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- [00:00]
A
If I told you someone had a background as a senior designer at Uber, Dropbox, Cruise, Apple, Patreon, I mean, you'd be pretty impressed, right? But more impressive than any of that is starting your own thing from scratch. So this episode with Adam Nofsinger is all about going 0 to 1 as a new design founder. I mean, Adam even walks us through his Figma file for Alma and talks about all of the different ways that his personal design process has evolved. So let's start by hearing how life has changed now that he's no longer working at a big company.
- [00:31]
B
A tale as old as time. You know, you work at large tech companies and you're focused on, like, a very small slice of things. Generally, if you're really lucky, which, honestly I have been, you get to work on, like, some big initiatives. So, like, at Uber, it was like working on the redesign of the Uber app. At Patreon, most recently, it was like, working on the redesign of that app. And you're really lucky if you get those opportunities at, like, a big company and you got to, like, work to position yourself to, like, be able to work on those kinds of things. That's just rare. And so, like, even at at, like, Patreon, for example, we went through, like, a big redesign, and then it was kind of like, okay, back to, like, the normal operating cadence. Now smaller slices of things. You know, you lead a team or lead a feature set, and that just kind of gets boring after a while, no matter what company it is. That's not like a reflection on Patreon at all. Once you get out of that mold, it's like you can go to something smaller or you create something from scratch. Right? It's like your scope of ownership becomes enormous, and, like, you can implement the changes that you want to make and you can drive things. And, I mean, I believe that was true. Just going to smaller before starting a company. Starting a company is like, just a whole different level of it.
- [01:37]
A
I want to start by drilling into the visual language piece just a little bit, because you're given this blank slate for the first time, not working at a big company. And it's so good where you landed. So talk to me a little bit about your process for figuring out the visual identity for Alma.
- [01:51]
B
You had interviewed Smith and Diction. Those were our branding partners. Right. I had, like, a relatively good UI design, and then we got the brand work back from them and just started, like, riffing on the visuals to feel, like, a little bit more bombastic and playful and sort of, like, bubbly. Round. I don't even know how it happened, but I was like, oh, I really like this visual direction. And then I just extrapolated it and redesigned the whole app in like a week and then implemented this whole new visual layer. That's when it kind of all came together.
- [02:22]
A
Isn't it amazing how one good input visually can just set an entire set of flows and screens in motion?
- [02:29]
B
One of my favorite tips to any designer is like, design all kinds of screens. This and that, this and that. You're going to hate 90% of it. And then you're going to find one screen or one execution, and you're going to be like, this feels so good. Carry that around like a little rubric and hold it up to every other screen that you do and that you build and just take the little elements of that and that's how you, like, get a whole lot feel good. Then it's like a snowball, right? So now, like, Alma has all these different views that we've made feel really good. Some I still hate too, but, like, when something new comes up, I just pull in all the rubrics I've. I've had over this time frame, and it helps me get visual design done, like, a lot faster.
- [03:07]
A
What's a rubric that you're using right now? Like, can we get specific about some of the details that to you are like, yeah, that's the bar that I want to try to hit.
- [03:14]
B
One thing I learned is completely, completely only possible at large companies is like, hygiene of figma files. You know, I've been a design system designer for, you know, much of my career. Literally at Dropbox, that was the team I was on. But in all my roles, I like, I always work on design systems and visual systems level things. And here now, I mean, you know, we're on Alma 3.1 at this point. The cleanest thing in all of this is my, like, sort of main main screen for all the core views of the app. But my gosh, my components tab is like.
- [03:54]
A
Yeah, that's about where I'm at with inflight right now, too.
- [03:57]
B
Yeah, totally. One thing I'm doing is building a new universal sharing feature at the moment, and we already had some kind of pieces of that that existed in the app. So I was starting to design, like, a better way to share your core metrics. We're starting to see a bunch of people get, like, competitive about this stuff and they're like sharing screenshots of these things. So I'm like, oh, I'll give you a Way to really simply deep link into a selected segment in this share view that lets you toggle between a solid background or a transparent background and then you can share these metrics. This is all kind of like really heavily inspired by apps like Strava and any distance that lets you export transparent PNGs to like overlay on what you're doing. For us, it's like you're probably going to overlay macros on like dishes you make and that kind of stuff. But our almascore community is getting very competitive and people getting like these huge ALMA scores that I can't even get to. And I'm like, okay, it's a good sign when your users are like outpacing you. So that's been really cool. But generally when I, when I think rubrik, like I come into this view here and I go to essentially what is like my anointed screens page. Like these are the things that we know look good and are built. And I pull like screens out of this onboarding, for example, I pull screens out of this and I'll pull them over to my new artboard as I go to start exploring and pull like the specific little visual cues or patterns out that I can reuse really easily. And the big unlock in ALMA was like this rounded card based system. It just made designing everything fit within kind of like this framework. And then we have a foreground and a background that's really easy to use. And then on the daily, you know, just kind of like building new patterns that I can use with new features. Like, you know, this floating kind of header segmented controller stuff, how we do charts, for example. I just redid all of that too. This is actually that page.
