running @yourmoment, worked with @tembo, @withdefault, @peec_ai and more
USA
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For an agency website's homepage, it's often a struggle to show that you care about the details, without making the whole thing about "your agency's brand" when the work is what actually matters.
For our new site, we try to showcase that care through the interactions within the client work in the carousel and smaller interactive bits throughout the utility elements on the site.
The work in the carousel is either a video made from the code that shipped, a high quality screenshot of real work, or in some cases, actual interactive code pulled from the projects we are highlighting.
The goal is to make it clear to others that we do actually sweat the details in our work. Putting subtle transitions and interactivity into into simple things like the book a call menu, pricing menu, and even footer links.
It's very easy to go overboard with this type of stuff and surprisingly, it takes more time and effort to keep it simple.
Click around, try it out. Let me know if you find something joyful.
moment.so
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I've been working with @niclasernst and his team @permanent for a while now to support some amazing companies with their websites, and it's led to significantly better work than we've been able to do on our own at Oratory.
To make this relationship more official, they've bought a strategic stake in the company and we're launching a new design service, taking the best parts of Oratory and the best parts of the work we've done with PERMANENT -- and forming them into a new thing.
That new thing is called MOMENT.
Everything that we do is in service of helping companies build the function that turns a business from "technically works" into "people want this, trust this, remember this, and keep paying for this."
Today I'm excited to announce two additional service companies that are joining the @permanent family.
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All of the current team at Oratory is moving over to MOMENT, where we'll continue designing and building just as we did before, just with a bit more help along the way.
MOMENT is essentially an evolution of Oratory, we'll still be running a similar sprint as before — except now we are taking things to another level in terms of quality and the types of companies that we choose to work with.
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You can read see the new site at moment.so, explore some recent work, read the new offer, and find more details about the announcement there.
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after using this for a few weeks, I can definitively say:
if you are not using strafe on your Mac, you are missing out on reaching peak productivity and your life is incomplete
github.com/rileycx/strafe
Swiping between macOS desktop workspaces is a core part of how I personally work. I might have one Figma file open in fullscreen on one space, another open fullscreen in another space, and every other app that I am interacting with likely is in a fullscreen space dedicated to the app.
It's how I prefer to work. I swipe between these tabs like a mad-man. I use this to reference a design, going back and forth between spaces quickly and frequently.
There's only one problem... If you work like this, you will know that whenever you 3-finger swipe between these spaces on macOS, there is a slight delay between when you swipe and when you can actually click on something post-swipe. That delay is slight. 150ms or so (I measured.)
But 150ms fifty times in an hour is 7.5 seconds. 7.5 seconds each hour you work is about 60 seconds per day. It's death by a thousand cuts.
This is my open-source contribution to the flow state.
github.com/rileycx/strafe
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often times the difference between designing something mediocre and something everybody is proud of is simply more iterations, more output, and more explorations
creating 20 variants of something only to ever present 1 or 2
pushing down a path knowing it could be a dead end because you might find some little nugget
trying that wild idea even if you know it might get shot down
keep going
Every project, we're trying to beat the last one. That means making a tonne of work nobody ever sees. Not only are we having more fun working this way as a team, the more explorations we do, the better we get at knowing what will work and what won't.
This is just a snippet of the mess we created refining an idea for a single homepage for radiusbrowser.com/. For this particular project, the end result looked totally different from where we started. Without the iteration and the reps, we would never have got to the place we did.
Do the reps, make the work, spend the time. It is never not worth it.
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the designer that is great at initial brand work is not always the same designer who is great at applying that same brand well across real applications
they are very different types of work and should be treated that way
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There are a lot of really talented young designers on here who have ambitions to have a successful design agency.
I'll get a DM from someone like this every once in a while. One of the things that they ask frequently is, "How are you getting clients?"
And in the past I've kind of dodged this question because I didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings.
The thing that I didn't want to tell them is that they just need to do better work. It felt like the wrong thing to say because I thought it was out of their control. You're either talented or you're not.
At least that's what I used to think. But after working with a ton of different startups over the past couple of years, I have changed my mind on this.
I know without a doubt that a designer can learn to do significantly better work over a relatively short time period because I've seen it in my own work and from others on my team.
If I look back to a couple of years ago, whenever I first went out on my own and quit my job, the work that I was putting out was really, and I mean really, garbage.
In order to get the reps in with real companies and real projects, I charged very little money. I charged just enough so that I could pay my rent, hopefully.
My goal at the time was to help as many companies as possible with one specific thing, which, in my case, was designing a new homepage for their website.
And honestly that was a selfish goal but just because it's a selfish goal doesn't mean that it can't also be a useful service for the companies that I was serving.
It was selfish because I wanted to somehow get paid and be working on real projects for real companies and get a chance to really hone my craft.
My advice now for that young designer who's looking to go out on their own: do whatever you can to get as many reps working with real companies doing the thing that you want to be an expert at.
That might mean that you're charging $500 for a landing page but at the beginning sometimes that's just what you have to do. Just because you see others charging thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars for technically the same line item on an invoice doesn't mean that you have to start there.
If you start too high and the market doesn't have enough evidence that you can deliver that work (even if you can), you'll end up salty because someone else is seeing success and you aren't.
So instead of feeling sorry for yourself and wondering why this other person is getting to work with all of these cool clients and you can't even get one, you can look at the reality of the situation.
Accept that the actual answer here is that they are a better designer than you are. For now.
There are no hacks. There are no marketing tricks, no amount of viral posts, or any gimmicks that are going to help you build a sustainable income. The truth is, you just need to get better at your job.
If you're willing to accept that and you realize that the answer to becoming a better designer is getting way more reps at doing the work, then you'll get to a point where there is simply no question that you're actually capable of delivering the thing that you are promising.
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"this has been done before" is the least useful feedback in all of design history
of course it has been done before. that is the whole point. "good design" does not equate to "new and undiscovered patterns"
you can do cool things even following standard patterns/layouts
designers are very bipolar about this in general -- like in some instances, something is sacred and should never be touched, but in others it is boring and lame if you don't try to do something entirely new
in software design and web design, people are used to how things work.
is it ok to change that and try to introduce a new pattern? of course.
but you should be aware that it comes at a cost that is paid by introducing friction to your users.
you can feel strongly that the friction is worth it and make a bet -- as long as you are willing to acknowledge that you are gambling with usability and familiarity
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experimenting with generating simple marketing illustrations for @dhh's Omarchy
purposefully not trying to change the visual language, just taking concepts and illustrating them in a simplified manner that allows for a workflow or feature to be highlighted with no clutter
whole workflow driven entirely by agents. need more? just ask the agent. it knows the codebase. it knows the styles. it knows everything.
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If you’re not delivering design assets with guidelines and rules around how and when to use ai, the end user (whether a client or others internally) WILL try to extend it with ai and you will end up with inconsistent slop
If you’re a designer… even if you hate ai and wish it didn’t exist… you owe it to yourself and your work to set up these rules
You can’t just “hope” people won’t use ai to build on your work because they will. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not. So take control and make sure others are set up for success.
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new @claudeai artifact link flow is very good; havent been using the artifact links at all and now it just works without having to think about it
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