Gabriel Valdivia
@gabrielvaldivia
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Fractional design partner for early-stage teams · investor → @trycampsite · prev → @patreon , @cnn , @google , @facebook
Brooklyn, NY
Joined April 2008
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Sketch pro tip: appending "c" scales from center, "r" right, "l" left, "t" top, "b" bottom.
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Shared this video with my students as a canonical example of what masterful interaction design can be. They literally gasped. 🤯
Our goal is to create the wallet you'll enjoy using every day. That’s why we pour so much time and effort into making every last detail feel delightful. Here’s a quick look at something you'll likely do quite often: sending tokens. 🌎
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The best designers have ‘good taste’, which is so hard to convey in design portfolios, especially in the era of cookie-cutter case studies, design systems, icon packs, and website templates. What have you found are the best ways to convey good taste in a portfolio?
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This is the closest thing to an Iron Man UI I’ve seen so far
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[THREAD]
To folks starting out in design, here’s 8️⃣ little tricks to navigate your career as you start the new year.
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iPhone 7 Plus Portrait versus Google Pixel Lens Blur, respectively.
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We recently rented a place with a backyard that’s a bit unkempt and we want to make it a livable space. The catch: I’ve never done any gardening or yard work before. So I thought I’d chronicle our journey here
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@gabrielvaldivia
here's another take, this time with a steadier hand. iPhone first, then Pixel.
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Launch day!🕺🏻
Toxic comments can ruin a conversation online. Today we’re releasing Tune, an experimental Chrome Extension that helps you control what toxic comments you see. Try it out here:
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So many design problems can be resolved by using hierarchy to reduce the number of choices a user makes at any given time.
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A sharp articulation:
🌝 Design — Build the right thing.
🌚 Eng — Build the thing right.
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Teehan+Lax → Facebook, Ueno → Twitter, Rally → Stripe. Who's today's great product design studio?
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Just discovered this CSS gem and got unreasonably excited:
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Am I the only one who chooses which wine bottle to buy based exclusively on the label design?
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Design systems question: should you name icons based on what they are (pencil) or what they do (edit)?
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Some personal news ~
This is my first week as Head of Design at
@ourcanopy
. We're building a privacy-first personalized recommendations architecture optimized for delight and healthier digital habits.
Good morning, some exciting news to share with you:
@smit
and
@gabrielvaldivia
have joined our team! 🤠 Read more on our blog:
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We're joining
@CNN
! Excited to bring all of Canopy's people, culture, and values to rethink the news experience at the world's biggest news platform. 🥂
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Some personal news — after an incredible 3 years at Patreon, I’ve decided to go all in on what I do best: partnering with founders and early-stage teams as a fractional design leader. More below 👇
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Personal news: Nov 17 is my last day at Facebook. After 4 wonderful years surrounded by incredible people, it’s time to try something new.
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Took the weekend to update my portfolio using
@framer
(really impressive tool, highly recommend) —
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And just like that, today was my last day at Facebook. Exciting stuff to come, but for now I get to be unemployed for a couple weeks. Let me know if you want to hang before I leave SF! ✌️
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I wrote an essay about where I see design heading based on the last two years of designing for AR/VR. Read with caution though, remember the wise words of Lao Tzu: "Those who have knowledge, don't predict. Those who predict, don't have knowledge."
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Design is a cleanup job. Start with a blank canvas, make a mess, then clean it up. That's it, that's the job.
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It's easy to be critical of design but can we take a second and recognize that this shit is hard and most of us are trying our darnest? I've been so inspired by the work that so many of you do every day. Keep fighting the good fight. ✊🏻✊🏼✊🏽✊🏾✊🏿
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Today we get to show the world what we've been working on at
@ourcanopy
and it's called
@tonic_app
. Tonic is a decidedly simple little app: every day we give you a selection of personalized reads to inspire and delight. That's it. That's the app.
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Introducing Vectors, a talk series that explores how identity impacts work, communities, and the world at large —
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The Ouroboros Principle: The longer you work at a company, the more your knowledge of that company’s history, processes, and relationships becomes your primary contribution to the company.
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I hereby coin these as Ridiculous Redesigns. Unlike the Unsolicited Redesign, the Ridiculous Redesign is pure joy. More of these please.
Instagram but your bank account balance is shared every time you post.
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Redesigning my website because 2021 and...oh man I hate the mobile web! Seems like that the only sensible layout route is inevitably to stack shit on top of each other.
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I took some time during pat leave to redesign my portfolio, this time joyfully built with
@framer
:
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Think beyond design; jobs and the experience you crave will come. Read more philosophy, go outside more, fall in love, play pickup basketball, grow out your hair, don’t stop figure drawing, flirt with more waitresses, spend more money, document everything.
