Design

Something I read recently: 

“A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning: today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep”

When I landed on design twitter about five years ago, the profiles I admired most were those who posted daily UI snippets and guidance. It felt like that was something I should aim for, but I didn’t know why or how. I was a self-taught designer with no resume and no map, and just did not know where to start. Posting on twitter in the first place was not something I knew as worthwhile.

Learning about Framer and design subscriptions were two major unlocks, and I just ran with it. Later, I joined Farcaster, hosted /design, offered to design for /neynar (still do, thanks to @rish and @manan who gave me the space to level up) and many others.

After two solid years of web work, it’s finally time to shift my main focus* to product design. This was actually one of the main factors that led me to rebrand my practice from /red to /a0 

Working on product is a reality check, because the number of problems you can solve with a shiny gradient is pretty much zero.

I was forced to admit that a lot of the products I thought I knew as a user I did not actually know at all as a designer. Most of us should be able to design a decent landing page, but would you be able to design a wallet? An exchange? A block explorer? 

The sheer volume of information density, dependencies and affordances mean these categories are out of reach for most of us. But complexity alone is not the only reason for that. 

These are products that require command of several domains (crypto, security, finance, usability) and where stakes are high (millions of users, transactions, legal exposure). There are only a handful of companies that can attract enough capital or talent to launch in these categories. As a result, only a handful of designers ever have the chance to work on these products. That’s not going to change any time soon. 

But there is something I can do about it, and if it can inspire others, all the better. I’ll be doing my 25 miles a day by deconstructing and rebuilding these archetypes in public, starting with wallets. 

My main goal is building muscle memory, so that when the time arrives to work on this stuff, I’ll be ready. Since I’ll be releasing these exercises on my Figma community profile, a by-product of this will be a sort of UI kit, although that is not the stated purpose.

I will also be using this exercise template to challenge and onboard /a0 apprentices, so keep an eye out on the channel if this sounds like something you’d like to do.

* still do a lot of web design, just relatively less so than product

"working on product is a reality check, because the number of problems you can solve with a shiny gradient is pretty much zero"