Jason Culbertson

Had to share this thoughtful article about the conflicting feelings we have as designers with new AI tools.... made me consider the threat of too much standardization over innovation, or letting your own creative instincts atrophy. Check it out and lmk your thoughts

6

2 years with Nectar! 🤘🔥 My favorite highlights: → Our team’s growth from 23 employees to 90 employees. Product alone grew from 6 of us to 21 strong now 🙌🏼, and we’re a sleek, efficient, resilient team under Brian Cressall and Nate Tingey. → Established Nectar’s Design System and built our component library, significantly improving speed, consistency, and quality of design and implementation. → Completed a massive UI design refresh for the existing product (bless the devs still building it 🫡 ). → Launched Nominations, the largest and most impactful new feature we’ve built at Nectar yet. → Completely scrapped a project, because it was the right thing to do. Grateful to work on a team that’s hyper-focused on our ultimate goals, and is sincerely willing to let sunk costs be irrelevant. → Ideated, designed, and launched our new product Internal Communications in 8 weeks with a small, mighty team 🤯 I’m still amazed we managed it. → $40M Series B funding in April 2024 with PeakSpan Capital. → Saw our efforts, motivation, and passion pay off when Nectar was recognized as the 2nd Fastest Growing Company in Utah County, 1st fastest growing software company in Utah, 8th fastest growing software company in the U.S., and 87th fastest growing company in the U.S. (across all industries). → 300% increase in revenue in Q3 2023 vs Q3 2024 (Q3 was also 50% above our revenue Q2 2024). → Saw every department at Nectar grow in excellence. I’m in awe of the caliber of Engineering, CS, Marketing, Sales, and what they accomplish. → Relished the challenge and variety of asks in the beginning as Nectar’s sole designer, including working on print design (looking at you, 28’ tradebooth) and animations for the first time. That animation announcing Nectar’s new logo a year ago? That was my first animation, and I’m still proud of myself for figuring it out enough to make that 😂. → Spent way too much on Holiday gas station runs (RIP old office). This is a long list, but for the record I cut it in half from what it was 😅. I’m grateful Nate reached out on LinkedIn right at the perfect time when I was looking to switch things up, and that we’ve made a great team ever since. Getting to work closely with our little product design team—Nate, Mason, Tyler, and Maya—and many, many others keeps me growing and keeps me motivated on the daily. Nectar’s mission and way of working resonated with me from the beginning. It’s rewarding to see our company continue to gain momentum and maturity, all while seeing how much room we still have to grow. Very, very grateful to be part of the journey. As we say, it’s still Day 1 at Nectar. 🚀

104

15 Comments

Imagine being one of the earliest designers on the VR and AI teams at Meta 💭 Lots of ambiguity right? That's why this week's episode with Maheen Sohail is a deep dive into designing without a clear playbook to follow (and the power of tinkering on side projects to learn) Get the full thing here 👇 https://lnkd.in/gfHQxBUV

9

AI tools will soon help us pull patterns from design systems, creating more personalised user experiences. See Google's example below of Gemini compiling UI from Material Design. Many B2B software companies are behind the curve in this respect, but those teams who are investing in design systems today are setting themselves up for faster, more consistent, and AI-enabled development in the future. #UX #UI #DesignSystems #B2BSoftware #SaaS #AI

3

Figma’s ConFig ’24 released several new features that caused many to continue to sing their praises. However, there is a trend their business model that is problematic. New features are initially available to all in beta. Once the feature goes into production, there will be a charge to use the new feature. Figma seems to be building an a la cart feature menu creating a nickel and dime growth strategy. The problem is that Figma has already surpassed the exorbitant pricing of Adobe products. Has Figma considered the full spectrum of their user base? While some enterprises may be able to float that price tag (For managers, it still can be a hard sell for budget approval), small businesses and independent designers will find the cost to be challenging or prohibitive. While Figma may generate some initial profit, it may not work in the long-term once the romance is gone.

19

So immensely proud of such an amazing group of people who've been working so hard on this big set of launches at Figma for #Config2024. ICYMI what we launched today, this blog post recap covers it well: https://lnkd.in/gX3KSWj3 I wanted to share a couple fun tweets from a few of the fantastic designers/leaders that worked on some of the things you may have seen in our keynote this morning. * This is not even close to an exhaustive list of those who worked on today's launches, but just a quick lil glimpse showcasing a few who happened to post about them today (also linkedin obscures the links for some reason, but they're all just fun behind the scenes tweets not shady sites I promise lol): Figma Slides - Keeyen Y.: https://lnkd.in/gmxBH3wq - Mihika Kapoor: https://lnkd.in/gr54Upnu - Natasha T. / Ryan Reid: https://lnkd.in/gd-v9gE3 Redesigned Figma (UI3) - Ryhan Hassan: https://lnkd.in/g868XAze (can't wait to watch the behind the scenes talk with him and Joel Miller and KC Oh as well as Wayne Sun's when they come online later) - Tim Van Damme: https://lnkd.in/gQyvqzYr - Nikolas Klein: https://lnkd.in/ge_kKyvD Figma AI - Jordan Singer: https://lnkd.in/gXmFeXTM - Oscar Dumlao: https://lnkd.in/gkACVY_c - Marco Cornacchia: https://lnkd.in/gMt3BvVY - Vincent van der Meulen: https://lnkd.in/gCrHvcVu - Jediah Katz: https://lnkd.in/gMxEu7i8 - Giorgio Caviglia: https://lnkd.in/gCNVQrKC And more: - Jenny Wen (pages design by rocky chen ✌️): https://lnkd.in/gd_6RHAv - Soundharya Muthukrishnan: https://lnkd.in/gsnibt-j - Daniel Destefanis: https://lnkd.in/gu6mYBe6 - Becca Ramos: https://lnkd.in/gqM7RGKQ We hope you enjoy these updates, and excited to meet more of the amazing community at Config for Day 2 tomorrow! I'm particularly excited for Marcin Wichary's talk tomorrow at 3:40 https://lnkd.in/gvJNNerg

