Searching
Searching for results.
FramerThe site builder for designers who'd rather ship than hand off.Try Framer →Searching
Searching for results.Books that made us reexamine the creative process in 2025 Every year, a handful of books stick with us long after the last page—shaping how we think about creativity, culture, technology, and the work we choose to…
The Design Better summer reading list As you head out on holiday this summer, it’s always nice to have a couple good reads tucked in a bag to pass the time. Our reading list this summer has nothing that would pass as…
I built a career in design for a simple reason: I love to make things. There is a specific, quiet joy in the intersection of a big idea and meticulous craftsmanship. For a long time, I treated this path as a sort of…
Before we get to The Roundu p, we wanted to share some of the exciting guests we have in queue, including: Fiona Crombie, Academy Award-nominated production designer for the film Hamnet. Sam Beam, Grammy Award-nominated…
Out wide and flat lenses. You’ll start to notice f-stops and depth of field. You’ll start to see the choices made that everyone else just feels. You’ll be able to notice the choices that make all the difference. This is…
Turn It Over This week on the show: Aaron Draplin , founder of Draplin Design Co ., on origin stories, junk stores, and the kind of generosity that never makes it into a design portfolio. Listen to the episode Aaron…
In this issue of The Brief : Observations on designing a personal portfolio Things to watch, read, and explore Job openings Join Portfolio Club Wednesdays 10AM PT/1PM ET Join us every Wednesday through the end of July…
When I was in college, I took a great printmaking class with the artist Enrique Chagoya . There were no assignments — he just taught various techniques, we’d present our work, and he’d offer a helpful critique…
Paying attention to how the world was moving outside Nike to appreciate multidisciplinary convergence, I was open to alternative ways to learn and garner more experience. After some soul searching, I chose the…
Highest quality output: “Approach this as a staff engineer who cares deeply about code quality, maintainability, and avoiding over-engineering. [Then your request.]” Or even more specifically: “Before writing code…
Eric about why speed was never the real problem, why the value a company creates comes from the design of its products, and why the single best way to use AI might be to refuse to let it do your work for you. Listen to…
For many of the inspiring people we’ve spoken to over the years, from John Cleese, to David Sedaris, to the band OK Go, creativity isn’t something that it is drawn from thin air. Rather, it’s a process of discovery…
Creativity is a discipline in optimism When Tina Roth Eisenberg moved to New York from Switzerland in 1999, she kept asking herself one question: where are my people? Eighteen years ago she answered it by starting…
Our world doesn’t quite know what to do with multidisciplinary thinkers. It can’t find the right category for us. Eli and I are exactly those kinds of people — we have wide-ranging interests, we like the big picture…
Three ways of working keep surfacing, like body plans that might actually survive the filter. AI x Influence Workshop Bobby Hughes and I have a few spaces left in our upcoming AI x Influence for Design Researchers…
As designers, many of us got into the profession because we had other creative passions. Perhaps we grew up drawing, or painting, or were into music or performing arts. Then the daunting reality of making a living set…
Illustration by Luis Mendo A few months ago, I was on a flight to San Diego, to visit my parents. It was my dad’s birthday in a few days, and mine shortly after. He was in hospice, so I knew it was probably the last…
How AI Is F*ing Up the Creative Process — and What We Can Do About It Claude Code and Claude Cowork have become the darlings of the tech world, and the mood across design and research teams right now is something close…
How beliefs make or break us Nir Eyal is a familiar voice on Design Better and someone whose work has become essential reference across hundreds of design teams. His book Hooked taught us how to build habit-forming…
This week on the show, Aarron and Eli talked with Jessie McGuire , managing partner of Thought Matter , the New York studio whose decade of civic, neighborhood, and cultural work just earned the 2026 National Design…
Just see like, what's, what's going on. Um, I think critique is like, is everything. Yeah. Yeah. I was just, I'll, I'll add two, two quick things. I was just listening to an article about how like colleges, like all…
Catt Small is a Staff Product Designer at Dropbox, the author of The Staff Designer: Grow, Influence, and Lead as an Individual Contributor (Rosenfeld Media, December 2025), and the host of the Catt’s Corner podcast…
Judgment, empathy and understanding of human needs and behaviors, and natural curiosity, are becoming more important than ever. We recently had Brooke Hopper, Senior Principal Designer for Machine Intelligence and New…
“Being a parent is like being a psychic who is constantly correct, but always ignored.” – Jim Gaffigan The comedian Jim Gaffigan has a funny bit about being a parent . It’s familiar to many of us who have raised kids…
Connect with talented designers in Slack and Design Club critiques and unlock our full library of learning resources.
