Life of Design: Tim Van Damme

Head of Design at Abstract

Colin Campbell

Published in

Life of Thought

8 min readOct 29, 2017

1. How did you begin working in the world of design?

It all started with the very first dial-up connection we had at home. Before that my brother and I used to play offline games, and draw things or make fake flyers. And then when the internet entered our house, I became hooked.

Whatever you could think of, there was something about it on the internet. And I realized that there are people behind this.

Someone made this website or wrote this article or whatever it was and their creation is now suddenly accessible to anyone in the world.

That got me fascinated with websites. I got into maintaining a website with a friend together by copy/pasting HTML tables around and adding new rows to a table and changing some values.

From there, I kept learning more and more about how to build a website. I realized that if you want to build a website, it’s probably a good idea to start off with a design or at least an idea. And that’s how I became hooked.

2. What is the purpose of design?

Well, design can never live by itself, right? Design by itself, it’s a fancy pixelated painting. I think the purpose of design is to illustrate a story.

That story involves the end user, the product, technical constraints, platform constraints, it involves time constraints, financial constraints etc. And essentially you are trying to illustrate “This is what we should build. This is what we should ship.” And you create a story.

And that story can be a sketch on a piece of paper, it can be a wire frame on your computer, it can be a detailed, pixel-perfect mock and sketch, or it can be a prototype.

Or, at the most extreme, you can actually build all of the parts yourself. I think where it begins and where it ends is very blurry. But, there’s a lot of in between that you can do. As a designer, you use all the knowledge that you’ve gathered throughout your career to illustrate the story as efficiently as possible.

3. How would you describe the mission behind Abstract’s Design? What core problem are you trying to solve and what experience are you trying to create?

From the day we started working on this product, we wanted to build something that people would use every work day throughout the day. So that, to me, meant the UI shouldn’t be fancy, it shouldn’t be flashy, it should be down-played as much as possible.

The best compliments I’ve gotten about the UI is how boring it is. That is great, because that means that you won’t easily get tired of it. If the design was to be very flashy, very now, very trendy, it would mean that six months from now you would get tired of it.

I think the easiest way to explain it is if you look at how engineers work today, there is a full paper trail all the way back until the day you started a project.

And you can see everything everyone did at all times. It’s all documented. There’s accountability in that system. And that’s just something that designers, up until Abstract, haven’t had. You basically open the file, make your changes, hit save, close, and then go home.

With Abstract, we’re asking designers to slightly change the way they work. They don’t go to finder to open their file, they go to Abstract to open the files. And we track the changes and then we ask the designers to, a couple of times a day, just document the changes they made. And they’ll do that in the commit and with every commit they create a new, tiny milestone, in the design. At that point, another thing that happens is the work gets shared with the entire team.

Designers occasionally have a tendency to kind of work on their own and only share their work when they feel like it’s ready to be shared. We flipped that model upside down and as soon a commit happens the entire team can see it.

The entire company can see it. But, we also put mechanics in place where you clearly tag what the state of your work is. So if you tag it “work in progress,” your team should respect that and if they really want to give some feedback they can, but they need to realize that it’s not ready for review yet. The next step is open for feedback, at which point we actually welcome feedbacks, but it’s still not set in stone. It’s only when you reach the ready for review step, that’s when the decisions get made.

That’s when you call in your manager or your colleagues, depending on the size of your team, and you ask them for permission to merge the changes that you made into the master, so, it’s a very official flow that everyone can follow.

4. What’s one thing you believe about design that most others don’t?

Ah, that’s a good one. Let’s see. I think design right now is too expensive, meaning… It pains me when I see designers waste time. It’s a skill that takes a lot of time to perfect, which means making sure that as you’re designing, you’re always productive. You know how to avoid certain rabbit holes, where you might spend days designing something that isn’t meant to be spent as much time on. I’ve seen companies go bankrupt because the design team wasn’t efficient.

And it hurts me. I try to work as fast as I can, take as many shortcuts as I can, and I use the people who are sitting around me.

By constantly talking to people and having conversations with people, it’s a shortcut. You save so much time. You’re doing both user research and you’re learning more about the constraints that you have to work with at the same time.

We need to use more of each other and waste less time.

5. what key problems are often overlooked by design?

I think this builds on my previous answer. Designers get isolated, or they think they should be isolated, or there are factors that isolate them.

Maybe the way a company is structured or maybe it’s just the way a designer thinks. When I worked at Dropbox, the best conversations I had were non-designers who worked in sales, or individuals who worked in support. They always had an opinion and the feedback is great, but the fact that they are so close to the end user, to the people who are actually going to pay for the thing that you’re working on, meant that they had very, very valuable things to say.

That’s a great thing. You need to be as close to the end user as possible. And another benefit of doing that is it’s great for the team as well. Because everyone gets to be involved in the design, and everyone gets to help make decisions. Which is why it’s bullshit when a designer says, “Yeah, I designed an important feature.” I’m like, “No, you probably didn’t.” You executed the pixels on the screen, but all the people that you talk to, all the people you got feedback from, they were all part of the design process.

6. What is the most difficult thing about design?

I think it’s knowing when to stop working on something.

7. When is design done?

I think it’s done when time runs out. Then again, when does time run out? Ideally, there is a deadline. Things need to ship, some design will probably need to be ready before the deadline so things can be properly implemented and all that.

But it’s a blessing and a curse that digital products are certain to be updated. It’s so easy to keep working on them forever…

You have to be willing to say, “Alright, this is it. I’ve done all the work that I think I should have for this. I need to move on to my next project, the next feature, or whatever’s next on the list.”

It’s almost like an art. There’s also an ego aspect to it, where it might not be perfect and you need to be okay with that. And this goes the same for me, for a long time I would say “I’m not happy with this design so it’s not ready.”

That’s not true.

You’re not happy with the design because you’ve been looking at it for a long time and you know every single pixel inside out. Done is better than perfect. I don’t know who said that, but I love that quote.

8. What does the future of design look like to you?

It’s very open ended.

I think a lot of things can happen, right? I’m excited about AR and VR. I’m excited about the AI approach, as well, especially when it comes to voice.

Visual designer-wise, you’ll have to make a choice or maybe you can do multiple platforms, but are you focused either on the 2D, on the 3D, or AR/VR thing. More platforms.

And one day there’ll be another medium, something that we can’t even dream of right now.