Designer mid-thought, natural window light catching one side of their face, shallow depth of field blurring workspace behind
Issue 001 — Coming Soon
A Weekly Design Interview

The people behind the pixels.

Long-form interviews with the designers shaping how the world taps, swipes, and thinks.

Issue 001 ships to founding subscribers first.

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Featured This IssueIssue 001 — Feb 2026
Profile 01Motion

Ade Olumide

Senior Motion Designer, Figma — Previously Spotify, Meta

"

The moment I stopped animating what looked good and started animating what felt true — everything changed.

Ade Olumide has spent the last eight years making interfaces move in ways that feel less like software and more like breathing. We sat with him for two hours in his Lagos studio on a Tuesday afternoon — Afrobeats low in the background, three monitors lit up with prototype timelines — and asked him to walk us back to the beginning. What he told us about his first year at Spotify, the project that nearly broke him, and the single feedback session that rewired how he thinks about time

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Ade Olumide motion design prototype on multiple screens showing fluid interface transitions

Prototype explorations for Spotify's "Now Playing" gesture system, 2023.

Close-up of animation timeline in design tool showing carefully crafted easing curves
Designer sketching motion storyboard frames on paper with pencil
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Profile 02Systems

Mia Chen

Design Systems Lead, Linear — Previously Vercel, Stripe

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A design system isn't a component library. It's a set of decisions your team doesn't have to make twice — and that distinction is everything.

Mia Chen has a reputation in the design systems community that precedes her — the person who shipped Linear's icon set, rebuilt Stripe's spacing logic from first principles, and has the Figma variable schema tattooed on her brain like a second language. But when we asked her how she actually thinks about systems work, the answer surprised us. She doesn't start with components. She starts with the moment a designer hits a wall — that specific friction that forces them to make a decision they shouldn't have to

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Design system component documentation spread across large monitor showing organized UI components

Linear's component documentation, v4 — shipped Q3 2025.

Whiteboard covered in design token diagrams and system architecture notes
Designer reviewing spacing and grid systems on screen with ruler overlay
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Profile 03Research

Jordan Park

Principal UX Researcher, Google DeepMind — Previously IDEO, Apple

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The most dangerous thing in user research is a researcher who already knows what they're going to find.

Jordan Park spent four years at IDEO learning how to ask questions without poisoning the answer, three years at Apple learning what it means to research at a scale where a single finding can affect a billion people, and is now doing something no one has quite done before: running user research on AI systems that are themselves trying to understand people. We asked Jordan to explain how you study the relationship between a human and a machine that is actively modeling them back — and what they found in the first six months

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User research session with participant and researcher in conversation in a calm neutral room

Field research session — IDEO Chicago, 2021.

Research affinity wall with sticky notes organized by theme and insight
Research data visualization showing user journey map with annotated pain points
Editorial Formats

What's inside every issue.

Three formats, one through-line: the honest account of what it actually takes to make things people use.

Long-Form Interview

Two hours. One designer. Nothing cut.

We sit for two hours minimum. We ask about the work that didn't ship, the feedback that stung, and the decision that changed everything. Edited for clarity, never for comfort.

Flagship Format
Portfolio Breakdown

Annotated by the designer who made it.

Three signature works, margin notes from the creator, and the reasoning that never made it into the case study.

Career Retrospective

The decade in review.

Senior designers look back at the pivots, the mentors, the layoffs, and what they'd tell their 28-year-old selves.

Reading List

What they're thinking about right now.

Books, papers, obscure Figma plugins, and the one tweet they've kept bookmarked for three years.

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