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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.

A living list of useful and inspiring product design portfolios.

Updated 5 hours ago

This year has been breezing by at an uncomfortable pace, so it is helpful to pause for a second and introspect a while.

Updated 1 month ago

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

Updated 2 months ago

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

Updated 2 months ago

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

Updated 2 months 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 caught up with Bobby Goodlatte and Josh Williams, two designers-turned-investors who recently announced Form Capital, an early-stage venture fund. In this episode we talk about the path to starting a fund, whether founders should live in the Bay Area, and share advice to designers who are interested in starting their own company someday.

Released 18 hours ago

This week, we talk about the recently-unveiled GPT-3 AI tool and the implications of AI for design. In The Sidebar, we discuss HUD design in video games, nerding out on diegesis, skeuomorphism, and more.

Released 1 week ago

This week, we caught up with [Cemre Güngör](https://twitter.com/gem_ray) to talk about transitioning from design to product management, the tension between the roles of PD and PM, why products fail, and so much more. In The Sidebar, we discuss the most over- and under-rated skills for PMs.

Released 2 weeks ago

This week, we attempt to answer the age-old question every designer will someday face: should I be a product manager? In this week's Sidebar, we share our first impressions of macOS Big Sur, covering our favorite changes and what we hope to see updated before public release.

Released 3 weeks ago

This week, we caught up with Yitong Zhang to talk about what it's like to navigate the visa process in the US. We dig into the details of different work visas, the constraints they impose on designers, and what is changing in the current processes. This, plus bonus questions and cool things as always!

Released 4 weeks 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.

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.