What’s on our mind?

Build your own design curriculum without going to design school.

I’m a student at Stanford and a product design intern at Facebook, where I help design products for billions of people around the world. But I’m not studying design—I spend my time in school taking classes on philosophy, computer science, psychology, and linguistics. Instead, most of what I know about product design comes from independent learning and on-the-job experience.
For those who didn’t have the fortune of going through a design program, the path to...

“How do I get better at visual design?”

This question comes up a lot. I coach and mentor a lot of students on product design by tutoring for the Academy of Art in San Francisco, reviewing for AIGA’s portfolio reviews, hosting interns at Facebook and so on.

There’s a bridge from a student’s perspective to a professional’s perspective. For most, it’s guaranteed to be a blend of fear and excitement and curiosity, peppered with a lot...

Why it takes organization and process to get things done as a designer.

The trouble with essays about design process is that they read like some sanctimonious twit regaling you with stories about their rosy life. I appreciate that you don’t want to hear that it takes organization to get things done. It’s all totally obvious, yet surprisingly hard to do day-to-day when you’d rather be learning Framer and coding a prototype. So I’ll try to keep this rooted in my direct experience.

The problem with simplicity...

Spoiler alert: you're almost NEVER the only person who doesn’t understand something complex.

About four years ago, I decided to take the plunge and join the Facebook Ads & Pages group to help build a design team for this crucial area of the business. I knew it was one of the biggest design opportunities in the industry, and I was excited to learn something new.

Of everything I believe, this goes deepest to my core: we can all be better. And so we should be.

I sometimes joke that everything I have ever learned about design, I learned from my first job. Nowadays, this first job has extended to nearly ten years, its soul consistent even as its shape unfurls in depths and colors I could never have imagined in the beginning.

Though I’ve always been an obsessive journaler, this year, I am particularly reflective...

Critique is an important part of any design process. Here’s how my team at Facebook does it.

Whether you work within a diverse team or independently. The feedback you get through a formal critique can help get you outside your own head in order to make better decisions, overcome obstacles, and strengthen your craft.

What’s the difference between a good researcher and a great researcher?

“Move Fast” is one of Facebook’s best known mottos, which can be seen on posters that decorate the walls of our offices around the world. Although the philosophy of Moving Fast allows Facebook to design and improve products for people all over the world, every once in a while it’s important to slow down, take a step back, and reflect.

Enterprise and business software should be as human-centered and approachable as consumer technology. And it's the responsibility of designers to get us there.

Today, many products we use in our daily lives are nothing short of miraculous. There’s an increasingly impressive array of well-crafted mobile apps that do a myriad of things. Many modern appliances are easier to operate than ever; even our thermostats have become smart and connected. But all these advances apply mostly to the products we choose to use...

Without mindfulness, products might only be rude, but they might also affect someone’s health, their support systems, or their very livelihood.

We’re on a journey together, you and me. We’ve come a long way, but design for the web is still in its adolescence. In the early aughts we learned to build websites without tables, then we learned to use data to make decisions. Emotion never played a role in driving page views, purchases or video plays. We just needed to get people from point A to point B...

About a year ago, we were discussing how strange it was that a mobile advertising tool for marketers didn’t exist... so we built one.

About a year ago, a couple of team members and I were discussing how strange it was that a mobile advertising tool for marketers didn’t exist. My team, the ads growth team, spends its time building products that make it easier for small businesses to advertise successfully on Facebook. But the majority of Facebook Ads products have been built with full-time marketers in mind. These people buy Facebook ads at work on their computers...

Since I work with some of the best PMs in the industry, I wanted to share some of my learnings over the years gleaned from their PM Handbook of Success...

There’s no learning without mistakes. And I’ve done the following (as well as seen the following done) too many times to count.

Product managers are like chameleons, changing to do whatever it takes to ship. As a designer, how do you handle their data-gushing, smooth-talking ways?

Generally speaking, you can trade in more time and talent and scope to get more quality. Alas, the inverse is not true.

If you're a designer, PM, architect, writer or anyone who spends most of their time living in a creative whirlwind, talking about design is an essential skill.