dreaming… • design, fashion, architecture & porsches • alum @lumalabsai @apple @airbnb @facebook
San Francisco, CA
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The longer I stay in tech, the more I realize how rare the Steve/Jony era of Apple was.
So much scale & capital value created while still keeping the human essence of technology.
It was fucking inspirational to witness.
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📣
Today is my first day at Apple on the Human Interface Design team.
Beyond excited for this next chapter that’s been more than a decade in making!
ALT Apple campus after rain
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Over the last year I got to work on bringing fluidity to the Airbnb app.
We looked across entire guest side and through critical journeys and established a spatial model of our “canvas” — system (account & camera), map, base and scrim (media + modality).
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A little peak into the Apple Design Studio in @wallpapermag 🌈
wallpaper.com/design/apple-p…
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Small life update!
Friday the 17th was my last day at Apple. 🌈🍎
The Design Studio is truly a magical place unlike anywhere else.
It was a once in a lifetime opportunity and a lifelong dream of mine to experience it and I will cherish it forever.
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It’s really sad to use iOS these days.
- Autocorrect is shittier
- New camera is slower/jankier
- Search is garbage
- So many clashing gestures on lock screen
- Many UI views are worse with Liquid Glass
- Icons are not optically aligned
And don’t even get me started on anything AI.
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i am sorry this is completely fine design and fun - and way better than sterile look and limited options we had before.
if you want to start design drama at least do it right.
It’s so funny that there is a team of over 700 people at Apple who all make $350K - $20M TC that designed this, approved it, and shipped it:
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The ability to keyframe camera path and focal length in @LumaLabsAI is quite magical
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This is the thing about really clean modern stuff. True in hardware, architecture and fashion.
The beauty is in precision and hairline clearances not in ornamentation.
Contemporary/futuristic without that precision is just cheap.
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sometimes i look at portfolio of new designers and i am just in awe and speechless!
diana is a future star in making. there is a “spark” or “soul” that’s very rare!
Hey yall! I am looking for a summer internship, please hit me up!!!!!
Also made some new updates to my portfolio, check it out 😉 diana.lu/
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After a fun ride of over 4.5 years today was my last day at @Airbnb. I got to do some great work, learn from amazing coworkers and watch the company become a public entity.
It feels surreal to say goodbye to folks you have known that long over Slack and Zoom.
❤️
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We built a thing! And raised some money to build more amazing things!
On a serious note - we are ACTIVELY looking for Designers who want to shape the future of multimodal AI systems and human-computer relationship.
Come help us imagine the future!
🔥 Introducing Genie 1.0, our first step towards building multimodal AI. Genie is a text-to-3d model capable of creating any 3d object you can dream of in under 10 seconds with materials, quad mesh retopology, variable polycount, and in all standard formats! Try it on web and in Luma’s iOS app now → lumalabs.ai/genie
#generativeai #textto3d #multimodalai
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Most tech today is exactly the reverse of what got me interested in the first place.
- Small teams
- Outsized impact
- Flat orgs
- Ability to dream big
- No bullshit
- High density of talent
That’s it. That’s the tweet.
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The brand team for @claudeai is killing it!
GOOD MORNING NEW YORK CITY
COME DO YOUR BEST THINKING AT OUR THINKING SPACE IN THE WEST VILLAGE
SAY NO TO SLOP
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Map transitions were designed to emphasize that map lived “behind” base canvas and reinforced the idea of “going somewhere” through a portal.
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seeing so many "oh they copied blah" when it comes to nodes...so here you go. its a very very old hci pattern
Going down a rabbit hole of Node Based Editors - programming for the rest of us
Screenshots — Unity Bolt, Cinema 4D, Touch Designer, DaVinci Resolve - Fusion
So many others - Origami, Lobe, VVV, Notch, Cables.gl, Nodes.io, Houdini etc.
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Yesterday evening was spent learning about shades of dark green that exist!
Brewster green, Oak green, British racing, Dark olive, Aventurine and so many more!
🥦🍐🫒🫑
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We established a wider expression of modality - popovers & stackable modal sheets that did not force people to leave the previous context making flows cognitively less taxing.
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starting to think the whole “good ideas are cheap” is cope by people who can’t come up with good ideas.
good, original and bold ideas are ridiculously hard.
like yeah skill, execution and timing are hard too. but that does not make the former easy.
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Pathetic seeing people take a dig at Browser Co acquisition.
The team has gone through multiple takes on a 5+ year old audacious vision, while maintaining craft & quality + a great team during all phases.
Please get off your high horse and go touch grass.
