Designer, maker, writer. Building anymark.co 📓 New book is out: productdesigninterview.com/t…
Berlin
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Foursquare was one of the most valuable apps on my phone.
Anywhere I went, I knew I could trust FSQ to take me to the best spots.
Since it shut down, every time I travel, I think, “I wish I had Foursquare right now.”
Sad to see such an outcome for such a great product.
Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure. teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
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I did the digital nomad thing for 2 years, living in 7 cities.
My experience was that everywhere felt about the same.
In every new city, you tend to create the same setup:
The coworking space, 2 coffee shops, 3 restaurants, 1-2 bars, 1 club, etc.
If you know what you like, all these places will end up being kind of the same – the 'wework', the 'sweetgreen', the 'berlin' bar, etc.
It's a great experience in your early twenties, when you want to explore and form your taste/preferences.
modern travel is increasingly flying 10 hours to experience a slightly different version of the same globally optimized lifestyle.
same third wave coffee. same natural wine bar. same brutalist menu. same sourdough. same beige hotel. same tasteful ceramics. same instagram lighting.
what a ridiculous convergence.
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If you open a US company while living in Germany, Germany will tax it.
Now you’re required to:
1) File taxes in both the US and Germany (+$1,500–4,000/year).
2) Report and pay VAT in all EU countries.
3) Pay exit tax if you leave Germany (a SaaS business with $200k revenue would pay ~$150–200k).
Rent a virtual office for $39.
Set up a Wyoming LLC.
Wait a month.
Get:
• Wise
• Stripe
• Vercel
• Apple Developer Program
• Google Play Developer account
• US phone number
• X account
All done in ~1.5 months.
Total operating cost: ~$150
Setting up a business has never been easier.
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How realistic is it that X would enforce their patent on the pull-to-refresh UI/design pattern, @grok?
I assume Apple, Meta, and Google wouldn’t use it in their products if it actually carried real legal exposure.
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Designers often want to reinvent the wheel because they are optimising for peer validation instead of customers/business needs.
Instead of focusing on the best solution, they think about how it will look in their portfolio or at a design critique.
interface design is pattern recognition: discernment of which form to apply and when, and sometimes (rarely) pattern creation
most interface problems have already been solved. there’s no need to reinvent the wheel each time. a good designer knows when to rely on a rich corpus of existing work, and when to push the envelope with something new or unexpected
systems cohesion and elegance: so-called “canonical interfaces” are much harder to cultivate and steward
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My experience is the opposite.
In the last few years, I have:
- Published 6 design books (in the top 2-3 UX authors)
- Gained 50K followers across channels
- Won an Adobe award, etc.
To be fair, I didn't do any of it to get jobs. But:
- 0 recruiters have reached out
- My "fame" made 0 difference for my freelance clients
(Again, I'm not complaining cause it was never my goal)
A large following might help you build connections, but it doesn't automatically bring inbound job offers or increase your chances of getting hired.
BTW the best designers I have worked with have zero social media presence.
It sucks that a huge part of being a successful designer and getting jobs is being well-known.
There are so many talented individuals who can’t get a job just because they didn’t shitpost their way to gaining a huge following.
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IMO, designers posting speculative work are just broadcasting that they are bad at their jobs. The hardest part of the job is not making work that looks cool, it's convincing the client that your vision is the correct one.
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In 2013, LayerVault coined the term “Progressive Reduction”.
The idea is that UI elements become simpler the more people use a product (attached pic).
When AI arrived, one of designers’ major predictions was that it would allow us to create hyper-personalised interfaces.
Yet adaptive interfaces somehow never really arrived.
First-time and 1,000th-time users still see mostly the same screens.
Designers fell in love with an idea that doesn’t survive in the real world because the overhead is simply too high:
With personalised interfaces, A/B testing, product tutorials, documentation and customer support all become more complex. On top of that, someone eventually has to maintain all of it.
In the end, adaptive interfaces are simply not worth it (at least for now).
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Jason buying $100k of shares of Figma was probably not on @galshirart ‘s list of possible outcomes of his tweet.
That’s why I love X.
Dylan misread my tweet about the impact of AI and design.
Or I didn't write it clearly enough.
Or a little bit of both.
However, anytime there's a miscommunication like this, I double click on it because it means something important might be happening.
The important thing that is happening in design is that incredible tools like Figma and Loveable are going to create a massive opportunity for designers and non-designers to make better designed Products more efficiently
Given that, I checked out the Figma stock, which I feel is mispriced, and I placed a bet 😂
One of the great things that happens when people debate important topics is that you find ways to place a bet on the future.
I think betting on Dylan is a winning bet!
This is not financial advice.
But I'm good at placing bets.
It's not financial advice! 😂😂😂😂
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Do not start a business in Germany if you ever want to leave.
Every few months, I see another founder post about discovering exit tax and realising they essentially can’t move away.
Unfortunately, I was in the same situation, and I want more people to know about it.
Exit tax forces a business owner to pay tax as if they had sold the company when they leave the country.
Here is an example:
You live in Germany and want to move to the US. You own 80% of a startup valued at $ 2m. On paper, your shares are worth $ 1.6M. To leave Germany, you may have to pay ~$500K.
I had to pay an exit tax myself, and like many others, I didn’t know it existed until I had already decided to leave.
I was “lucky” that my LTD don’t have much value, so I only paid a few grand.
Exit tax exists to prevent people from leaving for a low-tax country right before a liquidity event, which makes sense.
However, it also forces founders who *did not* have a liquidity event to pay tax on money they don’t actually have.
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> worked with Opus today
> gonna use Cursor tomorrow morning
> until GPT 5.6 Sol drops later that day
> until my Fable usage resets on Friday
> until Fable becomes usage-based on July 12th
Announcing Grok 4.5, our first model trained specifically for coding and agents. It was trained with Cursor and offers frontier intelligence at leading speeds and cost efficiency.
x.ai/news/grok-4-5
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The current design workflow reminds me of 20 years ago.
Back then, we used Photoshop (a photo editor) to design interfaces and Flash (an animation app) to build websites.
Now we design in Terminal and IDEs like Cursor and VS Code.
In both cases, we use tools that were not intended for designers but ended up being the best way to do our work.
However, while designers always put so much focus on their tools, tools were never the long-term edge for designers.
@shreyas writes: «Tools have never been a significant source of alpha in product success and that is not changing with AI tools.»
The same is true for design.
In the long term, everybody switches from Photoshop to Sketch, from Sketch to Figma, and so on.
Eventually, everyone will catch up, even with the AI tools.
Zoom out, and you’ll see that your advantage was always in your judgement, agency, and ability to work well with other people – never in tools.
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