What led you into design?
It fascinates me how two similar things can be so different in how I value them. The mix between marketing and design makes us desire one bike, t-shirt or toy over the other.
When you grow up with very limited resources you see details that the kids with money don’t. The label on a pair of jeans, is the difference between an official toy and one you can afford. You start to break things down to understand how they are made. What materials did they use? Will people notice that mine is fake based on the slight off-brand green?
My dad is a photographer and I was lucky that he managed to get me a bootleg version of Adobe CS very early on. I was hooked! There was something so creative about playing in those programs. I didn’t have the confidence to pursue drawing or music but art direction and web design was safe and still creative enough to become an obsession. This was the early days of the internet so everyone was a beginner which was so liberating and free.
Today I’m a designer simply because I get a kick out of making things better. If I were proud yesterday I’ll find a way to improve it tomorrow, perfection is an illusion. To me, it’s both humbling and encouraging to know that even the most perfect product can always be improved.
What does a typical day look like?
You rarely have typical days when you’re working at a fast-growing company, which is really fun.
We do have some rituals that stay the same:
1. Every six months at Sana we have strategy days where we set new bets, beliefs and goals. We then divide the company into missions with one clear goal each to obsess over for the next six months.
2. Quarterly we run Kano weeks based on the Kano model. This model was developed in the 1980s by Professor Noriaki Kano. The core idea is that when product development focuses on basic needs and core functionality, the end-user's satisfaction is capped.
Kano argued that better products are made by delighting end-users. By moving our focus from fixing functional problems to creating delight and joy, we can create a product that delivers more value to users. It also states that today's delighters are tomorrow's table stakes so you need to invest wisely and heavily in delighters.
3. Every six weeks we set short term goals and end each hexad with a big celebration
4. Every week ends with an after work where the teams demo what they have achieved during the week.
What's your workstation setup?
We teamed up with Ruxandra and Christian Halleröd when we designed our lab. We designed it during the pandemic with the assumption that a lot of the focus work would still happen at home and collaboration and interaction would be the most important feature of an office.
Where do you go to get inspired?
1. When I’m collaborating with my colleagues. Everyone at Sana is insanely smart, curious and proficient. I constantly feel like the dumbest person in the room with so much to learn which is the best feeling in the world. Sweden is cold and dark so you need a brilliant team to brighten up the non-existing days during winter.
2. When I close down Figma and start to prototype in code. 20 years in and I still think that it’s magical when design becomes interactive and when motion comes into play.
3. Looking at well-designed real-life objects. It becomes clear that digital design is still just in its early days. Physical products age so much better than digital. Before it was due to technical restrictions and to teach older generations how to interact with digital products but today there are no excuses. I dream of seeing a digital UI that is hard to improve even after 10 years.
What product have you recently seen that made you think this is great design?
The latest product that got to me was the Cartier Tank Solarbeat. The basic design is over a century old but there is still small refinements and technical improvements to be done. Look at it and think of all 10 principles of good design by Rams.
What pieces of work are you most proud of?
I’m never proud of more time than a coffee break. Pride gets in the way of going back and seeing everything you missed the first time. I hate looking at old things I've done because all I see are the things I would have done differently today.
5 years ago I was drawing a typeface and decided to build a climate calculator as a personal project. Partly to stress test the typeface and partly to try to deal with my climate anxiety. I never finished the font but building the calculator actually turned out pretty cool and managed to temporarily contain and aim my stress and sadness. You could measure your flight seat in square meters of melted arctic ice.
Now I'm at Sana (sanalabs.com) an AI company. Our small but amazing design team are working on two products, a learning platform and a knowledge assistant (+ trying to build a brand our users love).
What design challenges do you face at your company?
Trying to crack knowledge sharing for working professionals. Most knowledge in the world isn’t accessible to everyone, even with google and Chat GPT. It’s stuck in peoples heads or in locked or lost documents within organizations and institutions.
Learning and access to knowledge is a meta problem. If we can solve it, anything becomes possible.
What music do you listen to while designing?
Any advice for ambitious designers?
1. Commit to a personal project when you are in between jobs or need to cleanse your pallet. When I’m looking for a new designer, an interesting or well executed personal project weighs 10x heavier than some collaboration you did in school or a year in a team at Spotify or some other big organization. Personal projects show what you, and you alone are capable of and that you are hungry and curious.
2. Collaborate and be humble. You’re probably an idiot most of the time, all of us are. To really grow and learn we need others. An ego is great to have as fuel when you are alone and working late but it’s the dumbest thing to have if you ever want to get smart. Build a community, ask for feedback often and say thank you even when the feedback hurts.
3. Don’t get comfortable with one tool. Use new tools often. It will help break the frame and build new pathways in your brain. I wasted a year in Adobe Flash in 2007 instead of moving to HTML5 straight away and it nearly cost me a career. Now I make sure to use every new tool I find until I know what it can do.
This is especially important today. Learn how to generate faces and background images in Midjourney and bounce ideas using GPT. AI will save you hours and you will be among the first to know how to use it and when not to use it.
4. Don’t be lazy. The world is unfair and if you go to a design school or get a foot in the door, you are one of the lucky ones. Most designers earn more than a nurse or a teacher so you need to work your ass off to justify both you sitting in that chair and earning that money. This goes 10x for white men like me. Don’t think you deserve it, spend every moment trying to prove it or make space.
5. Work on a mission you believe in and that is true to your values. It’s cheesy but it’s true. If you can’t find it in the market, find friends and funding and build it yourself.
6. Don’t confuse process with output. Too many designers spend the majority of their time thinking and talking about the process and the design systems. All that matters in the end is the output and execution, everything else is a necessary evil and should be minimized or ignored.
Anything you want to promote or plug?
This is not a plug but an appreciation: Free tools and fonts for designers.
Design is a punk profession. All you need is access to a computer, the internet and Figma to compete with the wealthiest and biggest design teams in the world. And today when so many teams are distributed you can be a kid from anywhere with no money or education and still compete with the best if you have enough determination.
We just started an Instagram account this week where you can follow our work: https://www.instagram.com/sana_design_team/
If you want to try our AI assistant for free, visit https://sana.ai/.
Related Interview