88

5 Comments

My takeaway: same story as with other "copilot" applications. A designer using Figma's AI features > a designer not using Figma's AI features. Automate mundane design tasks and enable designers to focus on higher-order activities. ⚡

10

The more I learn about business the less I understand why any company would go public when they can instead run their business 

5

The 4 Stages of AI Image Generation: An Experience Map #GenAI #UX #productDesign https://buff.ly/3VKxjKs

5

Incredible!🤯 I fed my site, opendesigndocs.com, to Google‘s NotebookLM and had it generate a podcast about it. It took the context of the site and created a surprising amount of relevant content that sounds quite natural. Why is Google not advertising this! Take a listen: https://lnkd.in/gDQxxBCJ I imagine the next step would be to add different voices, tone, etc.

85

9 Comments

Design is evolving rapidly with the integration of AI, pushing tools like Figma and Framer to catch up. A significant amount of innovation in tooling and workflow is now taking place outside traditional design processes. I am excited to offer a hands-on workshop to multinationals, startups, and individuals interested in experiencing these new workflows firsthand. If you or your teams are keen on exploring AI-led design, drop a yes in the comments below. I will reach out to you once the workshop is scheduled. #design #AI #innovation

57

19 Comments

Strat USA conference (in-person only) is coming up September 9th in Boulder, and I wanted to share a quick intro to the workshop I'm leading that morning on Probabilistic Design. More information and tickets available here: https://lnkd.in/gub6Sv8U #designstratey #aidesign #uxdesign #uxstrategy

56

4 Comments

When Dropbox shifted to #VirtualFirst, my Design team helped lead the efforts to create the new model in a way that actually reimagined modern work. By applying a human centered design approach to build Virtual First—understand what users need, develop hypotheses, design and pilot solutions, observe results and iterate— what we saw as a result was true cultural transformation. This way of working is intentionally designed to make space for creativity, tinkering and deep work, while also reserving time for synchronous collaboration and IRL time when we need it. Through this process, we quickly realized there was a need for more conversation around the unique challenges of working in distributed ways. That’s how we came up with the idea for Remotely Curious—a podcast where we dive deep into the world of remote work and the struggles that come with it. One of my favorite episodes is on the topic of setting boundaries, an art that can take practice while working remotely. It’s something we’re laser focused on here at Dropbox—83% of employees feel successful in designing their own work schedules, but we know our employees want continued support around boundary setting between their work and personal lives as we continue in our Virtual First journey. Psychologist, professor, and best-selling author Andrea Bonior joined Remotely Curious to guide us through the specifics of setting boundaries in the workplace. One lesson that really stuck with me from the conversation was the idea that "clarity is kindness." It’s easy to fall into the trap of people-pleasing, where we start equating saying “yes” as being nice and saying “no” as being “difficult” or creating an uncomfortable environment. But clarity—being clear about your limits and expectations—is actually one of the kindest things you can do for yourself and your team. As leaders in a distributed environment, this is incredibly important to maintaining balance and remaining in control of our work. Creating healthy boundaries in my life enables me to be both a better leader for my team, and a better father and equal contributor at home. By being intentional in supporting myself as well as having a support system, or a “Team Alastair” around me, I can maintain better balance so that I can be the best version of myself, maintain peak-level performance and continue to scale both professionally and personally. I highly recommend giving this one a listen, and would love to hear your thoughts. https://lnkd.in/dn8As9zG #productivity #innovation #futureofwork

94

1 Comment

Working on freshmind.ai, I keep catching myself obsessing over product details. Gotta keep reminding myself: the slickest AI tool isn't worth 💩 without solid marketing/distribution. Time to shift focus and get this in front of more eyeballs.

4

2 Comments

Working on Freshmind.ai, I keep catching myself obsessing over product details. Gotta keep reminding myself: the slickest AI tool isn't worth 💩 without solid marketing/distribution. Time to shift focus and get this in front of more eyeballs.

10

1 Comment

UI Design for D to C brand ✨ Beauty brand | Yellow Slice We've revamped the user interface to be more user-friendly and intuitive, streamlining navigation and adding new features. We set the tone for the application with a stunning UI mood board and captivating samples, icons, and illustrations. After client approval, we designed the UI screens, resulting in an astonishing transformation of the Customer Experience. #ui #ux #design #yellowslice #d2c #folks

1

As a design leader, you work for your team—not the other way around. Learn how to keep your #UXteam happy, creative, and always on schedule. https://lnkd.in/eksZbUXM #DesignLeadership #TeamManagement #UXDesign #Productivity

3

This d.MBA episode shares a ton of great nuggets on advocating for design functions and how to have more impact as a designer? #UX #ProductDesign https://buff.ly/47VixoZ

2

Check out the 4 step exercise at the end of the article. Excellent advice.

2