Nate Parrott

Their words

I'm obsessed with HTML and I think HTML is the only document type that matters because you can just do so much amazing creative stuff with it, right?

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embrace the fuzzy space between different types of things you can create, right? If you if somebody asks you to make a presentation, think about like how can you make it interactive? If somebody asks you to create a document, think about like, hey, what if I made this a little micro site HTML experience instead?

Their words

Use voice. I'm a huge voice fan. Uh, this sort of goes along with the rule that you get out what you put in. If you give yourself the self the tools to give Claude much more context faster and voice is the best way to do that. I found you will get much better results and you'll just have a better time.

Their words

Ask for tweaks, especially in areas where you see Claude is not very good at figuring it out right off the bat. So, for example, if you're trying to make animations or you're trying to make really dialed in visual interactions, Claude is not very great at doing things like timing or figuring out things like spring parameters or animations because it can't see video. It can only see screenshots. So, instead, if you're finding that Claude is having a lot of trouble at that, say, "Hey, Claude, make me a tool so that I can dial this in myself.

Their words

don't just ask Claude to like make you a design without giving it any context. Give it as much context as you can. And ideally be pretty prescriptive about what you want to get out and let Claude do the hard work of mocking it up and coding it. But like don't trust Claude to be an amazing designer and do all the work for you.

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This era will probably end. I think the models will probably get better at having these good ideas. But I'm really savoring this particular moment where we as humans still have a monopoly on good design thinking.

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the models are really really good at doing the sort of busy work of moving things around and piecing things together and turning ideas into different formats, but they're not so good at the actual ideas and the design thinking. And so what I can do as a designer is I found that I spend a lot more of my time just like going on long walks and like recording voice notes and like thinking to myself because the good ideas are the currency these days.

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I think that, you know, in this in this like AI era, the tools are changing so rapidly that there's a lot of value in being like uncomfortably early to ideas.

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the way that I've drawn the line is by saying that designers should code designers should ship and claw design is for everything else. Cloud design is for when you want to communicate an idea.

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where you think about the specific problem that you have and think about exactly what the right perfect tool for solving that problem is whether it's figuring out a color scheme or an animation or designing an icon or trying to wrap your head around 16 different variants of an onboarding flow. Chances are there's no perfect tool for designing that one thing unless you make it and now you can.

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I don't think there's any beall end all design tool out there. We're still in a world where, you know, everything is fairly rough. There's a lot of new possibilities that you can unlock with tools like clut design or paper, but they're all pretty early. Really polished tools like Figma and After Effects and Origami are still super super useful.

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every designer should be using cloud code if part of your team's end product is coding if only because it's so much easier than going back and forth with an engineer and like bugging them to make changes and hoping they have the patience to wait and get it right.

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As it becomes easier and easier to build software, the question of what you build becomes more and more important. design becomes really really valuable when the engineering becomes compressed and I don't want to say commoditized but like a little bit of like now everybody has a baseline level of really good software engineering available to them and so of course the differentiator is going to be your design and your ideas and your positioning and your creativity

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you can exist in the middle ground. Like you can make a deck or you can make a prototype or you can make an animation, but you can also just make something that's right in the middle between all of this.

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I'll treat it as like a little bit of a junior designer and I'll say, "Let me give you feedback. Let me use my taste alongside your ability to mock things really really fast.

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the models are getting better and better at design, but they're still really really far from being good and really really far from having good taste. And so typically what I will do is I will just you know ask them to make up for that in terms of sheer volume.