The Best Product Designer I Ever Worked With | Alex Cornell (Meta AI)

if you get into a field let's say design it's presumably because you have good enough taste in that thing that you appreciate it and the problem when you start working in the field is that you are terrible and so you look at your own work and you're like this sucks you know because you have good taste and you're not good so it's like the Delta is enormous and it's just constantly frustrating but the interesting thing about that is if you have the good taste you have the barometer to know and evaluate yourself as you continue to work towards getting better and the only way to get better is to just do it in a lot of work and eventually that Gap does start to close eventually when it closes what happens is that you'll do some work and your good taste and the work will be aligned and it will be good but then like I said for me that only lasts for a little bit of time and the longer it last the better the work probably was but if I look at it I'm that's great I go get coffee and I come back and I'm like crap it's terrible it's like it probably wasn't that good to begin with so I think it's not really like a total instate you don't get to a place where it's like the work is objectively good forever my guest today is Alex Cornell director of design at meta AI Alex is one of the best product designers that I ever worked with he helped design Facebook substack linear and an app for family and friends called cocon we talked about lessons from designing leading Tech products how design will change with generative Ai and how anyone can start learning design right now this interview is a mustat if you're interested in design at all if you enjoy our conversation please like And subscribe to support this podcast all right Alex well welcome thanks for chatting with me not to make you feel too good but like you're like one of the best designers I ever work with so and you've made some like amazing apps over the years right and amazing products so i' like to start at the

high level you know do you have any kind of like Core Design principles that you think about or follow when building a new product yeah definitely well first thanks for that and really happy to be here I really enjoyed working with you as well many years ago yeah I think when I think about my process and Val use I guess the one that I have to always remind myself of is to resist being too clever I think that's an instinct that a lot of designers sort of have to temper and the other side of that I think is sort of embracing intuition you know so like your own intuition and also how that will sort of manifest for a user and an experience that would feel intuitive to them and I think I don't know what it is about designers that we sort of crave the clever and the elegant that is really tempting and I think risky Instinct sometimes because if you get too clever your interface will be beautiful but hard to into it and that is not where you want to be so I think that's definitely something that I think about at first yeah I think of design I think Elegance is sort of like collecting anything Niche like baseball cards or something like that where it's like there's a small group of people who value this thing extremely you know like and that would be designers you know if I showed my work on Twitter or something and it was really flashy there's a whole group of people that would be really stoked on it and they're all designers they're not users you know and it's sort of like baseball cards where it's like the people who like baseball cards they care a lot about like a Nolan bran rookie card but like the average person's like that's a piece of paper that's worth nothing to me you know and I think there's a lot of design that might fall into that c okay so still thinking about like the user problems and like I'm making it too complicated to solve the use the problem yeah and I think it's just sort of like a constant reminder that you know what you're working on will be seen to by somebody else for the first time and it's very hard to put yourself in that mindset when you're staring at this thing forever and ever got it so like you're like designing like a you know like a new product or app from scratch like kind of process do you follow and like how can PMS be a good partner for you there's a process I mean I think at the outset like at the true outset of something you know like if we're talking about like absolute zero I think my favorite process is sort of an

alternating between unbounded conversation pretty open discussion in person for hours and hours not just like 45 minute meeting you know like a six-h hour conversation maybe coffee break in between followed by a Sim similarly long period of iteration where you separate you know so let's say if it's you and me you know I would and we're starting something new I would suggest we get together for a day and just talk for a long time and it's very important that while you're talking both of you or one of you is taking notes because you know it's very easy to have an insight and just it's gone in 20 minutes so it's pretty that's not a guided conversation but it's structured in the sense that you are taking notes and you are you know attempting to glean insights in that conversation and then taking that very quickly to a period of design where you can try to manifest whatever it was that came up in that conversation in a way that then you can talk about it the next day and I think that process of alternating between those kind of unbounded just kind of finding your way around in the dark and then like truly putting pin to paper that back and forth can be really helpful and sain and I my co-founder at Kon would do that at the beginning we'd just