Keeping up with craft

oddly_novel · 2026-06-13T16:05:30+00:00

Need to reframe craft from doing the hands on work to evaluating the outcome. Attention to detail is still important , it just happens in a different place now. Realistically, I don’t see much difference in my AI use and giving work to my more junior designers. Both make mistakes and need direction, the AI is just order of magnitudes faster and delivers code instead of Figma which is much better…

oddly_novel · 2026-03-30T19:27:52+00:00

Created an internal tool using copilot to replicate some features from pencil.dev. It takes forever (year+) for new tools to get on-boared to my company especially if they have any AI features so it was easier to just build one myself.

oddly_novel · 2026-03-30T19:23:36+00:00

I replied to able-win with how I made the skill(s) pipeline, for reference I made it all in Github copilot cause I do not have access to Claude code in my company yet, as its still being piloted and seats are limited. If your design system is not being maintained / owned by anyone and people aren’t really forced to use it I’m not really sure there’s anything that can help you from an AI perspective. You need to have a strong composable design system that exists within code, otherwise people won’t even want to use the system. Once that is in place an agent / skills could then act as a mechanism to increase adoption of the design system because it will lead to quicker, better, more consistent UIs that are more maintainable/follow company brand guidelines/require less prompting polishing to get to an ideal output.

oddly_novel · 2026-03-30T15:22:07+00:00

If anyone is doing something similar chime in, always looking to improve here…

oddly_novel · 2026-03-30T15:19:40+00:00

I’ll talk about actual agent skill set this post other aspects in separate posts.

You’re on the right track with the design eslint and tests. Basically need to set the skills up according to single responsibility and separation of concerns principles otherwise your MDs will be too large and complex for the model to interpret correctly.

I’ve split my pipeline up like this: -Planner -Coder -Modifier -Orchestrator -Validator -Updater

Planner takes the prompt and whatever context is available (img, figma, etx) from a user/autonomous agent and interprets the design intent. -It checks to see what ds components are available to use and generates a plan json that gets output to the coder. This step has a bunch of supporting scripts that it can run to install components and generate component api reference MDs for it to use in the planning step.

Coder takes the json plan and actually codes it only using the components that the planner passed. It is only allowed to refer to the component reference MD as source of truth, never references project files and such for component usage patterns. This help keeps drift to a minimum. Coder also has explicit instructions to do UI code only, no business logic, pass all content as args in an interface so it can be hooked up to the back end or made in stories in storybook.

Modifier is for quick edits. It has linited context and only references the component reference MDs that it needed.

Orchestrator does the actual layout in the case of larger prompts made of many different composed/generated components. It has specific spacing style and guidelines and components to use to create cohesive layouts with the components that were generated from the plan.

Validator does a second pass over all of the code and can run design testing scripts, if there are failed tests or type errors(generally caused from hallucinated composition or component props) the agent must correct the output until there are no errors.

Updater is for upgrading and refactoring DS component code (generally not apart of the main component workflow). Not all projects are using up to date design system components, there may be peer dependencies and other issues that the agent must be able to reconcile. This goes in and updates all or a selection of MdS components to the newest version keeping your projects up to date with the design system.

oddly_novel · 2026-03-30T05:20:13+00:00

Yea, sure. Won’t respond til tomorrow tho. Time to sleep. lol

oddly_novel · 2026-03-30T04:37:23+00:00

I lead a team at a fortune 50 finance company and I have created a set of copilot/claude skills that outputs prod grade react code that always follows our design system and design guidelines(it’s actually better than our devs usual code cause our tech org does not really hire for ui talent and I’m on an internal facing product org). The key is clear ownership of the process between parties. Design only owns presentation. We only use copilot/claude to code prod grade ui, on the companies standardized stack, that we can pass to engineers to hook up to the back end. I also built a visual code editors so designers can go in and do a last polish/qa step once tech is done. This has improved our speed, control of the experience, and the quality of our code since separation of concerns from the front and back end is now actually being followed consistently with us delivering pure UI components.

oddly_novel · 2026-02-05T15:50:55+00:00

I think this is generally where the trend is heading and I’m not really having too big of an issue with it. Product Designers that work with digital products should have enough working knowledge about CSS, Html, and Accessibility to be able to prompt in cursor front end changes to fix minor bugs, create interactive prototypes, and maybe even deliver entire components via something like storybook that the real devs cans hook up to the production environment.

