So let’s talk a little bit about design process. Visually, people describe me as being a very technical and calculated designer. And as an INTJ, I value designs having logic to their decision making process. Coming from a science background, I try to use logic to determine the best layout or UX solution instead of my personal preferences, and back it up with user testing. AI has helped polished that output, and it’s made me faster at getting to the part where logic actually gets to speak.
Figma is still my tool of choice for designing and prototyping, and when I really need to sell a vision, I code production-ready prototypes that you can touch and feel. Claude, Cursor, Xcode, VS Code, Vercel, and Whisper Flow are my weapons — I ship production-ready prototypes so fast that the vision sells itself, without waiting on anyone.
Some other tools I’ve used are Manus for deck preparation and research, and Obsidian for detailed note-taking. Speed has always been one of my strengths, and AI has multiplied that speed.
I’m also a power user and like to use a ton of shortcuts, keybindings, macros, etc. Back in the day when we used Sketch, I wrote an article about all the add-ons I used to automate my process.
If you can think it, you can design it
Design is like a math problem; before starting anything it’s imperative to understand what it is you are solving for. That means asking the right questions, like: What is the primary business goal of this project? How do you define success? Why are we doing this and what are the engineering constraints?
In this phase I am gathering requirements, understanding who the stakeholder is, and who the users are. Sometimes it is necessary to conduct a user survey before starting.
When I start to think about the problems, naturally I break them down into manageable chunks. How do I achieve something with the least amount of clicking? How do I make sure that people will understand this for the first time, every time? And once I understand the problem, I like to think big.
I always design with a grid system and it’s important to my process so I can make sure things are aligned properly, and see to that the design would be responsive. Typically I do 12 columns on desktop, 8 on tablet, and 4 on mobile, with 60-80px columns and 20-30px gutters. I felt so strongly about grids that I wrote an article called
This is one of my philosophies in web design and user experience. Sure there are some things that are content based, but if a user is going to fill out a form or navigate a flow, it better be faster and better than doing it on paper. For example the user should be able to bulk edit something, or have the ability to select all check boxes, or have important call to actions sticky to the page. If someone can fill the same form faster on paper, then you know there’s something wrong.
This also means that content doesn’t always need to be present. If there are a lot of sections, some things can be condensed. And if the user shows intent on learning more, there are creative ways to achieve a progressive reveal — an expand/collapse, a drawer, a tooltip, a modal. Each one depends on context. I’m always thinking about how to make things easier, like sticky headers and footers, and more engaging through micro interactions. The goal is that the interface feels like it’s reading the user’s mind, not making them work.
I really don’t want to tell people what to do and how to do it. I think users should be able to choose. What that means for me as a designer is I need to provide more opportunities for them to do things. Multiple entry points to a task in different parts of the experience, or a navigation that is easy to understand they would expect.
To be honest, I don’t do low fidelity designs at any point of my process. I work with high fidelity and use placeholder copy and images or icons. The reason why is because based on my experience with multiple companies in multiple industries, nobody understands low fidelity. There have been plenty times where I would show a low fidelity mock up with Xs and grey squares, and try to communicate that “We are focusing on the layout here so don’t worry about the images and the colors,” and it is not understood. It takes them too long to grasp the wireframe concept, and secondly, even if they approve the layout, once all the placeholders are filled in often times they realize it is not actually what they want. I don’t blame them, we are all visual beings at the end of the day. This means I work much faster when I don’t need to do a round of low-fi and high-fi mocks. With AI in my workflow now, going straight to high fidelity — or straight to a working prototype — is faster than it’s ever been.
It’s all about the system baby. The placement of my elements are all meaningful, and I should be able to justify if something is even one pixel off. Nothing should be arbituary. Spacing and vertical rhythm can be defined by a baseline grid. Widths can be determined by columns on a grid. Font sizes can be defined by the golden ratio. I love building reusable components and thinking about how each specific use case will fit in with the whole.
Good design means to simplify to only what’s needed, and all things simplified must be considered. My mission is for users to understand my designs for the first time, every time. Simplifying the problem early in the process allows for building products that enhance capabilities, bring happiness, and increase efficiency. The ability to communicate a complicated concept that can be understood by all is the power of design and is what makes design so beautiful.
Simple design is not enough if it isn’t functional. The right function will be accompanied by clarity, which lends back again to being simple. Things shouldn’t be decorative or just about being pretty. Accessibility is key to function, perpetuating a design that more people can experience. Purposeful solutions mean humanistically calculated; making adjustments for optical illusions when a machine would have dictated otherwise, or adjusted for human preferences.
Good experiences consider the whole, and make systems that are sustainable, scalable, and reusable. I always consider ways where my design fits into the system, and can stand the test of time. I reuse the design language that I’ve built, and think of them as atoms and molecules. With this mindset, I combine molecules to make new components that will be additive to the whole experience.