- [06:00]
A
It's funny, I'm laughing because I'm literally in the exact same place right now where I'm just cranking out screens, but I'm also kind of figuring out the visual language along the way. I mean, we literally switched from like dominant light mode to dominant dark mode about halfway through. So it's. A lot of things are happening code and I'm finding little things where I'm like, oh, that's good. And I probably haven't been bringing it in as a rubric enough. Like that resonates a lot for me. Something that I've really appreciated even in juxtaposing my last couple experiences. Because I'm like you. I don't really have the big company experience. I'm almost always the first designer, so I almost always get the blank slate. And historically it's been Much harder for me to make polish updates in code. And so what ends up happening is I inevitably kind of figure out the visual language along the way. About halfway through, I'm like, okay, I got some patterns that I really like, certain things that are really working. But then I have all those first, like five, which are inevitably the core screens, because that's where you start. And I hate them. And it's been difficult to go, you know, you can't justify going back and updating them. But now I can kind of like sneak back into cursor and be like, okay, I want to fix that now. I know how to do that now. I did it like a month ago, but now I know how to do it.
- [07:15]
B
You know, it's a slow battle, right? It's also like in. In startup mode, it's so important to nail something you're at least happy with on that first fast execution because you're not going to come back to it for a long time. So you got to balance, like hitting like something that you're okay with. Get it out. It's not gonna. There's nothing in Alma that I'm like, this is perfect. Like, yeah, I've never, I've never shipped anything like that. In startup mode, everything's about like making concessions and like, can I get this built in a day?
- [07:50]
A
I was laughing the other day because I was clicking through the maven dashboard for the first time in a little bit. And the very first component that I ever made was this table row. And I remember I was sitting at this coffee shop and at that point I was doing a lot of the front end. So I, you know, it to different states for this. I hadn't put a ton of thought into it. And that thing exists exactly as it was made in 2020. First thing I made never got touched again. And there's a pressure, you know, like I. I don't know about if you feel this. As someone who does a lot of blank slate work, I feel the pressure in the beginning, you know, like, I gotta get off on the right foot.
- [08:26]
B
You tear yourself to pieces creatively. Like in those moments, you know, they always see the charts where people are like, you know, the designer, you're like, oh, this is awesome. And then you're like, or actually, it's up here. This is awesome. Then you fall into the valley of despair and you're like, I'm garbage. This is garbage. Everything is garbage. And then you're like, you find one thing that works and you're like, am I good? And then A couple days later, you're like, I'm a God. And then another week later, you're like, I'm back to being garbage. The blank slate just, like, blows all that, like, way up higher.
- [08:55]
A
Yeah. And being the design founder, too, when it's your. Like, you have this pressure, like, this is my life's work, you know, like, that's what you want it to be. And then you just. The roller coaster is so stunning deep.
- [09:06]
B
And to be honest, like, even now, I, you know, you just. You just lock in and you do your best and you're just like, I. Maybe I'm going to get roasted publicly. You think you're just like, everybody's going to be on Twitter or LinkedIn and just be like, you're garbage. Actually, when our app launched, all the positive feedback was about the design, and I was like, oh, my God, this is like the best moment of my entire life. But now you still just like, every feature I just, like, lock in. I'm like, just do the best you can. Be happy with what you get out. And if people love it, that's great. And most of the time, people are going to love something you don't even think about. This is the thing that you don't try hard on, that people are like, this is amazing. And it's like, not even something you really designed. It's like a button that does something random. People just love it.