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Congrats! Only advice is to consider NOT paying the student loans if possible (depends on your life situation and interest rate) and invest this money instead. You will likely pay off your student loan and still have more left.
Either way. Congrats!!
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- peak ai slop era
- chaotic era to push latest research or follow the latest weekly trend
- enough mental gap from the last public appearance of jony
- nostalgic of the golden era of apple esp wrt to current ai “fumbles”
- lowest respect of craft & expertise in last decade+
I am still trying to figure out why exactly that Jony Ive interview in this moment seemed to have resonated the way it did.
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every few years someone tries this in silicon valley.
and one of two things happen.
- they either revert it quickly cause hiring gets harder for senior folks
- they create hidden hierarchies (which leads to fun issues of its own)
ElevenLabs has removed all titles.
Now, there's no "VP of X", "Head of Y", or "Director of Z". Instead we are just Growth at ElevenLabs, Engineering at ElevenLabs, etc.
Why? We're small, growing incredibly quickly, and hierarchy just gets in the way.
Instead the best idea wins no matter where it comes from. And ownership is driven by the results you have.
If you're obsessed with impact and moving quickly; not titles and status we're hiring for nearly all roles.
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So excited to share the new version of Dream Machine - a visual thought partner for ideation and imagination!!
We believe ideas, images, videos should be one fluid medium of imagination. Go make things!
Say hello to the all-new #DreamMachine. 🚀 Your visual thought partner—where ideas become reality. Ideate, visualize, and share your ideas with the world. Available now.
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Feeling gut wrenching sadness today. Hoping we all come out of this stronger and resilient.
news.airbnb.com/a-message-fr…
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Have an bold vision.
Hire people with great taste.
Make lots of demos & live with them.
Be genuinely curious and brutally honest.
Be relentless and patient in the pursuit of greatness.
I don’t think about the Roman Empire very often, but I do think at least weekly about how the iPhone shipped without any user testing or focus groups
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While all cosmetic seeming changes they make the whole app feel significantly more fun to move around in and fluid.
Also major props to @EricHoracek without who all of this would never have been built in such a robust way.
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We are looking for a Senior Product Designer to join us at @LumaLabsAI.
Come help us figure out a new kind of future - one where everyone in the world has a Creative Partner.
One that can help us show — not just tell.
Where every curiosity you have ever had can be visualized. Where your ideas become new worlds.
jobs.lever.co/LumaAi/07efc1d…
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We are so so excited to share our text to video model — our first step in helping people imagine infinite possibilities and dream new worlds.
An imagination engine.
A Dream Machine.
Introducing Dream Machine - a next generation video model for creating high quality, realistic shots from text instructions and images using AI. It’s available to everyone today! Try for free here lumalabs.ai/dream-machine #LumaDreamMachine
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looking back being at fb and exposed to origami and framer was a step function skill boost.
at apple/hi the best designers often were the ones who prototyped and deeply understood the medium of touch.
AI is no different — a new medium that you need to poke to get a “feel”.
There's a window open right now for designers who want to roll up their sleeves and figure out how AI can be a catalyst for their career
Agency matters now more than ever
And that's what this week's mini episode is all about 👇
piped.video/watch?v=vM_b28ET…
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Look, Apple has a lot of fumbles.
This is not one of them. They knew exactly what they were doing and exactly who would buy it.
Also it’s ok fashion accessories are not for everyone.
When a company releases something that is so obviously underwhelming then the natural question is: “Did no one at the company see how bad this is OR did no one have the courage to speak up?”
I’m not sure which is worse.
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What are the best examples of companies that have nurtured a powerful community?
Early Stripe, Notion, Browser Company, Figma...who else?
cc @joshm
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i kid you not...i was so ashamed to ask this when i started at luma.
and then when i learnt the answer..it was like oh "so its just a fancy made up term for - running the damn model"?
🫠
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this is all great advice from @joulee!
some thoughts.
1) my hot take is that if you are a good founding designer material (0-1 product, not post-PMF), and thats what you are interested in doing then you should seriously consider doing your own thing/co-founding.
similar risk, much higher reward (material and emotional) and problem surface area. you get to "design" a product, an organization and a culture.
2) very few designers are capable of being a good founding designer and can truly steer the strategy and positioning in interesting places more so than just the pixels. see next point why.
3) lastly finding a thought partner who matches your wavelength in the ceo/cofounders is very rare. you could have the most amazing ideas but they need to be aligned with how the cofounders see the company and world to truly be earnestly be believed in by the whole company.
design is a way of looking at the world and seeing a different/better one. not just a tool to improve funnels or draw UI.
very very few companies get this.
