Brian Lovin
@brian_lovin
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🏕️ Co-founder @trycampsite 🐙 Prev. @github 🎙 Podcasting @designdetailsfm 📦 Made @staffdotdesign @withspectrum @specfm
Everything else →
Joined January 2012
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Pinned Tweet
You won’t learn what it takes to make great work by staring at a finished product.
You’ll miss the messy middle, the meticulous process of crafting an unformed idea into something alive and real.
There's something inspiring, yet demystifying, about watching a lump of clay turn…
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Stripe's implementation execution is unparalleled. The animated text on the card? Not a video. That's an interactive, selectable, render tree 🤯
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Side projects die twice. The day you stop working on them, and the day the domain expires.
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Would it be really annoying if I started tweeting tiny CSS tweaks to make random websites better? Something like this:
font-weight: 500;
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This is what FB developers will see in their local sandbox when building features for the upcoming redesign. Regardless of your stance on FB the company, this is a really powerful example of how a considered developer experience can directly impact the end user experience.
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Apps as complex as Blender blow my mind — this feels like "serious software design" while I'm over at the kids table trying to make a website with a sidebar and a list/detail view not suck.
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It truly pains me to say this, but 6px is the most underrated corner radius. 4 can feel too sharp and technical, 8 too loose and bubbly.
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Released my first
@figmadesign
plugin today! It's a small utility to quickly test your designs across multiple device sizes. Save 👏 those 👏 seconds.
Grab it here:
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This is neat — the cursor glow hits the edges of neighboring boxes, but doesn't illuminate their fills until the mouse actually crosses over.
Lovely work, as always 😍
New on our website:
→
Ingredients:
• A list of all Linear features
• All the reasons why Linear is the
tool of choice for high-impact
product teams
• A few magical little details
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Just open-sourced a
@figmadesign
plugin to fetch and populate data from GitHub. The published plugin is private to our org, but hopefully the implementation is useful for anyone trying to build something similar 😊
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if my calendar is ever this full please throw me off a cliff
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Making an interface feel "friendlier" —
Increase text size
Increase corner radius
Soften drop shadows
Add more color
Micro animations on interactions
What else?
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Made a new
@figmadesign
plugin to intelligently populate user interfaces based on an image's dominant color. This includes switching text colors to always be high-contrast against the background.
Check it out:
👇 Full thread for the feature deep dive!
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The more I see communities moving to real-time platforms like Discord and Slack, the more I miss classic forum experiences. Long-lived threads with bumping, a long tail of search ranking for niche topics, locking/combining threads, etc.
Real-time communities breed FOMO.
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Besides overlay and multiply, anyone who can select the correct option in this menu on their first try should go straight to jail for lying to me on Twitter.
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The new marketing page design styles on GitHub are straight 🔥
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As a macOS user for 15 years, this interaction to install new apps will never stop feeling so...weird. I know, the App Store "fixes" this, yet here we are.
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Two other things I've been tinkering with on my personal site this weekend:
- Home page as a timeline of things I'm doing (WIP)
- Bookmark categories, organized by things I'm reading, great product design portfolios, and my favorite personal websites/blogs
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Vibing with these little gradient underglows on the new Tailwind UI pricing table.
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Really eager for this “animate literally every element as it enters the viewport” phase of web design to wind on down.
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Framer has such a clear reverence for shipping excellent interfaces. Their bar for polish and quality is really inspiring – these are just their marketing pages, but the product is beautiful, too ❤️
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I can not stress enough how tough it is to build a web app that works well across browsers, mobile devices, and input methods while staying accessible and performant.
Hug your frontend developer.
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I'm getting about 3.5 hours of battery life on an M1 MBP while writing code, Slack, web browsing, etc. Is anyone else seeing issues like this? I feel like this machine used to last all day.
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Which button placement feels better? Poll in next tweet.
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Going to start using to generate smooth CSS drop shadows for all my projects going forward - this is really handy!
h/t
@JoshWComeau
for the find
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We're live ✨
In this first conversation on
@staffdotdesign
, I spoke with
@wilsonminer
about the illusion of career ladders, the trap of searching for pure design, and the exhaustion of writing your own job description.