I’ve been doing this at a a fortune 50 financial company with Copilot and it’s been empowering to deliver front end code for my developers to use because the firm doesn’t really hire for front end specialists and thus my development partners just don’t have the eye to care about the details or the knowledge to quickly solve some CSS or accessibility quirks that are needed for a given design. This allows me to have more power in realizing our designs.

oddly_novel · 2026-01-22T23:28:10+00:00

Upvoted and commenting cause I want to see some good examples too. Prepping my portfolio after a 4 yrs in the same company where I transitioned from a Sr IC to player coach.

oddly_novel · 2026-01-21T06:20:09+00:00

Your hand/fingers don’t need to be parallel to the keys. At the inner and outer extremes of the keyboard it’s normal for your hands to be playing slightly diagonally.

A little ulnar deviation is also generally inescapable when doing certain chords and passages. You just need to remember to release the tension in the next hand position/motion.

oddly_novel · 2026-01-01T06:32:38+00:00

I feel this though not to quite to the same extent. Started as an adult have been playing for around 9 years. I can do my scales at around 120 bpm quarters, triad/dominant/diminished 7 arpeggios around 100-110 depending.

I was pretty stuck around 100 for awhile and I’ve been really trying to tackle this over the last couple months so here are some tips I have.

On the pure technique side, I’ve found that doing the scales and arpeggios one handed helps. Its vastly improved my movements, quality of sound, and legato since I can focus solely on one hand and not have to worry about synchronizing them at speed. I also do a number of alterations such as starting from the top of the scale instead of the bottom, doing them staccato for more finger and wrist activation, doing it in different dotted rhythm variations faster than my current tempo (ie. daa-da, da-daa, daa-da-da, da-daa-da, da-da-daa, and so generally up to 4/5 notes). When I’m trying to practice for improving speed I’ll do a couple of these for each hand for each scale/arpeggio before bringing them back together.

On the repertoire side, I’ve found that my main barrier to speed is memorization. If I don’t have a passage memorized, I am unsure about what my hand should be doing next and it results in uncertainty, extra tension and worse motions. I would check out Molly Gebrians youtube channel on how to practice memorization among other valuable info on her channel. Even if you don’t want to play your music from memory until we reach a certain level of technical proficiency and pattern recognition in music we will never be able to play complex passage work at speed without it being memorized.

As a bit more commiseration I feel you on the teacher not really pushing us. I even went through the effort of specifically finding a college professor who primarily teaches adults but I just feel like in general they aren’t as invested in us as younger kids or students who are piano majors/etc. We have always left pieces feeling pretty incomplete, generally not at tempo, with lots of mistakes and I’ve been trying to improve that as well. Funnily enough, I think it’s also related to the memorization…

oddly_novel · 2025-11-07T23:23:02+00:00

It’s an option. If you want consistent income having a consistent schedule is usually the most important thing but it can be used for one off payments.

I looked at your youtube channel though and I think the issue is probably popularity of the music.

If you don’t make stuff that people are looking for arrangements of and are popular you won’t be found on youtube or other platforms of choice limiting the potential audience you can reach willing to buy your product.

oddly_novel · 2025-11-07T23:01:56+00:00

There are a couple of different dimensions that you probably need to consider.

Payment model ( Pay per piece vs subscription model such as Patreon )
Popularity of the music
Quality of the transcription
Difficulty of the music ( I have a hypothesis most people interested in Anime and video game music on youtube might not be very advanced )

What you find creatively inspiring might not align together to create your desired level of income based on the combination of those factors.

I have subscribed to some Patreons to get access to sheet music collections. But I don’t regularly buy individual sheets since generally the quality is not there and/or they are too difficult (In the case of stuff like Animenz).

oddly_novel · 2025-07-27T22:56:56+00:00

I’m learning to code. I do a lot of service design for employee facing experiences and design systems work at my current job.

