Lately I've been tinkering with some animations for a new game. Essentially it's a mix of 2048 and a roguelike. Control the movement with WASD or swipe with your pointer.
Those who are more familiar with animation/motion design, I'd love your feedback!
slide-and-sorcery.pages.dev
Last 3 weeks! Baby had dual ear infections. Now it's our turn. 🫨
Rocking your congested kid to sleep while you yourself have a fever is some real resilience training...
When @hrescak.com ships a new product, folks need to stop and listen. Can't wait to see where this goes!
my feed in the last 24 hours...
> ai will shift the focus to be about taste
> ai will replace designers
> heads of ai companies know nothing about taste
> people evangelizing about taste have no taste
i think it's safe to say no one knows...
Fifteen months as a father and I feel pretty confident in handling most things: fussy feeding times, nappy blowouts, medical emergencies...all except teething pains.
Send help. Or caffeine. 🥱
After a year of being a full-time dad, I'm looking for what's next. With a career in fintech, SMB and dev tools. I've built products, shipped code and managed teams as both a designer and director. I'm looking for small teams with conviction to be profitable. Building low and slow.
jonathontoon.com
Should've scheduled a few root canals while at it.
Roujin Z is pretty good.
Glad to see people coming around on Sonic.
After a year of being a full-time dad, I'm looking for what's next. With a career in fintech, SMB and dev tools. I've built products, shipped code and managed teams as both a designer and director. I'm looking for small teams with conviction to be profitable. Building low and slow.
jonathontoon.com
Lately I've been struggling to get inspired by the design of most modern marketing websites and landing pages.
They’re either super vague, saying little, or too complex with visuals and animations, leaving me overwhelmed.
Just me?
I reckon AI design is close to having its Bootstrap.css moment. Clean and functional results that all look the same.
As new technology raises the floor for "good enough", distinctiveness becomes the new moat.
Weird beats optimal.
In 15 years as a product designer, I've seen early-career designers struggle with the gap between tidy processes and messy, real work. Inspired by this observation, I recently gave a guest lecture to design students at the University of Canterbury about navigating this gap, read on about it below.
One of my many hobbies has been trying all sorts of logic puzzles, followed by learning the mechanics of how they can be algorithmically solved. So to scratch my own itch I finally wrote my own library for generating/solving Sudoku.
github.com/jonathontoon...
"Steve Jobs would've never..."
Ya'll need to let go. Seriously.
Nothing ground breaking or revolutionary happened in the interface design world today, right?
ChatGPT will remember this.
This is how it's mean't to be, and how it was from the beginning, with institutions like Bauhaus.
The downside of software is designers have delegated too much. And instead we have focused heavily on the intangible (facilitating process) rather than the tangible (learning through building).
I STILL can't get over how Dropbox at one point had one of the best mobile email clients around, killed it, and THEN decided to pivot harder into Enterprise.
Makes no sense...
when's it gonna evolve?
Designers need to move on from Jobs and Ive imo.
I wonder if Jony Ive ever tried to refund an angry customer on Stripe.
5/5 🧵
However, real success comes from practicing and galvanizing one's ability to be relentless, resilient, to employ critical thinking and skepticism, as well as embracing deep collaboration between diverse perspectives within a team.
4/5 🧵
By all means, you should talk to real people about their needs and problems, consider the potential within a market, prototype designs, quickly iterate, and explore ideas visually.
3/5 🧵
Young designers need to realize such methods don't account for the fact that the path to solving real problems is by no means linear or sequential.
2/5 🧵
Frameworks show some of the steps but otherwise offer superficial clarity, obscuring the messy reality of genuinely impactful work.