get together at each other's houses talk forever and you know we have I could still go back and find them and probably be pretty interesting these super long notes of these conversations that we'd be having and the notes are really wild you know they're just like it's like following your own kind of inner monologue and it's just as scattered but you can bold and Pull Apart what's useful and then turn that into a design I think pretty quickly what do you guys talk about for a whole day like a typical stuff like who the user is what the problem is or it's very unstructured yeah I mean I think like ideally you have presumably gathered together because you share some appreciation or interest in a problem space you know and so I think for us just as an example because it's I think it's useful to have some concreteness with cocoon you know we had sort of felt like we had lost a place to connect with our family you know and our close friends and this was in 2018 so well after I think we'd all sort of appreciated that the larger social networks were no longer really the place where you were doing that and a lot of those relationships had retreated to group messaging which was not really designed for at least not designed specifically for those use cases and I think even just that sentence or two sentences is enough to sort of kick off a conversation you know because I could say that and you could be like oh yeah that's true you know like I've got my large family chat which is terrible because like you get notifications whatever you and you just from there you have like kind of endless ways you could go and I think you're really trying to find the shape of the thing and like the outer boundary of where it is and I think like once you sort of established like okay this thing we're talking about is about this big you know it's like now let's fill in all the details and like see if within this problem space maybe there's actually some kind of solution that we might be able to build let's talk about cocon some more because you spent I think you s spend four years on it right so yeah give our listeners like an overview of what the app does yeah so cocoon was designed for your close friends and family and it was essentially a way to stay in touch share talk but designed specifically for those relationships so you know I think that there's a lot that you maybe would feel comfortable sharing with like your parents that you wouldn't ever really broadcast to social media and so we were able to get like a lot more I guess intimate you could say in terms of like the types of tools we provided and example would be like we did a lot of work around flight tracking you know so that this essentially messaging experience could also surface a lot of information about where your flight was if you were on it it's like the kind of thing that like the average chat probably doesn't need that you know but the a lot of my conversations on text with my mom are like have you taken off yet are you at the airport and we would just automate all of that and you could sort of Imagine or use that as an example and think of lots of features you might be able to build but I think ultimately what we were solving for something I know you'd be familiar with often is referred to as the audience problem you know which is basically that once an audience of your peers gets sufficiently large it becomes more difficult to share because you need to share or you need to find something that would sort of meet the criteria for all of those people the same thing I would share with my sister I might also I'd have to now also share with like my best friend and my college buddies and also my co-workers and it's like obviously over time what meets that all of those criteria starts to shrink and the way a lot of companies have traditionally tried to solve this is by artificially limiting the total size of the audience so you'll like I think path is maybe the most famous example where you could only have a certain number of friends or I think even retro today might be a good example where you know the size of the total audience you're sharing to is smaller close friends products these kinds of things like in inside of Instagram and our feeling was that the actual issue was not so much the total audience size but it was just context collapse so even if I only have three friends let's say it's you and my wife and my cooworker if I post a photo and the three of you comment you don't know each other and I know the three of you but you don't know each other so the conversation that's going to happen on that photo is going to be really I think maybe it's going to have to be really fragmented because I can have a conversation with each of you but like you don't care about each other and so our feeling was that the type of sharing that we thought you should be able to do is still broadcast essentially like sharing the same photo to lots of different people lots of different groups but any of the interaction any of the conversation should be direct and private so if I post a photo of my latte the co that would go out to everybody but then the conversation would be grouped by I had a family group I had a friend group I had like a direct message with a few people and that's where we ended up and I think eventually that was that felt like the right solution unfortunately where we started and where we made the biggest splash was like the product was a little different it was more of an ambient updating app where like you could monitor kind of what's going on with one single group of people over the course of the day automatically and what we pretty quickly discovered was over time that's not interesting as you start to understand people's routines also most people have more than one