What led you into design?
I always feel like I’ve been curious—I’ll spend far too much time reading Wikipedia articles, and as a kid, I spent countless hours figuring out how to solve my Rubik’s cube. Sometime in high school, this curiosity lead me to the MacThemes Forum where I found designers posting incredible app icons and visual design work they had created. It was fascinating to learn that all the software I was obsessed with on my Mac was created by designers using tools like Photoshop and I felt that I had to explore the craft myself. One thing lead to another and soon I was spending hours and hours fumbling around with the Pen tool in Photoshop, drawing icons, and theming my Mac and iPhone.
In college, I dove deeper into design through Human-Computer Interaction, combining courses in design, psychology, and computer science. This multidisciplinary approach helped me connect the dots between crafting beautiful visuals and solving complex problems through design. Today, I still explore icon design through freelance projects while working as a software designer at Linear, where I strive to channel that same curiosity into creating meaningful, intentional experiences.
What does a typical day look like?
I usually start my day by getting outside and walking my dog, Meli. I find it really helps clear my mind and is often when I come up with ideas about the work that lies ahead of me. I’m fortunate that work at Linear involves relatively few meetings, so after catching up with teammates over coffee, I usually have the chance to spend most of my day focusing on unraveling the current design problem I’m facing, the prototype I’m building, or knocking out a handful of smaller design tasks to improve the quality of Linear Mobile.
I’m really lucky to live near San Diego’s beautiful coastline, so at least a few times a week I’ll try to end the day with a dog walk by the water. In the evenings, I’ll spend time with my partner, possibly work on an app icon for a client, explore some ideas that have been buzzing around my head during the day, or get out and about with friends.
What's your workstation setup?
Where do you go to get inspired?
Quite a large proportion of my ideas come either while walking my dog with the Notes app open on my phone, or while scribbling in my sketchbook. This is not a novel concept, but something about stepping away from the actual work and having a clear mind to think deeply about it works well for me.
Aside from the moments that require deep thinking, I’m an avid collector of reference images, screenshots, videos, photographs, etc. I’ve built up a collection of over 8,000 screenshots, images, videos, links, etc. that I dig through often, and I’m always surprised by how frequently they inspire ideas.
What product have you recently seen that made you think this is great design?
Less of a specific product, and more of a class of products or features—but I’m always really impressed when a product is designed in such a way that it feels like a natural extension of yourself, rather than something you have to learn to work with. Products that are designed for natural human behavior.
To give some examples:
- Pull to refresh.
- My car door unlocking the moment I touch the door handle.
- A quick touch of my Apple Pencil on my locked iPad screen instantly opening a new Quick Note.
- The Linear website showing a "Copy SVG" button when I right click on the logo.
- Flighty triggering a “Share flight” toast when I take a screenshot of my flight details.
- My AirPods (and even EarPods before them) pausing when I take one out, and my Apple Watch silencing when I cover it with my hand.
- Dot from New Computer, allowing the user to send multiple consecutive messages before the LLM responds.
What pieces of work are you most proud of?
In September 2024, the team at Linear shipped Linear Mobile after about a year and a half of work. I’m really proud of what we were able to build for version 1.0, and there’s a lot more to come. This was the combined effort of many teammates—Josh Pyles, Bryan Stern, Alessandro Oddone, Jori Lallo, Tom Moor, Karri Saarinen, and Alex Cornell—with plenty of support from the rest of the Linear team as well.
To highlight a section of the product I’m particularly proud of: I spent a good chunk of time working on reimagining the collaborative documents experience. The product we shipped—and are continuing to improve—aims to make it seamless to navigate through comment threads on a document while retaining the highlighted context of the discussion.
What design challenges do you face at your company?
Linear itself is a very powerful product, and with all that power comes a lot of complexity. One of the jobs of the design team at Linear is to distill that complexity so that anyone can harness Linear’s power—whether they’re developer ICs, managers, VPs, or CEOs.
In my role designing the mobile apps at Linear, I have an added layer of challenges: working to distill complexity even further so that it’s seamlessly accessible on a small, touch-based interface.
A project I’ve worked on that showcases this is the new properties section on an issue in Linear Mobile. In the desktop product, issues display a list of interactive properties in a sidebar. The information in these properties is crucial to understanding an issue, but when fully displayed, they take up a lot of room. On Linear Mobile, I worked on creating a system to display the full list of properties on an issue, keep them easily interactive, and minimize their visual footprint.
What music do you listen to while designing?
Any advice for ambitious designers?
It’s tough to give good advice, but I’ll share a quote that has stuck with me for a while and that I think is especially helpful to remember during the more frustrating moments of designing.
Ira Glass talks about the “taste gap.” When you look at your own work and feel frustrated with its quality, it might be because your taste is outpacing your skills. That gap can be frustrating, but I see it as a sign you’re on the right track. Stick with it, stay curious, follow your interests, and create things for the joy of exploration.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years, you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
Ira Glass
Anything you want to promote or plug?
You can follow me @gavmn on X or find more on my website, nelson.co.
Also, I’ll promote a few of my favorite books relevant to creativity and pursuing a career as a designer/creator/builder.
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