Large organizations are a maze. At each turn, projects are met with the mangled overgrown walls of “who”, “where”, and “what”.

Who do I talk to about this?

Who has done this before?

Who is the expert?

Who do I have to talk to to get something done?

They’ve never been faster.

They’ve never had more UI design-centric features.

They’ve never enabled more effective collaboration.

But design tools are still holding us back. Our tools are still using methods, workflows, and features from graphic and visual design.

I get it though. A lot of UI designers come from that background. But we still talk about UI design like we’re making art. We use terms like “canvas” and “artboard” like what we’re doing will hang on the wall of a museum some day behind a red velvet rope.

But it won’t.

Heck, we’re lucky if anyone will even want…

I started this document a while ago for the design team I’m on at Asurion, but I thought it would be helpful for others on the interwebs as well. Nothing here is advanced or anything, but it’s a help repo if nothing else.

Have more to add? Have questions? Hit me up on the twitter.

• If coming from Sketch, you’ll be used to using groups. Try to not use groups. Use frames instead. Frames can function as masks, artboards, groups, or stacks. Groups in Figma are only used for categorization, and are not as functional as a Frame will be…

I design products, prototypes, and interactions in Webflow. It’s throw-away code (mostly). It’s clunky for lots of screens. It’s slow to get started. It’s not super collaborative. It’s expensive for teams. The code it generates doesn’t really translate to React, Angular, or Native Apps.

Yet I still can’t stop myself.

Other tools are better at visual design. I love Figma, Sketch is great, and still keep Illustrator and Photoshop on my laptop. Other tools are better(ish) at prototyping. …

This is a tough one to talk about, folks. This is not an aspirational post, or even one that will give advice on how to avoid my mistakes. I don’t think I can show exactly where I went wrong, or how I could have changed anything. There is no happy ending. Abandon hope all ye who scroll here.

Spoiler alert?

Now, if you’re still reading, than you, yes, you with the shining rectangle in front of your face, might just be in a similar dire straight. At your company, design is viewed as superficial in comparison to other, more technical…

If you’re a designer/car enthusiast this post is for you. I’ve broken down the details of the dashboard controls and interface of the Tesla Model 3, the first mass-market, touchscreen only electric car. The car’s UI design tells us a great deal about Tesla’s long term strategy, and their eyes toward a driverless future.

Here’s my Figma source file, and here’s a link to the prototype I made.

I’ve been following the saga of the Tesla Model 3 since the beginning. Having test driven a Model S last year, and fallen in love with how it drives and how keenly…

I’ve read a lot of comparison articles about the two, but I don’t think they really do Figma justice. Some of them briefly mention the team features, the browserness, the components, and constraints, but they don’t really focus on how they’re better than versions in Sketch. At best, they make it seem like both are about the same. The reason I’m writing this is because they’re not. This is a battle of nuance, and there’s VERY few things that Figma does worse than sketch. Even where those happen, they’re barely worse. But when they’re better… it’s not even close.

I…

All of my ideas are bad.

Every. Single. One. And yet, I still keep having them.

My brain is chalked full of inconsistencies, inaccuracies, & incomprehensible iterations of interactions. I stonewall good decisions and necessary processes, spout nonsensical thoughts while opining about the obscure, and pontificate about prognostications that will never come to pass.

If you think that designers possess some genetic predilection to being creative or finding intuition floating through the ether, you’re wrong. We’re just like everyone else out there. Creativity is not unique to creatives. …