Staff Product Designer — ✨ at @SpotifyDesign — Previously @Klarna @IDEO and @Designit
Stockholm
Joined April 2009
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A good grid and typeface. That’s all you need to make great design.
Everything else is optional.
Jordi Parra retweeted
This is not a diss at this post (I agree with the points) but more disappointment with our current culture.
“the future of design will not be won by whoever has the biggest resource folder or produces the most screens.”
IMO designers should not be focused on winning and beating each other. Most of us got into this discipline to help people by collaborating with our peers, and success should be measure by how well we solve problems for others, whether they are broadcast and awarded or not.
Online culture (which becomes offline culture) has turned everyone against each other. No one seems to feel safe. Everyone acts like they’re in a competition and that losing means being irrelevant and without a job.
design is getting easier to produce.
good layouts, clean interfaces, decent typography, polished motion. the baseline keeps rising, and tools keep making execution faster.
almost everything is already available on the internet now.
design resources.
assets.
templates.
typefaces.
references.
components.
systems.
inspiration.
access is no longer the advantage.
what matters is what you do with all of it.
how you combine things.
how you interpret them.
what you ignore.
what you change.
what you make your own.
and most importantly, whether any of it creates actual impact.
that is where the real differentiators start:
craft, taste, and point of view.
craft is caring enough to notice what most people skip.
taste is knowing what to remove, what to exaggerate, what deserves attention, and when something is already enough.
point of view is harder.
it is the reason your work feels like yours.
the choices you keep making.
the things you refuse to do.
the references you pull from.
the problems you believe are worth solving.
the way you interpret the same brief differently from everyone else.
ai can generate options.
templates can give you structure.
systems can make production faster.
the internet can give everyone access to the same ingredients.
but access does not create great work.
judgment does.
when everyone can find the same resources and use the same tools, technical ability becomes less scarce.
what becomes scarce is knowing how to use them with intention.
the future of design will not be won by whoever has the biggest resource folder or produces the most screens.
it will belong to people who can take what is available to everyone and turn it into something only they would have made.
something useful.
something memorable.
something that actually moves the business, product, or culture forward.
the ingredients are everywhere now.
the difference is you.
It’s getting out of hand. A tool that manages the tool, that manages the tool… so much process.
Side projects are becoming bureaucracy as a hobby.
Hm, I'm curious about @elyxdesign. Gonna have to give it a try: elyx.design/
How can I give @OpenCode mcp access to @figma ?
The desktop mcp option seems to be gone, and the web mcp is only open to a few clients.
There's a long thread in your forums, but no solution: forum.figma.com/report-a-pro…
Why limit MCP access to only a few clients?
I couldn’t agree more with @dhh’s pov on how exciting is it to be a builder today. Yes, roles are changing and change is scary, but if you find joy shaping things, there never been a better time.
I used to spend my day in Figma. Not anymore.
open.spotify.com/s/mmXJCFq
Apple is playing hard ball bere, but I do hope the EU understands that just making this a “pick what model you use” isn’t trivial when having access to so much personal data by default.
I hope they are getting proper advice.
Today I was notified that a design I share on Printables was being sold on @Etsy.
The license does NOT allow commercial use.
After politely contacting the seller, I have now received an email warning me that my message violates the policy and that I risk account suspension. 🤯
Can you help me with this?
How can you keep stores like this open? I already submitted copyright infringement reports for all the above, yet only one has been taken down.
What action is being taken with this store?
How can I receive a trust and safety warning for reaching out to the seller in the only way available on their Etsy store.
Why would this message trigger a Trust and Safety and account suspension warning? 🤔
nitter.cf/zenona/status/20564591…
I'm not one to use my network, but this is wild.
After my designs and others are being sold on Etsy without permission, I'm reported to Trust and safety for politely asking to get refunded with the profits to donate them to a charity and provide receipt of the donation.
👏🏻
Today I was notified that a design I share on Printables was being sold on @Etsy.
The license does NOT allow commercial use.
After politely contacting the seller, I have now received an email warning me that my message violates the policy and that I risk account suspension. 🤯
It's nice that VW is bringing back more tactile buttons, but maybe they have overdone it a bit with so many of them on the steering wheel… 🤔
Jordi Parra retweeted
c) Make a mediocre product and be the best at marketing it
Historically this hasn't worked in software because making software was so difficult that few could do it. But as barriers fall and it becomes trivial for anyone to make "good enough" software, the core challenge shifts away from execution and toward discovery.
This is already prevalent on over-saturated platforms like the App Store where many great apps sit undiscovered and mediocre ones succeed based on aggressive marketing strategies. No surprise, this is the playbook we see in other industries that have undergone similar transformations (DTC, apparel, food).
