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Hey, I’m Brian.

I’m a product designer, podcaster, and writer, currently living in San Francisco. Right now I’m building native mobile apps at GitHub.

Writing

I like to think out loud about design, development, and building products.

This post aims to outline the characteristics of software that we believe determine its fundamental quality.

Updated 1 week ago

Rebuilding my self-hosted blog with Next.js and Ghost as a headless CMS.

Updated 2 weeks ago

How adding just-for-me authentication cascaded into new ideas and possibilities for play.

Updated 2 weeks ago

A living list of useful and inspiring product design portfolios.

Updated 2 weeks ago

In the spirit of over-complicating the hell out of my personal website, I spent time this weekend trying to solve one very small and seemingly-simple problem: can I make my website know when I am viewing it?

Updated 3 weeks ago

Fun Projects

Little weekend hacks for fun and learning.

Internet things, saved for later.

Ask me anything.

A better Hacker News.

Design Details Podcast

Design Details is a weekly conversation about design process and culture. I’ve been a co-host on the show for over five years.

This week, we share some tips for getting unstuck when working on complicated design problems. We also share our home screen organization philosophies in The Sidebar, catch up on Tweets, and share our cool things as always.

Released 3 days ago

This week, we talk about how to overcome skill gaps. What should you do if you are bad at visual design? What if you can't make icons? Should you play into strengths or develop upon your weaknesses? We explore these topics, and more!

Released 1 week ago

This week, we discuss the characteristics of high quality software. We do our best to organize and outline things to pay attention to that will help you ship better software. This, plus a Sidebar discussing how to handle negative feedback from customers, and cool things as always!

Released 2 weeks ago

This week, we discuss what it means to have and develop taste. From software to fashion, styles change, trends come and go, so what does it mean to be tasteful? In The Sidebar, we discuss the hacker mindset and building for an audience of one. This, plus cool things like a handy iPhone app and a killer new VR game!

Released 3 weeks ago

This week, we try to figure out the right time to give up on a fight when collaborating with stakeholders who have different opinions and priorities. We also cover a lot of feedback this week, discuss new design resources in The Sidebar, and share our cool things of the week.

Released 1 month ago

Figma plugins

There’s a lot of work in the design process that is boring, tedious, and repetitive. I like to make plugins to help automate it away.

Generate a palette from an image to magically populate your designs.

Responsify

Quickly test your designs across multiple device sizes.

iOS Export Settings

Applies the correct export settings for every required iOS App Icon size and density.

Export .zip

Easily export assets from Figma directly into a .zip file.

GitHub Data

Populate data from GitHub into Figma mocks

Open source work

The code that powers designdetails.fm.

The code that powers this website you’re looking at.

A checklist for staying safe on the internet.

Simple, powerful online communities.

A podcast network to help designers and developers level up.

Speaking and interviews

Ryan Nystrom and I talk about designing and building the mobile apps at GitHub.

An exploration into the plugins I built to automate the tedious parts of designing mobile apps at GitHub.

Exploring the possibilities that open up when designers and developers can speak the same language.

An interview about how I got into design, my process, and past work.

Bryn Jackson and I interviewed each other. Totally humble.

App Dissection

In-depth explorations of visual and interaction design in well-known apps.