Designers: graduation season is coming up. What advice would you give your younger self, if you were a new grad designer in the field again?
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I’ve learned that so much of working remotely is about good, written communication. Here are a few tips I’ve found have worked for me. 🧵👇
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I love building a Minimum Viable Design System™ at the beginning of every project. It's a great way to approach designs holistically, it speeds me up a ton, and makes handoff so much easier.
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Went a little nuts last week (during vacation) and started to catalog a bunch of random things in my mind, like: ideas to start a company, everyone I’ve ever worked with, everything I’ve ever designed, and what next year could look like… 😳 I’m okay. Everything’s okay.
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Excited to finally share the result of the hard work from the entire Facebook VR Design team: Facebook Spaces!
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I’m so excited to introduce you to what I’ve spent my nights and weekends on for the past few months:
@makeshiftbk
— a new kind of co-working studio made for NYC designers to connect and grow with each other.
👉
👇1/7 Thread
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I’ve sat through hundreds of portfolio presentations. I usually walk away with the same takeaway after a presentation from someone who comes from a Big Tech company: what did they do?!
I think there are two reasons for this:
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Free AI idea (👀
@figma
): let me record a prototype and instead of showing the 2D phone with a circle cursor tapping around, spit out a video like this with a finger tapping instead of the cursor. Bonus points if you can get ChatGPT to narrate it sampling
@alexcornell
’s voice.
We’ve made it as easy as possible to swap tokens right from within Family, with quotes that update in real-time and clear ways to track your swap from start to finish. You can even see the path your swap took to get from A → B, if you’re ever curious. 🔄
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THIS is how you apply for a job 💪
Hey
@twitter
, so sports are a pretty big deal here. It's in the moment, people are passionate about it, and want to experience it together. Here's a cool idea on how bring people together for conversation around it.
Introducing: 🏀✨ Gametime ✨🏀
🔽 THREAD 🔽
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The rare case where a label is not better than an icon
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Today is my last day at Google and Jigsaw. It's been an incredible year and a half. I've learned so much and am so grateful for the opportunity.
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Junior designers: check out
@dariofigs
portfolio for pointers on how to present your work.
Design managers: offer this kid a job!
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I want a dribbble-like platform where designers can only upload loom-like walkthroughs of their designs — no static images. They must also pick from a list of "types of feedback" they're looking for when uploading, with no option that resembles "general thoughts" or "other"
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I'm excited to announce — not a VR Bible but a living, transparent home for our learnings thus far.
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These are great! But they highlight how different the job is in Big Tech™ (convince people to get something out the door) versus Startups (ship something that matters). Some tips that are shockingly missing from the list:
"What traits differentiate the best IC designers that you've worked alongside in your career?"
I asked this question to
@Soengle
@maheen_sohail
and
@brian_lovin
👀
Here are my 7 takeaways 👇
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If you work at a big tech corp and somehow find yourself begrudgingly attending an interview loop, remember that this is likely the candidate's biggest day of their life.
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Sketch pro tip: Save profile pictures as a pattern to easily access them anywhere.
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What’s your favorite app that stands out for its craftsmanship?
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This is exactly how I felt 6 years ago when I transitioned to VR, but I was wrong. Turns out innovation is a distraction (for me). There’s nothing boring about making people’s lives better through design, regardless of platform.
designing apps for phones has become so boring
feels like there’s nothing left to invent, most of it is just “which of these 4 patterns do i want to use today”
🥱
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I want a podcasting app for people. Instead of subscribing to shows, I wanna subscribe to [Bo Burnham] and get a feed of all his interviews across different shows.
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After a brief but enlightening stint at Daydream, tomorrow will be my first day at
@Jigsaw
— an Alphabet incubator that looks at how technology can make an impact on both physical and digital safety, focused on vulnerable users and communities.
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Using
@FacebookOrigami
to prototype a random idea I had 3 years ago to make contacts more expressive. Thoughts?
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📱 The iPhone was introduced more than 13 years ago. Since then, the mobile vernacular has evolved considerably and we've grown to expect much more from it. Here are 10 adjectives I expect from mobiles apps in 2020 (Thread)
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Truly do not understand this point of view. Auto-Layout makes me 10x faster, especially on iterations 2-10. Do we people really have perfect vision to align elements by eye?!
Designers realizing they can do their work three times faster without using auto-layout
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That wallpaper is so clever and disingenuous in its attempt to hide the notch that it might be genius
#AppleEvent
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This is the best tutorial I've found for VR interactions in Unity without code by
@snickersnax
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New year, new website. This time I focused a bit more on layout and hosting my writing.