Like Rasmus, I hope to see a lot more take route (b). But if we see a massive flood of new software, don't be surprised to see a lot of people find success with option (c).
There used to be two playbooks for commercial software:
a) be first to market
b) make the best product
Being first was rarely important, yet so many software companies operate this way. “We must ship by this time next month or we’ll lose.” A shallow way to build, in my opinion.
Now with AI tools having gone from “lol nice JavaScript try again” in Jan 2025 to “damn, nice C program, take the wheel” in Jan 2026, there’s only one playbook that remains: make the best product. Now anyone can “compete” with you if being first is your differentiator.
So don’t make a hundred products or a hundred features quickly just because you can. Instead leverage this “huge cheap skilled workforce” you now have to build something really good, even if it takes time.
You can’t blame timelines for janky scrolling or broken text editing anymore.
Build something that’s meaningfully different, something that you can be proud of a decade from now
Jordi Parra retweeted
This is really neat but it’s not a design tool as much as it’s a design _production_ tool.
The practice of design is mostly about what comes before production.
There’s no doubt in my mind that all parts of software production will become automated very soon. Writing code, making web pages, putting pieces of a design system together etc.
And that’s fine. I think few people actually enjoy this kind of production work. Wouldn’t it be better if we spent our precious time in life on what is more meaningful?!
At the core, the practice of design is methodical; like architecture, not like art. In a nutshell: We find constraints, form comprehension of the whole and propose solutions that honor those constraints. First after that do we enter some form of production phase, usually prototypes first, learn about some constraints that were hidden before, loop back, prototype and then build the production-grade “final” artifact.
These last few tasks are quickly losing value because AI tools can do it much faster (not yet better though) than humans. It’s simply just what has the best RoI for a business.
Some companies and individuals will continue to spend human time on certain parts of the “production line” as a market differentiator, but it will cost them a relatively high price compared to competitors.
Anyhow, I still haven’t seen a tool better than Figma that supports the actually-interesting part of the design process.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Figma focused their products on that, maybe separating “products for production” of “products for ideation & exploration.” The latter would obviously still leverage AI, but not to do the work for me but rather to support my efforts the way a therapist helps me live a better life (not living my life for me.)
Is Figma having its Sketch moment?
As a designer, I thought it was unlikely I'd stop using Figma, but more and more, for some tasks, I am not using it at all.
It's still key in my toolbox. But not for everything. I can definitely imagine a world where I don't need it.
It was obvious that the OpenClaw approach was coming sooner rather than later. Still, pretty scary that they leaked so much. I wonder how much it can affect security. Another reason to rely more on local models… 🤔
i can't believe more people aren't talking about this part of the claude code leak
there's a hidden feature in the source code called KAIROS, and it basically shows you anthropic's endgame
KAIROS is an always-on, *proactive* Claude that does things without you asking it to.
it runs in the background 24/7 while you work (or sleep)
anthropic hasn't turned it on to the public yet, but the code is fully built
here's how it works:
every few seconds, KAIROS gets a heartbeat.
basically a prompt that says "anything worth doing right now?"
it looks at what's happening and makes a call: do something, or stay quiet
if it acts, it can fix errors in your code, respond to messages, update files, run tasks...
basically anything claude code can already do, just without you telling it to
but here's what makes KAIROS different from regular claude code:
it has (at least) 3 exclusive tools that regular claude code doesn't get:
1. push notifications, so it can reach you on your phone or desktop even when you're not in the terminal
2. file delivery, so it can send you things it created without you asking for them
3. pull request subscriptions, so it can watch your github and react to code changes on its own
regular claude code can only talk to you when you talk to it. KAIROS can tap you on the shoulder
and it keeps daily logs of everything.
> what it noticed
> what it decided
> what it did
append-only, meaning it can't erase its own history (you can read everything)
at night it runs something the code literally calls "autoDream."
where it consolidates what it learned during the day and reorganizes its memory while you sleep
and it persists across sessions. close your laptop friday, open it monday, it's been working the whole time
think about what this means in practice:
> you're asleep and your website goes down. KAIROS detects it, restarts the server, and sends you a notification. by the time you see it, it's already back up
> you get a customer complaint email at 2am. KAIROS reads it, sends the reply, and logs what it did. you wake up and it's already resolved
> your stripe subscription page has a typo that's been live for 3 days. KAIROS spots it, fixes it, and logs the change
endless use-cases, it's essentially a co-founder who never sleeps
the codebase has this fully built and gated behind internal feature flags called PROACTIVE and KAIROS
i think this is probably the clearest signal yet for where all ai tools are going.
we are heading into the "post-prompting" era
where the ai just works for you in the background
like an all-knowing teammate who notices and handles everything, before you even think to ask
