Andy Madrick

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critical feedbacks intimidating, scary, putting ourselves out there is vulnerable. Like, but at the end of the day, it is the best possible thing that you can do as a creative in any field, really, to level up your work.

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I think it's like the the midwit chart of like the really great designers just do less, right?

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the default is like, what does this thing look like with no decoration? With the same size typeface, with no animations. Take that and say, okay, where can I add a little flourish of delight here? And how does that help the user instead of detract away from what they're trying to do with this thing?

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the best way to stand out is to show your best work. And to show your best work, like let it speak for itself. The decoration for decoration's sake, no one wants that, right?

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I still tell people that's a worthwhile exercise. It's less so about, you know, doing a static frame pixel for pixel, but like the linear sidebar logic is really interesting because if you minimize the window past a certain point, it'll automatically hide itself.

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We as designers, our job now with limitless UI out there, is how do we take it and make a restrained version of this where form follows function and we're avoiding decoration for decoration's sake.

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There is no shortcut to having taste or developing like a high craft high velocity practice. I think that with AI, we have shortcuts to creating a lot of things. But at the end of the day, it comes back to discovering and learning the language of visual design.

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And it'll create something with like a million gradients and like a million tags. And it looks like a jelly bean factory, right?

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I mean at the end of the day it's CSS and JavaScript and Opus in particular and Claude in general really really great at front-end. Composer really great at front-end, right?

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Can you keep all the functionality of the engineer's version and give it all the styling that I have here. And I think that can get you so much closer than I think like our intuition says it would.

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We have to break the work into like manageable chunks. Like five lines is not very realistic, but a hundred-line PR, that's my general advice of like don't five-code a bunch of stuff and send an engineer a 500-line PR that you didn't even review yourself.

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your PRs as a designer and not a an engineer who's got all the training of an engineer, your PR should be very very small and manageable. If you're not comfortable reviewing the code yourself or writing the code yourself.

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You really have to suss out what the people you're working with, like how they want to work with you. And there's no one-size-fits-all answer.

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But if it's a smaller thing, like a modal or polish, visual polish, something like that, I find Figma to still be really helpful.

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you just have to be cool with you know, looking at the thing that users are going to actually see and obsessing over that artifact and making sure whatever form of like iteration on that takes, like make sure that is going to be 100% right? And then like Figma and these mocks, they're just reference tools at the end of the day.

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If it's not going to get done, then someone else someone has to do it, right? And I think we have no excuse anymore to not be responsible for those changes that we want to see.

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These LLMs are not very good at the last mile of design. And that's still like our superpower and needs to be our superpower.