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Get 10% off Karl's Become a Design Engineer course: https://join.dive.club/karl Today’s episode is with Karl Koch (https://x.com/_kejk?lang=en) and it’s filled with practical tips for new design engineers looking to push past what AI gives you out of the box. We go deep into: - Adopting the design engineering mindset - What the job market looks like for design engineers - The difference between frontend and design engineers - Specific language to create better interaction design - The details Karl is sweating in his role at Duck Duck Go - + a lot more Get 10% off Karl's Become a Design Engineer course: https://join.dive.club/karl

This episode is a deep dive into Rive—the engine powering experiences like Spotify Wrapped, next-gen car dashboards, and so much more. After hearing Luigi and Guido Rosso’s vision for the future of interactive software, I’m convinced it will be a big deal for designers 👀

One of the biggest parts of my design practice is knowing which tool to reach for when coding with AI. There are a lot of options and they’re changing every week 😅 So in this episode, I break down: 1. The mental model I use to think about different types of AI coding workflows 2. How that model guides which tools I actually reach for day to day 3. The new AI coding product I’m completely hooked on right now - Tools listed: - Lovable (https://lovable.dev/) - Figma Make (https://www.figma.com/make/) - Dessn (https://www.dessn.ai/) - Conductor (https://www.conductor.build/) - Warp (https://www.warp.dev/) - Inflight (https://www.inflight.co)

Sometimes you open up a website and it's so good that you're left wondering... how the heck did they pull that off? In this episode the designer of the original Amie website, Xavier Jack (https://x.com/KMkota0), is going to give us a little tutorial of what it looks like to bring web experiences to life with 3D. Some highlights: - How he prototyped the viral Amie website - How he made the Amie interactive balloons from scratch - How he uses mental models to understand 3D design tools - Amie.so (http://amie.so/) - Desktop.fm (https://desktop.fm/) - Three.tools (https://three.tools/) - Shopify Winter 2026 https://shopify.com/editions/winter2026 - Wiggle bones https://wiggle.three.tools/docs/manual/getting-started - Blender (3D modeling software) - Three.js (JavaScript 3D library)

Last month the head of design at Lovable, Nad Chishtie, walked us through the portfolio of one of their recent design hires, Matt Sellers. So today's episode is a behind-the-scenes of what it actually takes to create a portfolio that gets you hired at one of today's top startups. He shares some really tactical mental models that I think everyone can benefit from. Some highlights: Why Matt removed 80%+ of his workWhat made Matt's micro copy so effectiveHow Matt built his micro animations in FramerThe finer details of Matt’s portfolio and micro-interactionsHow Matt changed his portfolio strategy and why it workedWhat it takes to make your portfolio an experience rather than a cataloga lot more Nad Chishtie’s episode

There's been a heck of a debate around the future of coding and design tools lately... but what's actually happening inside of today's top teams? Where is all this headed and how does the future of our tools shape the role of a designer? Today's episode is with Stephen Haney (https://x.com/sdothaney) who is the founder of the new design tool Paper. And for the last few months he's studied how design teams actually use AI in their everyday roles... everything from tooling to prototyping to process. He walks us through some of his key findings and how that's shaping his product strategy for Paper 👇 Some highlights: - The “designer playground” approach - How AI adoption looks at startups vs. big companies - Why designers at big companies aren’t PRing to production - AI usage being mandated in performance reviews for designers - The new localhost sharing problem and how teams are solving it - Why local development is winning over cloud tools for design teams - Why companies use of AI tools doesn’t match what you see on Twitter - + a lot more Basecamp’s “Shape Up” project management philosophy (https://basecamp.com/shapeup)

Gab and Nim are the co-founders of a startup called Dessn which allows designers to prototype in the context of their production codebase (without any of the setup). So I asked them to hook it up to the Inflight repo and give me a little demo to see what’s possible. I’m pretty sold 👀

Someone asked me recently... if you had to join a design team, who would you want to work for? And my answer was easy... Perplexity So today's episode with Henry Modisett (https://x.com/henrymodis) (Perplexity's VP of Design) is a deep dive into what makes their design culture so special. Some highlights: - How to create a culture of decisiveness - What signals Henry is looking for in designers - Factors that influence Henry’s leadership style - How to lay the right foundation for your design org - Why Henry is doing feedback differently at Perplexity - Henry’s strategies for building world class design teams - + a lot more

