A mutuals tool for Twitter Brief I had the idea for Mutuals about a year ago, sometime around November 2020. The idea is simple. When I visit someone’s Twitter profile, I see an important metric: Who do I follow, who follows this person? In other words, Twitter shows me the intersection…

A comprehensive list of tautologies — Earlier this year, in 2021, the brand Haerfest launched a campaign in support of the AAPI community. I bought a t-shirt with the campaign theme, “nothing changes if nothing changes,” embroidered in a circle on the left chest. “Nothing changes if nothing changes” is a tautology, a self-affirming statement. The…

I’m abandoning dtc.life, a very short-lived side project. Background In August 2020, during the pandemic, someone I follow was crowdsourcing DTC product recommendations on Twitter. I’d been following the DTC (direct to consumer) space pretty actively, but I hadn’t heard of many of the brands mentioned in the replies. Idea So, I…

As today kicks off SF Design Week 2021, I’ve been reflecting on what I see as the real value of attending design talks and conferences. — 4 years ago, I attended my first SFDW, as a volunteer. That year, I was going to design talks multiple nights a week. I volunteered at events hosted by the AIGA SF chapter. I sat in on panel discussions and workshops at General Assembly. I went to my first-ever large…

For a redesign of the Google Chrome homepage, I took on the challenge of producing high-quality animations without contributing to latency — Last year, Google Chrome celebrated a big milestone, and turned 10. …

Finding the correct vocabulary to unpack creative compositions — Words like “clean,” “flat,” and “whitespace” have become banal catchalls for tech-oriented design work. Generally speaking, I no longer find these words effective in communicating the specificity of a composition. When presenting work and giving feedback, I aim to use language that is descriptive, specific, and clear. …

A shared design philosophy — I’m embedded at Google as a designer through Left Field Labs, an experience design agency. While I approach my 1-year with Left Field Labs, Left Field Labs approaches 10 years of creative partnership with Google. I’ve quickly learned here that Left Field and Google align closely in their design philosophies…

Accessible design is so much more than color contrast — Stop the madness Accessibility is #trending in the design community as of late. Specifically, there’s one aspect designers can’t seem to get enough of: color contrast. If I see one more contrast tool on ProductHunt, I’m going to lose my mind. Micro-history lesson You may be familiar with the *magic ratio* of 4.5:1 between text…

A simple yet comprehensive organizational system — Client projects have lots of moving pieces. I’m a designer on Creative Engineering at Google, which works with Google PMMs (Product Marketing Managers) to create websites and digital experiences. We ourselves are comprised of several creative and development agencies, and work with both internal product teams and other external agencies. …