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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
Thinking out loud about design, development, and building software.
How software can prevent people from making mistakes, causing permanent damage, or bringing about the collapse of democracy.
Updated 1 week ago
True respect is the difference between a fantastic collaborator and an asshole.
Updated 2 weeks ago
My tips and strategies for writing effective self reviews.
Updated 3 weeks ago
Rebuilding my self-hosted blog with Next.js and Ghost as a headless CMS.
Updated 4 weeks ago
A living list of useful and inspiring product design portfolios.
Updated 1 month ago
Projects
Weekend hacks for fun and learning.
In-depth explorations of visual and interaction design in well-known apps.
Internet things, saved for later.
Ask me anything.
A better Hacker News.
Tools and resources for staying safe on the internet.
A custom-made set of 10 phone wallpapers, each with a unique color palette and design.
Design Details Podcast
A weekly conversation about design process and culture.
This week, we discuss the career paths and tradeoffs for someone who wants to do both design and development. In The Sidebar, we recap the Mac event and share our first impressions of the new iPhones.
Released 6 days ago
This week, we brainstorm design patterns that help save people from themselves. From stopping the spread of misinformation, to saving eardrums, to screening spoilers, these design ideas are often clever and non-obvious. In the Sidebar, we discuss why radio and checkbox inputs are the way they are, and how to use them well in your designs.
Released 1 week ago
This week, we dig into practical steps for creating a culture of design excellence. In The Sidebar, we share strategies for designing adaptive interfaces that work well on any screen size.
Released 2 weeks ago
This week, we discuss the tradeoffs and challenges of designing interfaces for one-handed use. In The Sidebar, we talk about strategies for collaborating effectively with brand and product design.
Released 3 weeks ago
This week, we talk about the shallow parts of design culture, where superficial work tends to generate far more attention and praise. We dig into potential solutions for this, too. In The Sidebar, we recap and share our spicy takes on the iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, and HomePod mini.
Released 1 month ago
Figma plugins
Making the design process less tedious.
Generate a palette from an image to magically populate your designs.
Quickly test your designs across multiple device sizes.
Applies the correct export settings for every required iOS App Icon size and density.
Easily export assets from Figma directly into a .zip file.
Populate data from GitHub into Figma mocks
Open source work
The code that powers Design Details.
The code that powers this website you’re looking at.
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.
An interview where we dig into my work at Buffer, Facebook, Spectrum, and what’s in the works at GitHub.
Ryan and I discuss how we designed and built the first version of GitHub’s mobile apps.
App Dissection
In-depth explorations of visual and interaction design in well-known apps.