- [09:51]
A
I know a lot of you, like me, are animating in jitter, so I have some good news. You can now speed up reviews by sharing and responding to feedback directly inside of your files. Each comment is timestamped and also synced across the canvas and timeline, so it's always in context. And you can even mention people, so it's easy to bring the right teammates into the conversation. It's just another reason why I love animating in jitter. And comments are officially live for everybody, so you can head to Dive Club Jitter to check it out today. Remember what Jonam Trivedi from Airbnb said about shaders? They're like the final frontier in UI development, right? It's like the ultimate escape hatch, that you are no longer limited by anything that your framework or design system or software library gives you. You are just given this canvas and it is fully up to you to figure out what to do with it. They used to be this alien format that I couldn't really do anything about, but now paper is making it possible for designers anywhere to create their own shaders. You can preview them directly on the canvas and it's just another reason why I'm all in on Paper as the next great design tool. I mean, they are truly raising the ceiling for creativity and you can be one of the first to try it out. Just head to Dive Club Paper. Okay, now onto the episode. I want to keep pushing on how your process has evolved. Not only switching from type of company, but also we have this explosion of tooling. And I know that you're kind of getting into the code a little bit more. Talk to me about that part of the practice. And if you were going to kind of throw up the way that you operate on a, you know, whatever weekly basis versus how you would have historically in these bigger companies, like, what are some of the big deltas that you see that we could drill into?
- [11:40]
B
When I was at large companies, as iOS got easier to prototype for, I would build little prototypes here and there. When SwiftUI came out, that became very, very possible. I went from using Framer. Framer. Those guys rock. Shout out them like framer Classic. You know, when it was like a CoffeeScript library to prototyping and SwiftUI and I was kind of learning origami at the same time. So that was like my stack. It wasn't like I could be a production engineer at those companies though, that I worked at. Like, the tooling at a large company is like so much broader than like what I had knowledge of. And I was just too terrified, right, to also contribute to those code bases. So I had built, I built these apps, right? And then becoming a sort of co founder, starting my own thing and also having the advent of a lot of these AI tools like Cursor and ways to like not have to go to stack overflow and spend three hours researching something was like, oh, I can actually just contribute now in a lot of the places like where I felt my gaps were, which is like backend development, like the more complicated stuff around data modeling in an application. That's actually where cursor in these tools really excel. And I'm like, okay, great. Cursor is more likely for me to mess up like a visual layout or like design details or not make something look good and or tasteful than it is to mess up like navigation architecture for my app and passing data between views. Like I can run a background agent to do that and be confident that's going to figure it out. If I'm like, hey, lay this out like xyz cursor is going to mess that up for now. It's going to change though. I mean, there's a time coming when that's not going to be the case anymore.
- [13:23]
A
So how much are you actually working in cursor versus in Figma? Because I mean it's obviously you're doing a lot of stuff in Figma. So talk to me a little bit about when you're reaching for different tools and how that maps to maybe the flow of an idea or something that you're exploring.
- [13:40]
B
90% cursor right now, to be honest. Yeah, so it's, it's very specific though because I have gotten way out ahead on design and so then it's actually better for me to be in the code with everybody coding. And the way that our team operates now is we have four team members, we have some advisors, a bunch of advisors actually too. But the four core team members we all code and we're all relatively design minded people. People have like a designation of what? Like their core focus is like design. We have someone who owns our whole iOS platform, Eddie Shout Out. Eddie Rami, my co founder, is a man of many hats. He shoots across backend, shoots across iOS, builds web. We do have some web services too. Him and I both do those. And then we have a sort of ML and AI engineer and he's also shooting into iOS front end too. So the way that we kind of approach it is everyone tries to be full stack. I'm the least full stack out of everybody, which is sad, but I'm going to get there. I'm going to get better at our back end designs, get out in front right, we know the features we want to build. And then I just jump into full time engineering too. Build the features kind of front to back. It changes like I have. I need to really kind of design what we're building in the next few months here. And that's going to take me probably a good couple weeks to get everything all figured out and get everyone feeling good about the direction we're going in. But today for example, there's like two small little things that I need to do that I don't need to like, we don't need to all come together as a team and figure it out, but I do need to make a design for it and I need to. And I need to build it. So I'll spend half my day today designing that and I'll build it in the afternoon, maybe finish it up tomorrow so it waxes and wanes. But for many months I spent my time, I didn't code. Oh, I don't know, for four straight months because we needed so Much design. And then probably two months ago, I was like, okay, I had the time to get back to coding.
- [15:30]
A
You talked about being in Figma and then building it almost like the second half of the day. How much are you iterating on the Figma visuals in code? And then how does that change the way that you think about Figma as a source of truth and alignment?
