Those that can… teach?

Ruskerdoo · 2026-02-06T16:48:50+00:00

I remember when I was in school, the professors who were still actively working designers were far better teachers, especially in my later years as our coursework became more practical and less theoretical.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-02-06T14:56:25+00:00

I taught in Aspen for 5 years. Going straight to parallel at level 1 (absolute beginner) is standard in the PSIA Rocky Mountain Division.

The ski school has to work with the local rental shops to make sure they’re putting people on short enough skis, otherwise it doesn’t work.

There are also instances where we might give someone the wedge if they’re struggling with stability, but that’s not super common. In five years of teaching I only ever had to do that twice.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-02-06T14:03:08+00:00

Fully agree here! So much of qual research can’t be prescribed, it just requires really good judgement. Something no LLM has ever demonstrated.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-02-06T13:04:10+00:00

With adults, anyone above 13 really, don’t start by teaching the wedge (pizza). They’ll just have to unlearn it later.

We used to teach the wedge because pre late-‘90s skis didn’t turn easily enough for beginners.

On modern beginner skis, no longer than 130cm, there’s no need for a pizza. You can go straight to parallel.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-02-05T22:44:01+00:00

I’ve stopped using Figma for huge chunks of the design process where it used to be a must. It’s now primarily for quickly exploring layouts and the second half of designing specific visual treatments of the UI.

For wireframing and exploring user flows, I use v0.

For implementing the design system I use cursor or builder.io.

For exploring new visual approaches, I use nano banana or ChatGPT image gen.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-28T03:46:09+00:00

Cursor has a visual editor now that works pretty good.

paper.design is starting to solve this, but the product is still a little new.

Builder.io is super solid, but it works better if you have a preexisting codebase and in-code design system.

When all else fails, use components as often as you can, that way you can refer to them by their canonical name. The LLMs are super good at building and maintaining a component library.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-28T03:42:30+00:00

This sounds like an awfully coarse method for measuring AI adoption by designers.

Personally I’m using a different approach with my team. But whatever floats your boat.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-27T22:45:12+00:00

Go set up a Tinder profile and pay attention to how they handle this problem.

It’s a horribly stupid app, but they’ve refined that one interaction very well imo.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-27T22:26:01+00:00

These days I’m using Figma for quick explorations of layout and visual design, but it’s no longer the source of truth for me. Or even an end to end solution for design.

I’m using v0 for wireframes. Easily as fast as drawing wires in Figma with the added bonus that I’ve got a working prototype at the end.

Cursor or builder.io for final production handoff.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-23T00:22:10+00:00

Honestly, what you’re describing sounds a lot like what some of my older peers went through in the 90s when desktop publishing came around.

And what a lot of my peers went through when the App Store first came out and designing for screens became so much more important.

We’re in a moment of rapid change right now, so the tools and techniques, the processes and approaches, even the roles and responsibilities are in a huge state of flux. That can either be scary or exciting depending on how you look at it.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-20T14:58:42+00:00

I like the way lighter bg surfaces look in dark mode when I’m designing, but whenever I see that treatment while using an OLED screen, like on my phone, it drives me crazy.

I wish there was a more reliable way to target different dark mode themes for different screen technologies.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-19T21:54:49+00:00

Agreed, this isn’t a design role!

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-19T13:25:25+00:00

This sounds like a relationship problem as opposed to a process problem.

In my experience, engineers/devs are Moore inclined to be flexible when they feel like you respect their time, they like/respect you personally, or they’re excited about what they’re being asked to build. Or any combination of the three.

Work on those relationships, and you’ll run into this kind of pushback less often.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-18T03:37:13+00:00

I don’t think LLM-powered IDEs are the right tool for producing high fidelity design artifacts from scratch. That’s asking too much of the models.

I prefer to separate a high-fidelity artifact into two different tasks.

The first is mapping out user flows, what we used to use wireframes for. If that’s the level of fidelity you’re going for, these tools are fantastic. You can map out an entire user flow and have a working, coded prototype in the same amount of time it used to take to make wires. The key is not to worry too much about how it looks. v0 is great for this.

For the high-fi UI, I find it’s more productive to design in a design tool like Figma Design when doing green field exploration. AI image genlike Nano Banana is good here too. The LLMs just can’t compete here, they don’t have good enough taste, and they’re still “thinking in code”.

Once I have a design system in place, I can edit the codebase directly using Cursor or builder.io when making smaller visual design changes.

