Tom Johnson
@tomjohndesign
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prev - Founding designer @basedash. Maker of https://t.co/v2OkqJ5IOg. Husband of @joylynnlife. I dream in dither.
Nashville, TN
Joined September 2012
Weekends aren’t meant for pixels
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It’s wild that a trip I’ve been planning for years with some of my closest college friends happens to coincide with the weekend I make a huge career shift.
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new little feature in Paper: hold shift while using the eye dropper to add the color into a gradient
@sdothaney @figma @paper @framer Yes, or something along those lines. Less about an existing gradient, more about gradient creation. Like I don't want to swap a fill to a gradient, I want to hold something that make the eyedropper become the thing that adds a new stop to my fill, making it into a gradient.
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Anyhow, I'll close this out. Just gonna ramble into my mic for a second and hopefully @WillowVoiceAI can transcribe it all the way. I joined Basedash originally because I wasn't sure if I was good at design, and looking back five years ago, I probably wasn't. There was a ton of
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But you know what? I'd still probably do it all over again. That was a fun project. Check out what it looks like inside of the actual product. We have a full-blown vintage macOS theme for the app that someday can be turned into just normal TV mode. Pretty cool.
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And then.... And then nothing. Three were lost in transit. One was damaged. Two, I'm never sure if they actually made it. One was sent back from Canada. Had to be reshipped. One was sent to an old address, so someone random in San Francisco has one of these. And I don't know
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And then I had to put them all in custom boxes with custom inserts and custom foam, assemble them, and then ship them.
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And then I had to assemble them all. Glue them together. Heck, I even had to grind down the weights because the quality control is so bad that the size of the slot I had for the 3D print didn't match the sizes of different weights.
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And we also have custom floppy drives that I found that are also USB drives. So of course I had to make custom labels. A lot of custom labels.
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And some more printing. All with the goal of sending them to people who we thought were making credible software. People who went and inspired us, either through their quality of work or their aesthetic choices, or who were pushing back and making things that were uncommonly
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And bought a screen on Amazon and started doing some testing. And some printing.
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And since we were working on dashboards, I had this idea. I said, what if we made that, but specifically for Basedash? What if we made a monitor that was old school, retro, and there was a mode for our application that worked on that viewport? So I modeled it.
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This was where it started. A simple tweet from Guillermo Rauch about how he has charts on his desk with a Temu monitor. https://t.co/QShtC7p2Xi
I purchased a Temu mini external monitor to display company and product metrics at all times on my desk. AMA (Tungsten tetrahedron for scale)
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And then there's Macindash. The project I had SUCH high hopes for. And that I've shared very little about... because, well... because it didn't really amount to much. https://t.co/YH2ZNL4z9m
basedash.com
The Macindash is is a personal metrics display. Handmade, remixable, and rebuildable.
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I almost forgot about state of databases. For two years, we surveyed about 2,000 people about database tools. Solicited their feedback, aggregated it, and built a couple websites with the data. I pushed @TallyForms to the absolute limit with some of these surveys. This data
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I've connected with some absolutely incredible people because and with these portraits. @reijowrites @dannyjpwilliams @colderoshay @designertom_ @ridd_design @wking__ @derkolstad @sdothaney @aidanhornsby @jonminori @jdsimcoe @igarcido @JohnPhamous @mxdelacruz to name a few.
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@figma Oh, and then there's Ditherface. Wow, I couldn't have predicted what this small project would do for me. These started as just portraits for the team for our About Us page. And then while we were in the middle of a pivot, they turned into something I could use to compensate
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@figma Edit and ask states for AI selection, to allow the AI to not just be involved in the creation process, but also in digging into data and doing complex analysis. Why did this tick up? Who signed up? When? What's the spike in traffic? Etc.
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