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Playing with an idea to make my website feel like a proper web app. Global nav, list/detail views, and maybe even user accounts for commenting in the future.
This is the progress I made today on a responsive 3-col layout — pretty happy with it so far. Feedback appreciated 🙏
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Design reviews are broken.
People bias one another, the first comment sets the tone for a critique, and one person in a position of authority can silence valid contrasting opinions from the rest of the team.
We're fixing it —
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It's you, a designer working at a startup. The design debt is accumulating, but you have to Move Fast and Ship Things. You know you need a design system, but it's not clear where to start, or even where to find the time to start paying back the debt.
Who has been here and won?
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A useful question I've been asking myself a lot this past month: "How can we solve this problem without adding any additional UI?"
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Added a new page to my personal site listing my favorite tools and apps that drive my daily work.
There's a recommendation form at the bottom if you think I should check something out!
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Every time I talk with founders, my mind explodes anew to hear about the current state of design recruiting. Companies aren't blinking an eye at $50k/mo contractors and $300k base salaries. All senior++ talent, but damn...🤯
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Subtle noise textures on landing pages, so hot right now
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New project in progress, shipping next January:
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A friend recently asked what it was like to raise $ for
@withspectrum
at the early stages (we raised ~$450k pre-seed). Here are some of the questions angel/seed investors asked us, in case it can be helpful to anyone who is preparing for early stage startup fundraising:
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Oooh, another fun GitHub List idea: open source personal websites 🔥
My collection so far:
Hit me with some more repo links!
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It's all fun and games until your product needs a notifications inbox.
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Seems like people interpreted my last tweet about this as being negative or inferring that I thought the update is bad. What I really meant though, was that I literally have questions about this. Here are my questions so far:
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Are any designers out there making good passive income outside of your day job? What are you trying?
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This company raised $400,000,000 two years ago and can't play a video on Safari.
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Campsite breaks down silos at work, and I'm beyond excited to continue building towards this vision with support and funding from many of the best designers, builders, and investors in the industry.
Onwards!
🏕️
We've raised $2.6m to break down silos at work 🏕️
Campsite helps teams:
• Follow progress on projects in a single feed
• Share async feedback across design, product, and engineering
• Cross-pollinate the best ideas and best-practices
Read more →
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Most landing pages these days are so obsessed with looking + sounding like Apple that they fail to actually describe what they even do. It's maddening.
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It's easy to mistake aesthetic quality for product quality. Many of the prettiest apps of the last decade no longer exist.
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Hot dang this is nice site — I love the background video with the gradient overlay.
Also
@samselikoff
is one of the best programming teachers in the game — I've been watching every YouTube video for the past while and learned so much 🔥
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Here's how the new Twitter hearts work - love the details!
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Here's a longer demo of a
@figmadesign
plugin I've been building.
This video shows color management, data population, dark mode conversion, and now auto-layout, all with just a few clicks. Really hyped on this!
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Dying at this email I just got from my father, a month after setting up his Coinbase account and convincing him to buy $NET 😭😂
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I'm working with several startups that are very hungry for founding designers / heads of design / senior++ product design talent. If you're even remotely considering taking a plunge into startup life, let me help you de-risk with intros to some of my favorite founders. DMs open.
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Working at GitHub is having a private repo with your manager, running weekly Actions to queue 1:1 notes as PRs, which then get merged as a running timeline of your conversations and notes. The future is now! 😂
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First version complete! Here it is:
This is a checklist for people who want to improve their online security and privacy. Hopefully it is approachable for anyone and can help people feel a bit safer online 😊
Finished today! Will do a bit more polish and release tomorrow - super fun weekend project 🥳
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I think today might be the perfect time for my startup, Facebook, to join an accelerator 🚀
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I made it.
I finally got a recruiting email for an engineering role at Meta.
Your lil product designer is all growed up.
🥲
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🏕️ I'm now working full-time on
@trycampsite
!
I'll be onboarding another ~50 companies next week — if you want to improve the visibility of your design team's work-in-progress, let's talk.
Reserve →
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i wrote a big post explaining how my personal website works, how much it costs, how the design affects traffic, building a social commenting system, and what i'll be working on next!
