What led you into design?
I started designing things before I knew design was a thing.
As a kid in the 80s and 90s, I spent countless hours tinkering with computers, drawing comics, writing stories, and making weird visual experiments of all kinds.
I especially loved the friendly playfulness in the original Mac's interface. It was so approachable, I connected with it immediately, and my imagination took off from there. I learned to always put some humor and soul into everything I make.
Later I moved on to print and web design, then took a few detours through journalism, computer science, and conceptual art, before finally jumping into software design. All of those experiences turned me into a strange sort of generalist designer—I figured out how to be scrappy and adapt to many different problems and challenges.
What does a typical day look like?
I've been fully remote since 2020, so I roll out of bed, tend to coffee, cats, and kids, then hop right into work. A portion of our team at Figma is located in Europe, so I'm often in early meetings with them. Once those meetings are over, the rest of the company has started getting online, and we're off to the races.
I've been managing design teams for the past several years, so my meeting schedule is busy. I'm usually jumping into warmups, 1:1s, crits, reviews, and interviews throughout the day, then riffing on ideas and writing in the evenings.
I live in the Chicago area, and whenever our midwestern weather is decent (a somewhat rare occasion) I try to take a break on my bike, hang out in my garden, go get a sandwich, or any other activity that involves fresh air and sunlight. When you're remote, you have to get out in the world and refresh your state of mind a lot.
What's your workstation setup?
My bedroom is my office, because my family lives in a modest little house, and all the rooms are taken. I've optimized the few square feet I have for a nice desk setup, and packed in as many books as I can fit elsewhere.
Desk stuff: Fully Jarvis standing desk, Grovemade Desk Shelf, HÅG Capisco chair, Teenage Engineering Computer-1, GMMK Pro keyboard, MT3 Susuwatari keycaps, iPad mini with Nuphy Air60 keyboard, Lume cube light.
Where do you go to get inspired?
I'm rarely inspired by software. I love working on software, and it's fun seeing what people are building, but it doesn't motivate me that much. I think I'm too close to it, and I try not to be overly influenced by what other folks are doing.
So I mostly look outside of digital worlds for inspiration: music, art, poetry, and nature. I grow a lot of houseplants and orchids.
I also like to read biographies of creative people, because we all share the same highs and lows trying to make something great. We dig deep, draw inspiration from those before us, and put our whole selves into the work—along with all the uncertainty, self-doubt, struggle, fearlessness, and grit that's necessary along the way. Those feelings transcend every medium.
A few of my recent fave biographies are Just Kids, A Designer's Art, and This Is A Dream We All Dreamed.
What product have you recently seen that made you think this is great design?
It seems like designers often have an obsession with some imperfectible object: things like bikes, cars, watches, or whatever. There are infinite ways to design these, and they’ll never be exactly right, so you can nerd out on the little details endlessly.
For me that thing is backpacks. I’ve tried a ton of them! When I started at Figma they sent me a giant-sized MacBook Pro, so I had to get a backpack that would fit it. I picked up a waxed canvas GR1. It’s a sweet combo of classic materials and modern bits.
On the software side, I’ve been enjoying a recent resurgence of indie apps that have been popping up. Here are some of the good ones:
Twodos by Adam Whitcroft. Clever UI ideas in this!
Trash Baby, an amazing and fun AI image remixer by Kelin Carolyn Zhang.
feeeed, a simple news reader by Nate Parrot.
Bebop, a speedy notes app by Jack Cheng.
Also a fan of Tot by Iconfactory, Ivory by Tapbots, iA Writer, Things, and Stops, a great little camera app.
What pieces of work are you most proud of?
I’ve had the privilege to work on some amazing projects over the years. At Figma I've been focused on the production side of design, with features like Dev Mode, Design Systems, and Prototyping. At Twitter I worked on the main timeline and the layout of tweets. And before that I helped invent the HEY email app.
But I'm most proud of my side projects, because they have no constraints. You have complete creative control, and you can make totally bizarre decisions that would make no sense in a corporate environment.
Several years ago I created Hello Weather with my friend Trevor, and we’ve been running it as a side business ever since. We're currently in the midst of a massive rewrite that's taken years to complete, but we think it'll be worth the wait!
I also started working on a collaborative poetry app with my daughter. It’s still unnamed, but we’re hoping to launch this someday.
What design challenges do you face at your company?
Haha...at Figma, probably all of them?
It’s fascinating (and daunting) to design the product that designers use to design products. On one hand it sounds straightforward, because you're building the tool you want to use every day, so that should be easy? But the reality is that teams have drastically different ways of thinking and creating, and we want to support as many of them as possible, so we can't just rely on our own instincts.
We try to make Figma highly flexible and open-ended, with the right amount of structure and magical bits to help people get into a flow state and work efficiently. We really sweat the details to get this right, which often requires building incredibly complex things in order to achieve a simple-seeming outcome. Nearly every part of Figma is a complex system with its own rabbit hole of details, dependencies, and puzzles to figure out.
The design process has also become so much more than just a designer working in a tool in isolation. Design is a collaborative activity that requires coordination from lots of people, including PMs, engineers, writers, researchers, and more. We're thinking deeply about how we can support those workflows more thoughtfully than we are now, and I'm super excited about the potential.
Lastly, there's also the constant challenge of using Figma to design Figma, which continues to break my brain on a regular basis.
What music do you listen to while designing?
Any advice for ambitious designers?
Here's my advice in list form.
- Start with your weirdest ideas
- Bring enthusiasm and positivity
- Solve the critical problems first
- Timebox explorations
- Be open to many options
- Question assumptions
- Have an opinion about what’s important
- Seek any and all feedback
- Be an ally for your team
- No territorialism or ego
- Deliver critique with kindness
- When in doubt, ship and learn
- Advocate for customers
- Prefer being clear over clever
- Call out harmful ideas or abuse vectors
- Avoid getting too attached to your work
- Learn to build it yourself
- Stand by your principles
- Sweat the details on style and interactions
- Always take care of people.
Anything you want to promote or plug?
Follow me over on Threads and Mastodon, or subscribe to my newsletter (which I send out extremely sporadically, but I can promise it will be entertaining when it happens.)
You can find me on the web at jonas.do.
I also want to promote the Chicago Food Depository. Please donate a few dollars if you can.
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