Product design

Earlier this month, Linear’s Karri Saarinen tweeted a little about how their team designs. Loose file organization, minimal design system, prototypes only sometime… Karri explained how they use design artwork only as a reference and the move into code as soon as possible.

In my experience, the trick is knowing when leave Figma for code.

Stay in Figma too long and you risk polishing a picture (instead of the actual product). Jump to code too quickly and you risk ending up with something that looks like Basecamp. Linear know where they fall on that spectrum and Karri’s tweet got a lot of others thinking about their own place.

As with anything in design, what works for Linear won’t work for everyone. Linear specifically hires people that can work this way. But for small teams comprised of generalists with both design and code chops, this approach can be magical (I’ve worked on one or two teams like this).

Check out Karri’s interview on Lenny’s podcast, where he goes into more detail about this and more.

Email geeks

I 🎃 Action Rocket’s Halloween email this year. Using only HTML and CSS, this email leads you to explore the image through a series of clues.

If you view source, you’ll see this was done with a few absolutely positioned radio buttons over a single image. Straightforward execution for a clever concept!

I’ve not dabbled much in interactive email outside of a prototype I made a few years ago, but examples like this show what’s possible.

If you’re interested in learning more about interactive email, Mark Robbins pioneered the technique and Anne Tomlin built on this in her recent talk on hot spots in email.

Climate

Google wants to be at the center of all your climate change decisions. Maybe a sensationalist headline, but I’m in favor of what Google’s doing: helping people make more sustainable decisions. Especially since the last few years have been rough for climate startups.

Tons of people use Google Search and Google Maps. So climate topics are mentioned in their UIs, it reaches a lot of people. Google can nudge a lot of folks towards buying electric cars, heat pumps, electric stoves, and more.

While Ai is generally an energy hog, one good thing it can be used for is crunching large sets of data. Think: scanning rooftops in Google Earth to find the best location for solar panels, or having Google Maps help mitigate the effects of wildfires and floods.

Google is famous for tracking absolutely everything, so I wonder if they’ll publicly report the impacts of these product changes.

Fun

Thanks for reading, see you in a fortnight ✌️
-Ted
@tedgoas