The Blog

Each and Every Day

I’m writing the beginning of this post in my head as I’m falling asleep. It’s just before midnight in early July. I’m exhausted. It’s wonderful. I should write about this process. 387 days of daily code commits. 198 days of daily design posts. Why am I doing this? What have I learned? How long can I keep this pace?

Brand in Public

In recent years, “build in public” has become a popular marketing and educational strategy for founders and early team members looking to bring awareness to their product creation process. It’s a nice way to let potential customers peak at upcoming features and updates, while also demonstrating an openness culture that can make people feel like the company values external input.

Own Your Work: Climbing out of the Walled Garden

I stumbled upon Dribbble (I’m pretty sure I mean literally, via StumbleUpon - a popular site/browser extension at the time, which guided users through the internet’s maze of links to uncover hidden gems that might otherwise remain relegated to a small following) while in college, and spent hours browsing the site. It was chockfull of beautiful, thoughtful, clever, and inspiring designs.

Maintaining Screenshot Quality and Color Profile in Figma

It's easy for a designer to misstep when bringing screenshots into their Figma project, updating the design and/or adding a device mockup, and then exporting the final image(s). Several of these missteps can occur in other design tools, but I'm highlighting Figma for this article, as it's currently the most popular design tool for product designers...

Defining “Quality”

Recently, CEO of Linear Karri Saarinen posed a few interesting questions on X. “What are the reasons companies fail to create quality products? Why are high-quality experiences so rare in the world?” I thought about this, and replied to his post...

5 Figma Features I'm Hoping for in 2025

A decade ago, Dylan Field and Evan Wallace were busy developing Figma, an obscure web application known only to a handful of VCs, designers, and engineers. Some designers got early access at the end of 2015, but the app wouldn't be released publicly until the following year. Today, it's the default application for millions of software designers creating UI/UX designs...

Launching Preview SMS

After months spent designing, redesigning, refining, scrolling Stackoverflow, making failed API calls, encountering build errors, and code rewrites later, I’m finally launching Preview SMS. Along with Preview SMS, I’m publishing the blog section of my personal site. You can read my previously written posts (only now going live) to retrospectively read about my process in building Preview SMS...

Selective Depth: Designing UI That Informs

There’s a resurgence of skeumorphism going on in UI design these days. Coined “new-morphism”, it’s the concept popularized by Apple in the early 2000’s to make interfaces that look like the real-world equivalent. Paper, felt, metal, water, and other materials found their way into UI design. It was an effort to put metaphors in front of users from real world objects...

The Preview SMS Stack

If you want to build software in a reasonable timeframe, you're likely going to need third-party services. Here are the technologies, services, and applications that I used to create Preview SMS. There is a lot made of technology stacks, what to do/not do, and which product/service combinations will yield the best results...

How Much Are Your Features Worth?

While I’m planning the features for Preview SMS, I’m also planning the split of which features will be available to all users, for no cost, and which features will only be accessible for paying users (whether they purchase 1 year subscription, or a lifetime of access). There’s a fine balance between making the free version so good that nobody bothers upgrading and hampering the free experience...

Just Tell Me When It's Live

I’ve seen too many products tease great animations, logos, “coming soon” landing pages, waiting lists, micro-interactions, etc. only to be either shut down before launch, delayed years, or altogether vanish without explanation. I hate this feeling. The excitement for vaporware is bad for the creator(s) and the consumers. In response to this, I’m not...

Most MVP’s Aren’t Enough

When I started creating Preview SMS, I imagined a quite small feature list and just enough functionality to prove that this concept is worth exploring. If I were working on a feature for a larger application that was already in existence, these line items (outside of the create initial react app step) would be a great start...

I'm Going To Build an App

As 2023 winds down, there is nearly constant discussion around AI changing our world. But my interest currently is in a technology that's decades old. That might seem backwards but there is a method to this madness. First, the technology in question. Short Message/Messaging Service or SMS...

Tuesday Was A Good Day: My Experience at Dribbble Hang Time LA 2018

4:50am: The first of four scheduled iPhone alarms goes off. I quickly toggle down the volume rocker and extinguish the first annoyance of the day. 4:59am: The snooze timer alerts me that while I did get those nine additional minutes of rest, now it’s time to make the decision...

10 Useful Adobe Illustrator Keyboard Shortcuts

Once you begin to get comfortable using Illustrator, you’ll likely want to do certain tasks faster. Whether it’s managing the type of view, resizing design elements, or quickly grouping objects, keyboard shortcuts can make your life much easier. There are often tasks that occur several dozen times throughout the design process that you’ll want to...