Derek Briggs
Designer and developer. Principal designer at Shopify; before that head of design at Hypermode (with Kevin Van Gundy, acquired) and, in 2024, Director of Design at Clerk.
Derek Briggs did not write this page. ppll compiled it from their own words, each linked to the source. Is this you? · Report a mistake
What they believe
-
It is very difficult to innovate in design with AI, because agents can only do what they have learned and innovation happens in what has never happened before.
Agents are capable of doing what they've learned to do, and innovation happens in what has never happened before. So it's very difficult, and my personal opinion is it's very difficult to innovate in design with AI, being that it's only ever going to present what has happened before when we're trying to figure out what's going to happen in the future.
youtube.comSaid 3 Nov 2026This on korrents
-
Users never see the Figma files, so a design team's quality is only as good as the UI engineers who implement its work.
I say all the time that the users never see the Figma files. Like, your design quality and your design capabilities of your team is only as good as the UI engineers that are implementing it.
youtube.comSaid 18 Jan 2024This on korrents
The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These 2: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 20 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
It is very difficult to innovate in design with AI, because agents can only do what they have learned and innovation happens in what has never happened before.
Agents are capable of doing what they've learned to do, and innovation happens in what has never happened before. So it's very difficult, and my personal opinion is it's very difficult to innovate in design with AI, being that it's only ever going to present what has happened before when we're trying to figure out what's going to happen in the future.
Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopify Said 3 Nov 2026
Designers need to spend more time on the artboard, because a lot of prompting just produces whatever an agent will do.
I think that designers need to spend some more time on the artboard at times. I think that there's a lot of prompting happening that just results in what an agent will do for you.
Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopify Said 3 Nov 2026
Designers should own the quality of the output rather than rely on their agents to determine it.
But right now in this era, I think designers even more should really own what the quality of output is rather than relying on their agents to, to determine what the quality is.
Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopify Said 3 Nov 2026
Show 17 more
Taste and craft should be documented as simple markdown skills that every designer's and engineer's agents use, so that greatness happens by accident.
I think it's incredibly critically important to deploy taste and craft and quality and knowledge around what tools we need to use and what strategies we need to use to achieve the level of quality we're looking for. We need to document those in just simple markdown files of how I'm approaching this, what I'm doing, and here's the outcome. So that those skills can then just be deployed through our skill packages throughout our designers and our engineers to where greatness accidentally happens.
Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopify Said 3 Nov 2026
Companies waste their time hiring many specialists to own every area when that expertise can be deployed horizontally through Markdown files.
I think companies are wasting their time if they're trying to hire tons of these people to be responsible for all these areas when you can very horizontally deploy them through Markdown files.
Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopify Said 3 Nov 2026
The design engineer, who can bring a design's vision to life in code, is still maybe the most important role there is right now.
I think that that role is still maybe the most important role out there right now. Somebody who can truly bring the vision to life from a code perspective
Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopify Said 3 Nov 2026
Shipping something without any data on its success leaves no way to know whether it was the right thing for the company.
I think people need to be ruthless around knowing and being confident that the solutions that they're designing and shipping are meeting the goals that they set out to achieve. If you're shipping something without any sort of data around its success, I don't understand how you'll be able to know if what you did was the right thing for the company or not.
Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopify Said 3 Nov 2026
A codebase is the most important context an AI agent has, and letting many different models add to it without consistent patterns leads to trouble.
Because I am a big believer that, like, the most important piece of context that you have is your codebase. And if you just let it continue to evolve itself and sling things in there from various different models doing various different things, I think that you're going to get into a world of hurt eventually.
Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopify Said 3 Nov 2026
Today's LLMs should not be treated the way yesterday's were, because they are good at doing what you want without much being asked of them.
I'm a big believer that we need to stop treating today's LLMs the way that we treated yesterday's LLMs because it's just really good at doing what you want without asking too much of it.
Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopify Said 3 Nov 2026
AI should make people ten times better at their work, not have them do ten times more of it.
