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

Updated 8 hours ago

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

Updated 1 month ago

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

Updated 1 month ago

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

Updated 1 month ago

A living list of useful and inspiring product design portfolios.

Updated 1 month 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 go deep down the WWDC rabbit hole to dissect the latest design details coming from Apple HQ. We also share our spicy takes on the new macOS icons in this week's sidebar.

Released 2 days ago

This week, we caught up with Maurice Cherry to talk about design podcasting, building an agency from scratch, and the current state of diversity in design. Maurice is a designer, podcaster, creative strategist, agency founder, writer, speaker, and much more.

Released 1 week ago

This week, we share some accessibility gut checks that designers should think through before moving into high fidelity mocks. We also talk about industrial design and video game hardware in this week's Sidebar, plus we share our cool things as always!

Released 2 weeks ago

This week, we talk about weaponizing hashtags, co-opting social media movements, and solving hard problems in product design. Spoiler: hard problems are hard. This, plus The Sidebar, some follow up, and cool things as always.

Released 3 weeks ago

This week, we can't record a podcast talking about pixels and software design. The world is hurting, and the best thing we can do right now is direct people to the resources and organizations that are able to have the most impact in black communities. Please consider reading, learning, introspecting, and donating this 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.