group which is obvious in retrospect and also really what people want to do is they want to talk and they want to share mostly photos so like we were sharing like automated location updates and that kind of thing and that just wasn't as interesting kind of reminds me of I'm not sure if you use like we had moments where I can upload a photo and if you comment on it like if satch is not connected to you he cannot see your comment you know it's not like Facebook where everyone can see everyone's comments like you have to be connected the other person to see the other person's comments yeah it's a similar type of insight where it's like you know you just because there's less total people who can comment it matters like who's connected to who you know I think like that symmetry was something that we felt was pretty important and you know the hard thing with that is and this is something that obviously we are aware of at the outset is you are then now artificially constraining your product's ability to grow because you know once you complete your groups there's really no incentive to go beyond that there's no you know there's no status game and you know we valued that quite a lot but I think it is also the kind of thing that can put a little bit of a headwind on your growth and we definitely did feel that and the people who loved cocoon loved it deeply but eventually you know we weren't seeing like the sort of explosive growth that you might see on some sort of like viral mechanic that's designed to grow but is ultimately fous you know yeah so maybe it could have been a good lifestyle business or like boostrap business but not like a VC funded business right yeah we considered you know towards the end we this was around the time when subscription products were becoming more mainstream and more accepted we did move the model into a subscription style business with which you could unlock certain things and there was definitely a path forward I think where if we had sort of we had a lot of free users and we would have probably had the force people to like everybody to pay like we probably could have kept it alive forever in some version like that but it would be kind of a lifestyle business for and I think probably difficult to keep the lights on actually but it was you know I think towards the end we did see there were lots of different possible paths and I think that was one of them we ultimately got acquired by substack during the pandemic which was a really interesting and exciting process to go through I'd never been AC choir before so that wasun yeah let's talk about substack since I you know I write on substack I talked to saching a lot actually oh great he's the best you know I think like he's one of the most if not the most insightful person I've ever met and I think like you know you don't start a company with just anybody and so I think like it's to me it's a starting a company starting a band and starting a relationship are all in the similar category of like how closely you need to align with the person or people you are starting that Journey with you know yeah it's definitely like a long-term commitment so like as substack I think you worked on the mobile app right is that way on yeah I think you know their interest in us we shared a lot of values you know when it came to just the internet that we sort of felt like we wanted to see and exist in but also our specialty you know at that time our team of four had really developed like a very particular specialty which was building mobile apps and yeah you know we had just done that with cocoon and they didn't have a mobile app and so that was definitely of high interest for them when they brought us in and I think the mobile app I've be using it you know it kind of looks similar to Twitter in some way it has a aim boox but also has like this feed called suback notes I guess while you were designing it what was kind of like the jobs to be done like the problems you're trying to solve yeah yeah well I guess I should say the app when I designed it was prenotes so it was just the Inbox and the notes product came after I left so I can't speak to that so much but yeah when we started it

was really interesting because I had never designed an app like that where I also hadn't designed the product I guess you know you could say that about when we worked at Facebook it's like obviously we didn't design Facebook but like live was sort of an experience we were designing together substack you know existed in full as a product in the world and so we were basically taking it and translating it into a mobile context that wasn't something that I had done before and I think you have to recognize at that point that you are you know a little bit more of a conduit for not only the founders Vision but also their core customer which is the writer you know so you're sort of bound to a different set of constraints than normal which is good because actually I think in that case you know our like I said we had gotten really good at designing and building mobile apps and I think when you actually have a lot of the thorny problems already mapped for you of like what actually is this product and how does it work that it already has product Market fit like that's pretty interesting compared to like building an out from zero and trying to like find your way around in the dark to find product Market fit it's almost more a mission of like don't screw this up and I think like the thing that became very clear very quickly to us was subsec is a two-sided Market you know there are the writers and they're the readers and the app is designed to make the reading experience really good for readers and you know I think you might think at first that there's really no nothing wrong with that but you