Kyle Zantos is leading the new UX Tools Labs where he's responsible for figuring out what matters for new design tools and workflows. As a result, he's pretty quickly become my go-to source as I transition into more of a builder with AI. So this conversation is a deep dive into very specific tactics you can use on your own design engineering journey. We'll go through recommended tools, workflows, and Kyle's process for building a design engineering "Skill" using Claude Code. Kyle’s portfolio site: https://zantos.coLeva control panel: https://threejsresources.com/tool/levaCompound Engineering plugin: https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin Jhey Tompkins: https://x.com/jh3yyDerek Briggs: https://x.com/PixelJanitorWill King: https://x.com/willkingEmil Kowalski: https://x.com/emilkowalski

We talk a lot about using AI at startups… But what are more established companies doing to scale AI prototyping? What are the best ways to use AI to prototype with your design system? That's what today's episode is all about because we're talking with Lewis Healey (https://x.com/Lewishealey) and Kylor Hall (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylorhall/) about how they scaled AI prototyping at Atlassian. Some highlights 👇 - Their vision for a truly AI-native design system - What's worked to scale AI prototyping adoption - Tips for reducing hallucinations when prototyping - ways to help AI make sense of your design system - Their novel approach to prototyping with “templates” - How the role of design system designers is changing with AI - + a lot more - Atlassian Design System (https://atlassian.design/) - Figma Make (https://www.figma.com/make/?gad_campaignid=23356954992&gbraid=0AAAABCTX0ItGAe7RZBBeUOUindISLe0Un) (AI prototyping tool) - AI Builders Week (Atlassian internal program) (https://www.atlassian.com/blog/inside-atlassian/ai-product-builders-week)

Today's episode goes deep into all of the design details in a new video collaboration tool called Flask. But the reason I’m so inspired by this product goes far beyond the UI/UX… Flask is designed and built by one person—Enrico Tartarotti—who was a PM before this so his journey is the perfect example of what it looks like to thrive as a generalist builder. So this episode tells the story of what it took to build a well-crafted product and all of the lessons that he learned along the way. Enrico references the Mom Test for user research and the episode with the Supercut Founders

As one of the fastest growing companies in the world, Lovable is scaling their design team by tapping into the [Dive Talent Network](https://www.dive.club/talent-network). So I interviewed their Head of Design, [Nad Chishtie](https://x.com/nadonomy), to learn everything I can about how to get hired as a designer at Lovable. Some highlights: - A breakdown of a recent design hire’s portfolio - How to avoid getting your portfolio screened out - How to crush the later stages of the hiring process - How you can win Nad over with side projects alone - What to do if you’re not confident in your visual skills - The 2 things Nad cares most about when hiring designers - Spotify’s cross-functional squad model (https://medium.com/found-ation/agile-team-organization-a-deep-dive-on-the-spotify-model-f5b32dfc37dd) - Matt’s portfolio (designer hired through Dive Talent Network) (https://www.lfs.gd/)

What does it look like to own web design for one of the fastest growing AI companies in the world? And how do you get that opportunity if you don’t have companies like Apple or Airbnb on your resumé? That’s what this episode with [Roman Tesliuk](https://x.com/RomaTesla) is all about. He walks us through the Eleven Labs Figma and talks about the tiniest of design decisions all the way to how he’s building a scalable website system. We also go deep into Roman's side projects and all of the ways he's becoming a builder with AI 💪 Roman’s App Stacks project - https://appstacks.club/ and portfolio site - https://pixelwrld.co/

I’ve probably learned more about visual design from MDS than anyone in the design community. So I wanted to go deep into the creative process behind the all-new Shift Nudge website to see how he explores visual ideas. He takes us through his Figma file that is full of very good ideas that didn't ship. And he even shows us how he built his own Mosaic tool in v0 which became the core motif of the site. So if you're interested in seeing the windy creative process behind one of the truly great designers today then I think you're going to enjoy this one.

I get shown a lot of tool demos and one thing is clear… Canvas-based UX will play a pivotal role in how we interface with AI. It’s a big reason why Figma just bought Weavy 👀 So I interviewed Steve Ruiz who is the founder of tldraw where he's spent over 3 years and $5 million dollars building the perfect canvas (which powers many of the startups that we've studied on this show). Some highlights: Why he’s been obsessing over fairiesSteve’s principles for good tool designHow he was able to learn to code so quicklyWhat Steve’s learned through his AI experimentsHow he’s thinking about the future of agentic designa lot more