one person? That's what this week's episode with Nate Parrott is all about. He shares the origin story along with a ton of examples of how he's using Claude Design in his own workflow. Some highlights: - Nate’s tips for getting the most out of Claude Design - Storytelling and communication tactics for designers - How Nate views the landscape for design tooling today - How “weatherman mode” turned into a killer voice mode - How Claude Design went from side project to launch in ~3 months - Examples of how Anthropic designers build artifacts across mediums - + a lot more Claude Design (Anthropic) - https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs

Charlie Deets ( https://x.com/charliedeets ) has designed Safari, Arc, and now Dia… Needless to say he knows a thing or two about designing browsers 😅 So in this week’s episode Charlie shares the principles that guide his design practice and takes us on a tour of some of the finer craft details inside Dia. Some highlights: - Charlie’s tips for presenting design work - How to protect your special sauce as a designer - What makes Apple’s decision-making culture unique - The differences between designing at Apple vs. The Browser Co. - Why Charlie is spending more time in Figma and less time prototyping with AI - + a lot more - Nate Parrott episode on Dive Club (first design hire at the Browser Company): https://www.dive.club/deep-dives/nate-parrott - Gabriel Valdivia episode on Dive Club: https://www.dive.club/deep-dives/gabe-valdivia-2

Pablo Stanley ( https://www.pablostanley.com/ ) has built as many creative tools as anyone in our industry. So in this episode he gives us a behind-the-scenes of his latest creations (including how he prototyped the all-new design mode in Vercel's v0). We go deep into: - The two types of design builders at Vercel - Pablo's approach to prototyping the new v0 - Behind the scenes of Pablo's custom design tools - What historic artists teach us about AI and creativity - How Pablo gets people excited about his ideas with Loom - The moment Pablo realized “I don’t design like this anymore” - Efecto: Pablo’s design tool with shaders, ASCII effects, and AI agents on the canvas ( https://efecto.app/ ) - hilos: Pablo’s team chat that ships code ( https://hilos.sh/ )

Jason Yuan ( https://x.com/jasonyuan ) has one of the most fascinating minds in design so naturally I like to keep tabs on what he is creating 😎 This episode is a deep dive into Jason Yuan’s creative process for Hivemind (his new social intelligence product). He screenshares dozens of unused concepts, novel art directions, brand identities, and everything in between. Some highlights: - The journey of designing Dot - Why Jason doesn’t believe in user research - The surprising sources Jason uses for design inspo - building a system to generate infinite branded images - How Jason thinks about art direction and world building - + a lot more

It kinda feels like how design operates at Anthropic is consistently 3-6 months ahead of the rest of the industry. As a result, Meaghan Choi ( https://x.com/meaghaneschoi ) (Design Lead for Claude Code) has quickly become a staple guest on this show. In today’s episode we go deep into her design process, how she uses the new Artifacts feature, how the shape of designer is evolving, and a lot more… Some highlights: - Designing experiences that don’t have UIs - How Meaghan collaborates with Claude Tag - What it’s like designing the Claude Code CLI - The shape of designers that will thrive in the coming years - Collaborating with the models for execution vs. brainstorming - + a lot more

Meng To ( https://x.com/MengTo?lang=en ) is one of the people I keep tabs on to see how he's evolving his workflow as he builds his ideas with AI. So I sat down with him to get a look into what his process looks like now… (spoiler: he’s moved everything to Codex) We do a ton of screen-sharing and go deep into his strategies for prompting, how to get better outputs from the models, and more 👇 Some highlights: Why Meng built his own local Notion tool Why Meng writes 0% of his own code now Strategies for design.md and agents.md files How Meng uses GPT Image 2 to brainstorm UI design How Meng’s workflow has evolved in the last 1.5 years a lot more

This week we are going behind the scenes of Config 2026 with Loredana Crisan (Figma’s Chief Design Officer) https://www.linkedin.com/in/loredanacrisan/ We talk about Figma’s vision for AI, why design is having “an identity crisis and a renaissance at the same time,” and what it means to use AI to express what’s already in your head (not outsource creativity to it). It’s a clarifying conversation about taste, tools, and the future of design 👇 Some highlights: - Designing systems not screens - Loredana’s mental model for AI as a tool - Building your own tools and mini apps in Figma - What Figma is learning in their own UX research - What types of designers Figma is hiring right now - + a lot more