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Coming soon to GitHub for iOS, the new G1 Chip custom app icon! This was designed in collaboration with
@Gavmn
who knocked it out of the park – we are excited for more community collabs in the future 🥰
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Been remote for the last 2.5 years. Previously was commuting ~2 hours per day, 4 days per week, ~48 weeks per year.
~960 hours of not sitting in traffic.
Quality of life++
So far this year, I've saved ~360 hours commuting thanks to
#remotework
. I've spent the saved time:
- January-March: napping 😴
- April-June: planning 📆
- July-August: pondering 🧠
- September-?: practicing 📝
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Learned a ton about dark mode, elevation, contrast, and relative color when we were implementing this. One of my favorite parts was writing a
@figmadesign
plugin to auto-convert entire iOS and Android screens to dark or light mode so that I only had to mock things once 🌗
We couldn’t release Github for mobile without dark mode 🌚
Get all your code, mentions, and more in a night owl, eye-friendly version.
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This is my favorite component on the Stripe Billing page.
1. Autoplays to show different use cases
2. Interactive if you want to customize it yourself, pauses autoplay
3. Usable mobile fallback
4. Actual dom nodes for all text, no video/gif nonsense
5. Dat number tweening
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A common story I hear:
• PM leaves a team
• Designer steps up and fills that role temporarily, learns basics of PM, builds stronger xfn connections, gets some accountability, etc...
• Designer gets promoted
Don't let the lack of PM support hold you back.
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Loving the look and feel of the new wave of productivity tools – Linear, Height, Quill. All different in their own subtle ways, but there's a lot to learn here.
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For a few years I've maintained this list of helpful and inspiring product design portfolios for my own reference.
This weekend I went through and curated + added a bunch of new ones, in case it's useful for anyone doing research:
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Here's the written version of my talk from
@figmadesign
's Config, diving into automating product design workflows with plugins ⚙️⚡️
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the side project prophecy: the more you talk about building your side project, the less likely you are to ship it.
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Honestly though, what are designers supposed to do in portfolio reviews when all their past work is NDA'd or didn't ship due to factors outside of their control?
Have been meeting with a lot of designers in this situation and their frustration and confusion is so real.
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Pro tip for all you Safari users: you can right click on any DOM node in the inspector and grab a screenshot of that node. Doing this on the <html> tag gives you a full-page screenshot 🔥
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Couldn’t be happier to continue building products for online communities at GitHub! Truly: thank you to everyone who has been on board with us over the past year and a half ❤️
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If you aren't using
@sizzyapp
to test your web projects, you've goofed. This app saves me so much time manually resizing windows and toggling dev tool settings - plus, synchronized scrolling is straight magic 🧙♂️
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This should be the default behavior for every dropdown menu from now until the heat death of the universe.
Fun little detail that just landed in
@linear_app
:
When navigating in the contextual menu it’s now easier to move the mouse to sub-menus, since we paint out a little “safe area” between the cursor and the menu.
(The area is highlighted in the clip.)
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A bored PM at the 6th largest company on the planet: "why don't we ping a billion people to let them know that yes, indeed, they have used our service at some point?"
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Remember how much nobody cares about changes after like, 3 days?
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This is a very small thing. I recognize that it doesn't *really* matter.
But it makes me happy that online indicators work this way on
@trycampsite
🟢
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🌗 Here's a preview of a
@figmadesign
plugin I've been jamming on to automatically convert screens between light and dark mode. This works in conjunction with a separate color management plugin, which I'll try to share notes about soon!
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Spent this cold and rainy day tinkering on my personal site, trying to speed things up and make it a bit more fun. I like this interaction, in particular 🙃
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✍️ New post: How to give a great product design portfolio presentation
• Explain problem discovery and prioritization process
• Share specific stories about navigating tradeoffs
• Show iterations and outcomes
+ a few more best practices
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Just me, or is the current trend of animating every element on a page as it enters the viewport incredibly distracting?
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In the last three months we moved the Play Store rating for the GitHub Android app from 4.1 → 4.72 stars.
No secrets or hacks, the team just consistently showed up, fixed bugs, replied to reviews, and kept our polish bar high. Ridiculously cool to see this kind of progress 🌟
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