- [15:46]
B
Then I actually like just a pen and paper. Like, I sketch like crazy. I have an entire notebook that sits right here next to me all day and has all the sketches. This is actually like my fourth one for Alma, and I sketch my ideas here. And if I actually don't need to visual design, I could jump right into cursor to build this. But generally, like, I don't like jumping into code because what happens is you will just build something that can be created with things that already exist and with, like, patterns you know, of. From an engineering perspective, like, all the best ideas are the ones that are like, so bananas that, like, you just don't want to dream of them in code. You want to dream of them in, like, this perfect world where you're not encumbered by the code. That was something that Apple was all about too, is like, don't worry about what the engineers are going to do to build this. Think about, like, the best possible experience you can make for the people that use your app and then engineering will figure it out. So it's a little bit different now, right at a startup because, like, I'm not going to make some insane thing that's going to take us a month, two months to build. So it has to be somewhat realistic. But, like, as a principal, I like to think on paper or in Figma first before jumping into the code.
- [17:01]
A
Makes sense. As someone who went through a coding bootcamp, I can't unsee the ROI of anything that I'm designing in Figma because I have at least a ballpark sense of how difficult it's going to be to implement or how efficient a certain layout could be to build. I have to really intentionally get myself to break out of the box of designing things that I know exactly how to implement, you know, and like, truly be creative and sling rectangles. It's like a curse of knowledge almost for people who have a little bit more of a technical lens that they can apply to their work.
- [17:36]
B
Absolutely. I just have to turn that part of my brain off sometimes and, like, I'm very aware of it all the time when my teammates will build something and like, okay, this is ready to launch. I'm like, hold on. Let's think once again. I'm not saying hold on. Weak. I'm like, hold on. Just like a moment, let's think about. Because I think that's like kind of my job is everybody's building at our company, like really, really fast. And it's kind of like I try to be the conductor that makes sure all the trains are coming into the station and they look good and they're clean and all the passengers are happy and all the users are going to be good. We have like a really good partnership in many cases. My co founder will build something really, really fast that's like awesome from a technical persp. And then he'll be like, what do you think about this from a UX perspective? And I'll think about it and then I'll take all the data flow he set up and build the thing after I've thought about like how I actually want it to be organized, way more just like tossing ideas back and forth than like anywhere else I've ever been. And I think this is like indicative of a direction generally that you're going to see this entire tech scene go eventually, at least in small companies for sure. I think the cost of building, executing is going to go to zero. Like right now there's still like a huge. If you, if you are a designer and you have good tastes, there's like you provide value on top of cursor and on top of AI tools because they're just not nailing it yet. They're going to. If you think that two years from now this cursor is not going to be able to nail exactly what you're thinking in a design, you're dreadfully wrong. And I think that every discipline is going to be affected by this. I don't think that, like things like brand designers are going to be replaced or product designers are going to be replaced, but I think that you're going to have to have ideas because execution goes to zero. So your ability to have ideas and your ability to have taste and orchestrate right things that are designing for you are going to differentiate you more than your ability to hop open Cinema4D to execute something or your ability to write XYZ and code. So invest in having big ideas and invest in understanding like far more about business. I mean, this is kind of funny because that's always been the thing that people say to designers, like, we want to see it at a table. You got to understand how the business works. It's like the table is Just going to become filled with people who are just builders. And, like, your title doesn't matter. Like, understand how a business works. Understand how to talk to users, have great taste, because that's still the best way to differentiate. And you're not going to build taste without doing reps. Right? Like, you just gotta design, design, design. So I don't think I see, like, design tools going away in that way, but I see how the specific act of building occurs, changing. Like, in cursor now. Like, I see an evolution of how all that will work over the next five years. Maybe three to five years is gonna be absolutely insanely different.
- [20:37]
A
I'm glad that you said the ideas and not just taste, because I think sometimes in the dialogue that I see taste is kind of wrapped into something that feels a little bit more visual, even though it's so broad. Right. And you kind of hit on two things, which is like, yes, the model's gonna get really good at implementing good design. Probably out of the box, too. They'll for sure be able to execute whatever you want them to do. So there's still this responsibility of, like, don't point and say it's a slop. It's whatever you made, you know, because it's going to be able to nail it. But there's also this idea, like, I love to use the word conductor. That's really cool. Right? It's like, whoever this table of builders is, the one that's bringing the most good ideas forward is the one that, by definition, has impact and kind of steers the ship to an extent, you know? And so, my goodness, what a better time to be a designer.
- [21:32]
B
Absolutely. I couldn't think of a better way to bookend the conversation. Get excited, guys. It's good.
- [21:40]
A
Awesome. Well, thanks, Adam. Thanks for hanging.
- [21:42]
B
Of course, man.