What does it look like when a designer with zero technical background commits to shipping something real? That’s what this week’s episode with Brett Williams is all about. He gives us a behind-the-scenes of his journey building Gather including: Brett’s process for iterating on a design Brett’s new prototyping.md skill workflow How Brett maintains control while building with AI Brett’s strategy for adding sound design to Gather When Brett relies on Figma vs. explores directly in code a lot more

This week's episode is with Ron Goldin who has led design at Google, Shopify, UberEats, and in my opinion... he's the perfect example of what it looks like to thrive as a design leader in an AI world. So this week’s episode is a deep dive into his journey as a builder and it’s full of stories: Redesigning the Shopify checkout Ron’s unique research tactics for UberEats Building MTCHMKR from scratch in Lovable Navigating the job market as a design leader a lot more

A couple of weeks ago I recorded my first ever episode in front of a live audience (at Ramp HQ in NYC) 🗽 So today I’m excited to share the panel discussion recording with 3 incredible guests: Meaghan Choi who is the design lead for Claude Code and Cowork Dan Shipper who is the CEO of Every and one of my favorite thinkers when it comes to AI And Bradley Ziffer who is a design engineer at Ramp It’s a deep dive into AI design workflows at Anthropic, Ramp, and Every and I think you’ll enjoy it :) The event was hosted by Double Diamond and Ramp

⭐️ Check out Andy’s course - Craft at Speed https://join.dive.club/maven-aff-andy-madrick Use code DIVECLUB for 15% off Andy Madrick ( https://x.com/andymadrick ) is rethinking what it means to be a designer in 2026. While at Notion, he’s developed a workflow where he prototypes directly in code, ships frontend PRs, and uses AI tools like Cursor to own the final polish of user interfaces. In this episode we get a look into how he keeps all these things in motion and still designs with insane attention to detail. Some highlights: Building one of Notion’s most visible UIs Why recreating interactions teaches you craft Owning the last 5-20% of frontend polish work The “jelly bean factory” problem with AI output When to start in Figma vs. jumping straight to code How Andy creates prototypes that content teams can edit a lot more

Over the last few months, Tommy Geoco has went on site to study today’s top design teams (Vercel, Perplexity, Metalab, Ramp, etc.). So this week’s episode is a deep dive into all of the trends he’s seeing around AI workflows and where design is headed next. Some highlights: Why 59% of designers build their own tools Tommy’s current tool stack for AI design work What signals show AI fluency in job interviews Why internal tool building is the new career path Why now is the best time to grow in the design community How design workflows have become creative director roles a lot more Ben Blumenrose (mentioned as having good insights on design)

How do the best designers shape strategy at companies like Shopify? That’s what today’s episode with Design Director Katarina Batina is all about. Some highlights: Balancing metrics and vision Redesigning the shopping cart UX Taking a big bet on the shopping feed How product strategy has changed with AI How to get people excited about your ideas How to make sure you don't overcook your app a lot more Katarina mentioned John Rundle and Luke Dupont

Rafa Conde ( https://x.com/rafahari ) is a design engineer at Retro and one of the most creative designers I know. I still remember where I was when I first saw the video on his personal site ( https://rafa.design/ ) 😂 In this episode we unpack what it means to design experiences that bring delight :) Some highlights: - Finding ways to introduce delight - How to make users feel something - The power of humor in your design - How to lean into video as a superpower - Balancing accessibility and delightful UX - Behind the scenes of Rafa's side projects - + a lot more - Metal Gear Solid (PlayStation 1) — directed by Hideo Kojima, referenced for its fourth-wall-breaking design moments (Meryl’s codec frequency hidden on the game box; Psycho Mantis boss fight requiring the controller to be switched from port 1 to port 2) - Sunlit app — gyroscope-based app for tracking sun position and light direction, referenced as a recent example of surprising UI: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.lonepalm.coloringworld&pli=1 - Retro app — private social network for friends and family (what Instagram used to be); Rafa’s current employer: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/retro-photos-with-friends/id6443709020 - Splat app — Retro’s generative AI app for iPad/iPhone that turns photos of kids into coloring book pages: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/splat-magic-coloring-book/id6749165093 - Hand Mirror app — Rafa’s most popular side project, a menu bar camera app: [ https://handmirror.app](https://handmirror.app/) - Gabe Valdivia’s episode — early Dive Club episode (~ep. 30) where Gabe talked about designers needing to be like “little TikTok creators” inside their orgs: https://www.dive.club/deep-dives/gabe-valdivia - Final Cut Pro — Rafa’s video editing tool of choice: https://creatorstudio.apple.com/info/try?itscg=20201&itsct=acs-sem-187498456050-794866723417&pt=2003&ct=css-187498456050-794866723417