The market for start-up design talent has never been more competitive. I’ve had half a dozen companies ask me recently, “how do I get a great founding designer?”
Folks, if you are not already bosom buddies with great designers, you’re gonna need to put out a beacon that attracts top talent:
1. Tell a compelling, true story about your ‘why.’ Make a page dedicated to this. Make your story come alive as only you can. Anyone with ChatGPT can write a generic sounding req about competitive benefits and rocketship grow opps. Write about a problem and vision that is wildly ambitious yet deeply personal to you.
2. Express that you “get” the importance of design. This is your ‘proof of work’ that you will value the person that you hire, for ex (not limited to):
a. Your page / app / website show attention to detail and care for the experience
b. Your description of the job shows a deep understanding of what good design means (do your research here).
c. You talk about design work that you admire or find aspirational.
d. You have design-forward people on your cap table (ie @designerfund, @soleio, @karrisaarinen, @rsg, @tobi, etc)
Ofc easier said than done, but the key is to put some effort into standing out as an incredible environment for designers to do their best work.
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After playing in softwares like C4D, Houdini, Touch Designer and Unreal Engine - most UI design tooling feels archaic/limiting.
We have erred too much to mapping 1:1 to how things are implemented vs expressiveness of ideas (which influences future implementations).
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I rarely get mad about stuff like this on twitter but it’s extremely disheartening to see literally 3 people in my entire timeline giving a damn about H1b visa ban.
What happened to the rest of you?
Anyways go back to drooling over icons.
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All transitions use the same underlying animation system of views that grow contextually from the source and animate into the destination view.
We worked through exposing right parameters like anchoring of animating elements , scale vs fit etc.
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I have recently been fascinated by partnerships among creatives. So often we seek individual excellence but some of the most beautiful things happen as a result of two kindred souls coming together.
Steve/Jony
Kanye/Virgil
Charles/Ray
Lewis/Toto
Who else?
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my hot take of the day is that if AI can truly be good at this, then AI should not be generating figma files. it should just be generating the real UI.
tbh its not even that hot of a take.
Meet Galileo 1.0: The game-changing prompt-to-UI platform now open to all.
Our mission is to supercharge the creative process of designers and builders, making design easy, fast and magical.
Bring your idea, let AI do the heavy lifting.
Start today: useGalileo.ai
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it’s very very hard to imagine designers creating static mocks in 2+ year horizon.
it already feels a little silly but giving some buffer for more aesthetic/craft oriented tooling to emerge around.
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Few random realizations in last 7-8 months:
1) Being high agency is a skill and can be learnt.
2) You are capable of a LOT more than your environment might make you feel. Esp if you are a high agency in a low agency environment.
…continued
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As a final tweak we added panning support while swiping down a view. While minor it feels considerably natural vs a uni-directional swipe. It also unified edge swipe and swipe down to feel like extensions of the same action.
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Our popovers and context sheets allow for various sizes based on needs of the product teams and support dynamic type as well as stacking.
All modals can be swiped down upon to dismiss them and are paired with haptics to give tactile feedback once you cross the threshold.
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Love this role and perspective.
It’s a shocker we broadly don’t see UI design as a creative medium. Too much rationalization, too little expression going on today - it has potential to influence culture in the same way fashion or hip hop can.
Universe is looking for a UI Artist to join the product design team. Someone who sees UI design as an artistic medium, not just a method of problem solving. Someone who is obsessed with the delightful possibilities of software. workatuniverse.com/ui-artist
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One of the last ideas from this work just dropped in the Airbnb app! 🙏🏽 to folks who pushed through and made it happen!
Accordions that reuse the popover metaphor to breakdown flows into smaller chunks.
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baby’s first podcast 🙈
was so fun to sit down with @ridd_design to chat about design, ai and everything in between.
thank you for having me on @joindiveclub 🙏🏽
.@tuhin has designed at some of the most prolific companies in the world (early FB, Airbnb, Apple, etc.)
But everything's changing in his new role as the Head of Design at @LumaLabsAI...
So we went deep into how the value prop of design is shifting 👇
piped.video/watch?v=nznSevwj…
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One of the best tricks we pulled as an industry was convincing ourselves (and others) that design leadership is primarily an operational skillset and has little to do with craft.
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This is a pretty darn good interview with Tim Cook around how Apple has changed post Steve fastcompany.com/3062090/tim-…
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How does France and Europe in general have so many kickass creative developers?
Often I find someone sharing something cool and search around to realize they are in France/Europe.
Seriously how? why?
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Absolutely love this way of sharing product features - twice a year!