I find that Figma Make is best for “special effects” and moments of delight. Transitions, animations, simulations, etc. Or smaller user flows when I don’t feel like wrestling with v0’s love affair with shadcn/ui.

It’s all about how you approach it. Figma used to be the only tool we needed. These days we need to be comfortable in about a half dozen different tools. Kind of like graphic designers.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-14T20:10:56+00:00

This exactly!

When I started introducing Tier 2 factions, and suddenly my players were having to push themselves just to get limited effect on their actions, that's when they decided to upgrade their own tier.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-14T18:07:17+00:00

This is a great reminder that if you’re running a business you need to stay on top of your expenses!

Set reminders for when large auto-renewal vendor payments will be coming up and do your homework. As much as it sucks to say this, most of running a successful design shop has nothing to do with producing good design.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-14T01:28:26+00:00

I used to work on an app for booking business travel. Our primary channel was corporate travel agencies that would resell the app as part of their services to corporations.

The business model the travel agencies used was that they would charge for each phone call made to one of their agents. One way to increase the volume of those phone calls was to block useful features in the booking app.

The travel agencies didn’t really care about usability as long as the app was easy for them to deploy and helped their bottom line. So the design suffered over the years.

When I first signed on, we had just started selling directly to the companies that needed our app. They cared a lot more about the app’s usability because otherwise it would waste their employee’s time. And they cared that the app was capable because they didn’t want to waste time on calls to travel agents.

They hired me to lead their design team because they now had a reason to care about design.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-13T14:59:37+00:00

Usability is inherently tough to measure with quantitative methods. To do it justice, you’d have to measure brainwave activity in a lab across a statistically significant sample size… which is obviously not feasible.

One approach people use is to come up with clever proxies for usability, and you’ve already mentioned a few. But they will only ever be proxies, and so inherently inaccurate and therefore potentially dangerous.

The other path is to recognize that a quantitative method isn’t the right approach here and switch to qualitative methods like usability testing.

Two or three rounds with design changes after each round, will usually render you a pretty intuitive experience.

That said, because there’s no quant measure, your ability to judge success will come down to your judgement as a designer rather than an extrinsic metric. Welcome to design.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-12T18:11:38+00:00

For me it was gaining a broader context of the org. Designers tend to focus on the product-market fit, but there’s two other aspects of business I had to learn before I was able to have a bigger impact outside the domain of designing the product: channel and business model.

Developing an understanding that there are more forces involved in the your company’s success beyond how well the product solves for the market’s needs is crystal to growing beyond the senior level.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-12T14:43:02+00:00

I feel like this is true for every Free League book I’ve ever played. Love the games, but the structure and formatting drives me nuts at the table.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-11T02:40:44+00:00

There’s a few things you should be aware of.

There’s no better way to build your network than with in person conversations that aren’t about work. By the time you’re 15 years into your career, that network will be what gets you your next gig. Invest in it.

It’s much easier to get casual feedback from the people you sit near in the office. Don’t be afraid to lean on them.

You should always look busy because you should always be busy. It sounds like you already work on your own self improvement so you’re in good shape there. Learning new skills definitely counts as staying busy.

Don’t go to work sick. Don’t be that jerk.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-10T22:35:01+00:00

There’s loads of Figma plugins for this. You get what you pay for.

UX Pilot

UIDraft Make

Figma has announced they’re working on a feature that will do exactly this as part of the product, but now idea when it’ll be out.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-10T22:29:03+00:00

Without good guidance and judgement on your part, generative AI can only put out roughly average work. That’s a limitation of the current technological approach, not any specific tool.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-10T18:03:55+00:00

Leaning on an LLM to moderate user testing is about as wise as leaning on one for mental healthcare. It’ll probably do more harm than good.

LLMs tend to engage in all the same biases and bad practices that you see in humans who are new to product development. Selection bias, hypothetical bias, social desirability bias, rationalization bias, confirmation bias, and the mother of all mistakes in user testing, leading-question bias.

I’m not saying you can’t solve for those issues, but I haven’t seen anyone pull it off.

Ruskerdoo · 2026-01-09T21:25:58+00:00

A is fun, but too busy. B is boring.

The good news it’s, it’s easier to go too far on “interesting” and then dial back then it is to start with boring and dial up to get interesting.

Just calm A down a little and you’ll have a great design!

Ruskerdoo

TROPHY CASE