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I've been keeping a public log for a few years now at . It's a way to keep myself accountable. even though this year has been filled with deeply personal change, I wish I had more public facing impact. Something to keep in mind for 2020. How was your 2019?
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It��s rare to encounter something legitimately new and interesting on mobile. “How did they think of that?” “How did they build that?” This app did just that while visualizing time in a way I’ve been wanting for a while 👏 👏 👏
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The more I think about it, I realize minimalism comes from a position of privilege. Owning only what you need assumes that you can easily acquire what you *will* need.
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Wishful Design Thinking™: Updated my portfolio to display my writing as if I was a published author (I'm not... yet 😏)
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Wow. The D.D.P. in Seoul felt like stepping into the future!
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A piece of advice: you are a lot more than what you do, so don't let that get in the way of who you want to be.
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@rogie
@figmadesign
I'd love it if child frames defaulted to "fill container" when I group them into a parent auto-layout-ed frame
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Today is the day I hit 9k followers on twitter dot com. My guess is that, at most, 1% of you actually care about what I have to say. I'll call you The Naughty Ninety.
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Watch this when you’re stressed out
Imagine believing we’re significant in any way whatsoever.
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Happy to finally launch Facebook 360, an exciting new place to discover and enjoy 360 photos and videos on Gear VR.
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After nearly 2 years of dancing the player/coach waltz and now that the design team is 15 (a far cry from the 3 designers we were when I started), I'm excited to lean into the work as a principal designer working on an exciting 0→1 project at
@Patreon
.
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This is one of the coolest projects I’ve seen in a long time 🤤
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My grandma keeps accidently going live on Facebook. This time with a magnifying glass 😂
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Today we celebrated the launch of our new navigation, design system, and insights tab across our NY and SF offices. A huge, collaborative effort across many teams at
@Patreon
, setting the foundation for what’s to come! 😌
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Rule of thumb:
When communicating within a team, avoid saying "we" — it implies conversations are happening that others are not privy to.
When communicating outside a team, avoid saying "I" — the team is responsible for all decisions made.
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8️⃣ Be generous — Always give more than you take. Solve more problems than you create. In the end, you’ll look back and be reminded that leaving a dent in the universe happens in billions of tiny little ways. Play your part and enable others to leave their tiny little dents too.
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One trick I've learned for conducting productive meetings: 📄 Open a blank doc and 🖥 share your screen, then ✍️ document what's being discussed into ✔️ bulleted lists.
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Thinking about experimenting with a design apprenticeship. Basically: invite junior folks to help with small design tasks and in exchange they get exposure to how I work, feedback, coaching, and real life experience. Would anyone be interested in something like this?
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Stumbled into this
@FacebookOrigami
prototype I made a year ago at
@ourcanopy
exploring what
@tonic_app
could feel like, back when we cranked up the gooeyness to 11 📱
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BS ALERT: If you hear someone mention “gamification” they likely have no idea how to solve the problem.
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I’ve spent the last few months working on a side project focused around growing a local design community in NYC. I can’t wait to share it with y’all next week!!
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The iPad pointer’s size is......................19 PTS?!!?!?
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Cleaned up my space because we are now several decades into this pandemic. Show me yours 🧘🏻♂️
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Made a silly little patch in
@FacebookOrigami
to easily prototype a parallax effect on hover. Hope it's useful!
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After going independent 3 months ago, I’ve been fortunate to have worked with 8 clients in new (to me) industries like AI, productivity, publishing, sports, and fashion. 2024 is going to be a helluva year 🤠
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Being artifact-first and optimizing for speed are the two main levers I encourage every designer to pull with their work. The world is slow and complicated. Make it fast and simple.
New episode on storytelling and designing 0 to 1 experiences w/
@gabrielvaldivia
is live 🎊
Listen here 👉
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Today is my last day at CNN. What a year to be a part of a news org! Learned a lot and grateful for the experience. Excited for what this year has to offer!
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BREAKING: Today my son had his biggest blowout yet while on my lap during a zoom call, so I had to pause to clean him up, then I came back to finish the meeting only to realize I had literal poop on my shoulder the whole time.
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360 Photos are live! You can now share those panos sitting in your camera roll! 🎉
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If you follow me and you appreciate my work, please remember that everything I've ever done has been the result of a collaboration with other people. Literally anything: you name it, other people deserve the credit.
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I made a patch for Origami Studio to easily position elements in a 3D sphere. Go here if you wanna grab it for free:
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