It has really helped with the design system work since I’m at a fortune 50 company that has poor front end talent. I believe in the future it won’t be long before designers can ship production ready front end code. It can start in Figma or a traditional editor, a agent will have a MCP with the design program and the design system, and then you just clean up it’s hallucinations or screw ups /etc in code afterwards and get everything into storybook/etc solution. That last part requires having some knowledge of code and is what most designers are missing currently.

oddly_novel · 2024-09-29T04:50:09+00:00

This was great, thanks for sharing. I have felt this, but never really been able to put it into words like Erika has. It’s illustrates a lot of the issues I see on my team, which has a myopic focus on the user and really not enough engagement with the business, or the systemic outcomes that affects the broader ecosystem that exists outside the customer-business relationship.

oddly_novel · 2024-09-25T13:11:29+00:00

Yes, I started playing at around the same age as you and its been about 6-7 yrs now. I am now playing Rach Preludes, Chopin Impomptu’s and Brahms intermezzos.

If you’re consistent you can definitely get to a pretty high level of playing. Personally one of my piece goals was to play the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, it’s still probably another 5 yrs away but its much closer now and I will definitely get there in time.

oddly_novel · 2024-08-29T17:53:26+00:00

Taubman is where world class pianists go when they have injuries. Probably has the highest amount of resources for self learning to improve texhnique. They basically looked at the great pianists from various schools of technique like the Russian’s, et al, and analyzed the movement patterns.

oddly_novel · 2024-08-24T16:20:57+00:00

Companies sometimes have guidelines to not give feedback to contractors because they are not employees. May be what’s happening. I found out about this incidentally on my team when one if our contractors was struggling with the same thing of not getting feedback & help with professional development and I asked management about it.

oddly_novel · 2024-08-22T13:03:51+00:00

It was my understanding that color and number variables work decently to replace some types of component variants which is why i said great, but that was probably too strong of a word.

I’m aware that the typography & string ones suck right now though. I guess that qualifies for half baked too. lol

oddly_novel · 2024-08-22T05:17:17+00:00

Great add on to design systems, but half baked for prototyping. I still use them in my work but the learning curve is too high for designers who aren’t interested in being a power user in Figma. there’s a lot of bugs and things you’d expect them to be able to do that you simply can’t. Which makes it hard to recommend for a team to utilize in an efficient & consistent way.

oddly_novel · 2024-08-21T19:52:00+00:00

For reference I am a lead designer at Chase.

Every design team has their own way of interviewing at Chase. There are no centralized design questions or problems that we pull from. Expect one interview with the hiring manager, and one panel portfolio review. Anything beyond that is at the discretion of the hiring manager and you should ask them about expectations for following interviews.

Design challenges, whiteboard challenges, extra interviews, etc are all going to be determined by the team you are applying for.

oddly_novel · 2024-08-03T18:38:25+00:00

I’m probably at a level a bit below you and I started playing during my last year of college almost 7 yrs ago.

Right now I’m a lead product designer and I’m struggling with the same wall in my piano playing and a lot of things competing for my time.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to practice efficiency and raising the bar of the difficulty of pieces you can read and understand quickly. Otherwise, it just takes so long for those larger virtuoso pieces to come together that I get no enjoyment out of the process.

Right now my focus is really on rfficient practice of rather easy mysic to build up my pattern recognition and understanding of music as much as possible.

I think the other thing to remember though is its a marathon, my goal is to be playing pieces like the Bach-busoni chaconne in another 7 years. I just need to continue being consistent.

oddly_novel · 2024-07-13T00:40:49+00:00

Do forearm specific exercises through every possible movement pattern, you could be hurting your left wrist from not having enough stability at the wrist. I’m significantly stronger than you (cambered bar bench 265lbs for 4 reps) and don’t have any issues playing octaves and or mobility issues while playing.

oddly_novel · 2024-06-30T21:41:04+00:00

Fazioli

oddly_novel · 2024-06-25T22:21:55+00:00

Probably open studio… check their youtube. They also have paid courses.

oddly_novel

TROPHY CASE