It's really important to me that folks are not using AI to do 10 times more work. It's important to me that it's making them 10 times better.
Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopify Said 3 Nov 2026
Less and less leadership is needed these days, because LLMs and AI tooling give so many answers instantly.
And I think from a leadership perspective that there's just less and less leadership needed these days, being that with all of our LLMs and AI tooling that we have, there are so many answers to get instantly.
Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopify Said 3 Nov 2026
An interface animation can move visually in 200 milliseconds and still reserve extra time for a gentle ending that makes the movement feel more natural.
Visually, it's 200 milliseconds, but it reserves 200 milliseconds for that last ending bit of delight that just makes it so gentle and much more natural movement.
Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopify Said 3 Nov 2026
An animated element coming up against something hard should end softly and stop; one coming into free air can bounce.
if it's going up against something hard, I like to just have it come in soft and just stop. If it's coming into free air, I'll let it bounce.
Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopify Said 3 Nov 2026
Users never see the Figma files, so a design team's quality is only as good as the UI engineers who implement its work.
I say all the time that the users never see the Figma files. Like, your design quality and your design capabilities of your team is only as good as the UI engineers that are implementing it.
Derek Briggs - Creating a design culture of craft (Dive Club Ep. 34) Said 18 Jan 2024
Deadlines either let work stretch out to fill the time or force a project to be descoped to meet an arbitrary date.
I have a big issue with deadlines. Setting a deadline is going to either allow the person to stretch out that amount of work over that period of time or have to eventually de-scope the project to be able to meet that arbitrary deadline.
Derek Briggs - Creating a design culture of craft (Dive Club Ep. 34) Said 18 Jan 2024
Teams can invest in design systems too early; a design or component should be reused a few times before it is codified.
I think teams can invest too quickly in design systems, both in Figma and in code. There are a lot of early decisions that get made that are easy to either overthink or over-optimize. And the way that we have approached it is kind of designing for what we need at that time. Reusing that design or component a few times before codifying it, especially in code.
Derek Briggs - Creating a design culture of craft (Dive Club Ep. 34) Said 18 Jan 2024
Anyone can see that one design looks better than another; what makes a good designer great is being able to say what the difference is.
You might not be able to say what looks different, but you can see that it looks different. And I think the key factor is what makes a good designer a great designer is being able to tell you what the difference is.
Derek Briggs - Creating a design culture of craft (Dive Club Ep. 34) Said 18 Jan 2024
A redesign should reach users step by step, accepting inconsistencies on the way, rather than be built behind a feature flag and flipped over in one day.
I just really don't want to build a new dashboard behind a feature flag and one day flip it over. I'd much rather give users that value now and those improvements now and deal with the inconsistencies
Derek Briggs - Creating a design culture of craft (Dive Club Ep. 34) Said 18 Jan 2024
Hire the right people and do not question what they do: velocity and pride both go up.
focusing on hiring the right people for the job and just letting them do their job. You think that they're the best person for this, so don't question what they're doing. Then the velocity's higher, the pride is higher, and I think you just get to where you want to be quicker.
Derek Briggs - Creating a design culture of craft (Dive Club Ep. 34) Said 18 Jan 2024
Designers should learn the basics of the medium they design for: some HTML and CSS for the web, some Swift for iOS.
If you are a designer that is building web applications, learn a little bit of HTML, learn a bit, a little bit of CSS. If you are a mobile designer working on just iOS apps, write a little bit of Swift code, learn a little bit of Swift.
Derek Briggs - Creating a design culture of craft (Dive Club Ep. 34) Said 18 Jan 2024
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Where they publish
Site pixeljanitor.com His own site.
His personal site, built from the pixeljanitordotcom repo on his GitHub.
Link verified 4 Nov 2026.
x.com @PixelJanitor Short posts.
GitHub PixelJanitor Design and code.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter, especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked article and a belief on korrents.com are left in their original language.