- great way to contextualize the changes for customers
- own your product's narrative arc
- the teams feel sense of momentum and pride of a diff scale
- Planning cycles have a diff to compare with and you can still do ambitious things
Shopify Winter'24 Edition just dropped ✨
shopify.com/editions/winter2…
lots of amazing features. Let me highlight some
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We just closed on our house in Oakland. So many thoughts on SF and why we are moving but for now I can’t wait to enjoy our house!
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Soul comes from caring.
Soul comes from being intentional.
Soul comes from building things out of love.
Soul comes from play. Gotta make space to play.
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Using @cursor_ai and @lovable etc is making me miss IC life. SO MUCH fun and despite the inefficiencies so much potential!
Makes me want to design my ideal "vibe coding" tool. So many times I want to isolate a component and rev visually and then "put it back".
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The final hero was the full screen grow transition created especially for our unique inventory. A particularly interesting challenge was how do you allow edge swipe as well as swipe down from the top.
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strong agree
learn to train your own models
learn to build your own agents
there are too many “design decisions” input (data pairs), aesthetics/behavior (ft/rlhf), learnability (rl loops) etc that actually make the experience.
the “shape” of medium comes from these choices.
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this is one of my most fundamental weltanshauung. you either get this or you don’t.
Patrick Collison on the importance of beauty and craftsmanship when building products
“If Stripe is a monstrously successful business, but what we make isn’t beautiful, and Stripe doesn’t embody a culture of incredibly exacting craftsmanship, I’ll be much less happy. I think the returns to both of those things in the world are really high. I think even beyond the pecuniary or financial returns, the world’s just uglier than it needs to be… One can do things well or poorly, and beauty is not a rivalrous good.”
Patrick believes a commitment to craftsmanship and beauty played an important role in Stripe’s success:
“My intuition is that more of Stripe’s success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like beautiful things—and for kind of rational reasons because what does a beautiful thing tell you? Well it tells you the person who made it really cared… And so if you care about the infrastructure being holistically good, indexing on the superficial characteristics that you can actually observe is not an irrational thing to do.”
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Really great talk from @Wattenberger from @AdeptAILabs.
- Abstraction & transformation of information now possible on the fly
- Unique value in each level of abstraction for different workflow
- Maintaining actionability
- Batch actions supercharge efficiency
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We designed the new #DreamMachine to be so much more than just an asset generator.
Being able to visualize your thoughts, see and show what’s in your head is as fundamental as speaking or writing.
Here is to the visual thinkers & the daydreamers!
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Michael McGuiness
not everything needs to be a chatbot but for a thing you can talk to …it’s odd how few people in ai/llm think of relationship/character design.
everybody is obsessed with models, context windows and capabilities.
the relationship/character is a new “interaction” mechanic.
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Playful yet pioneering.
A teeny tiny sneak peak of what we are working towards.
So many novel interactions, fluid modalities and constructs waiting to be explored here.
If you are an interaction designer that gets excited by world class and inventive interactions - reach out!
Coming soon to Dream Machine - powerful editability and intuitive controls! Here's a sneak-peak of something exciting we are working towards. #LumaDreamMachine
Sign up for early access and to be the first to know when it is ready: forms.gle/PnfNkVPs3jYhvADCA
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The longer I work the more I appreciate how truly RARE it is to have all 4 be true at the same time:
- great problem space
- great core team
- great management
- great organizational support
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At this point “augmenting human intellect” and “bicycle for mind” feel overused to the point of being passé.
Like if 55 year old demos are still our guiding light…boy do we need to use our imagination more.
Just saying.
🤷🏾♂️
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Our PDP transitions support swiping down from top scroll position of a view, edge swipe or grabbing the title bar at any scroll position. Our first version treated the X and Y gestures independently and used only scale to unify edge swipe and swipe down transitions.
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this is the hill i will die on
work very very hard
and then enjoy life harder.
repeat
the reason you feel exhausted is because you've convinced yourself being always online is the requirement for great work. great work isnt driven by 24/7 slack messages, isn't driven by coding at the party. great work is driven by intense periods of focus, followed by leisure
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this is pull to refresh level interaction
“pinch to distill”
Maybe my favorite feature we’ve ever shipped:
Pinch on any website in the Arc Search app — like you’re pinching 🤏 to zoom out — and we’ll fold it down (origami-style) to summarize the page for you!
Feels SO GOOD & saves so much time when people text you links on the go!
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Wrote this framework for thinking of new products for personal use. Might be too gospel like but here is a screenshot
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2000s: There is a website for that.
2010s: There is an app for that.
2020s: There is an AI model for that
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Negotiations and emotional confrontation across different cultures hbr.org/2015/12/getting-to-s…
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