know from a writer's perspective their work is going out into the world into the hands of their subscribers and they care quite a lot about you know the context of which it's read like where it appears how it appears and all of this and so you know you take maybe just something as simple as branding if you have a very branded newsletter and now it's appearing in an app that is kind of you know more homogenizing the way the experience it's like you can see how that might be a balance that's tricky to strike and I think that was something that was really interesting to navigate and again like you are sort of feeling like you are having to just really execute according to the wishes of the actual customer which is the writer you know so that was really interesting I think and I enjoyed it because I care a lot about typography and layout graphic design which are things that like don't always come up in traditional mobile product design but when you're doing like a reading app you know you can actually go pretty deep into the details of like wait what actually is the letter spacing you know and what is our Sara font and that kind of thing which was really fun so I enjoyed that quite a lot interesting maybe it's definitely a beautiful app no doubt about it but maybe the idea is that you know when I send newsletter posts out most of my readers get it in their email inbox right but like if they can use the app instead to read my stuff maybe can they can discover other writers or I can be discovered by other readers yeah yeah I mean certainly you know it became a very large growth lever for writers because of exactly what you describe you know you're being exposed to just a lot more writing that way as a reader you know and you might not otherwise have ever seen you know if it was coming into your email inbox you would obviously never see another writer's writing there and I mean I think like that was always the thing too for me I was like you know the email client is a pretty sad place to end up in the first place you know like just from like in terms of what else is around you know you're kind of getting bundled in with all the other emails that you get and like the context there is kind of crazy as well so you know I think the app is a much more Serene environment and it is designed specifically to get to give you like the best reading experience possible so you know I think you know we felt really good about where the writing was in up there awesome so then you were at linear for a brief period and you know linear is like a company that really cares about craftsmanship and design yeah I'm curious if you learn anything from that experience Yeah well yeah I mean linear is definitely a company that values design more than anywhere I have worked at before I think it is sort of maybe the best embodiment of the phrase design Le you know which you hear all the time and I think maybe not only because it's literally led by a designer in ki but also the product itself and the main thrust behind it really does feel like it's coming from a place of design and I think what I liked about working there again it was a similar experience where you know they didn't have a mobile app and they wanted one and I was brought in to essentially bring you know that experience into the mobile context was very similar to substack in that like there is a product with product Market fit that needs to be translated into Mobile very similar which I enjoyed a lot and I think what it felt like there was a true test and every designer wants this is they always every designer always complains they don't have enough time they're like oh we only had a week or we only had three days or like oh my God this like it's always so fast they wanted to ship whatever linear really was a great experiment for me in like what happens if you are trusted to hone a thing for as long as you want until you think it's ready like truly like we will release this when it is perfect and ready you know and like that was really fascinating because I don't think I'd ever really been anywhere where there wasn't at least some pressure you know artificial pressure I should say to release it because obviously there's pressure of any kind I'm talking about the artificial pressure of like here's an arbitrary deadline that we just put on the calendar and the interesting thing about that is for me as a designer I sort of measure the objective or objective good of a thing I'm designing by how long it takes me to not like it anymore if that makes sense like I will design a thing today and in 20 minutes I'll look at it I'll be like yeah that's pretty good tomorrow I'm probably going to hate it because I'll have thought about it a bit more I look at it I'm like yeah actually this doesn't make sense the length of time between when I design it and how long it takes me not to like it is usually Maps pretty well to how like objectively good it is and so at linear I was sort of allowed to work on it until that period of time became basically non-existent like it never really got to like the app that when I left that it was like kind of getting ready to go out the door sorry for my email was you know as far as I could tell like great you know that was really an exciting experience and they also they allowed me to explore and do some pretty wild things as well which I enjoyed I think my most well-known experiment there was pouring canola oil on my iPad and filming it for a marketing campaign which was yeah I think it was actually like it was really fun they one day they were like we're releasing this product called linear asks and we want to have just like a simple looping video of the logo can you think of anything and I was like today like in a couple hours and they're like whatever you can do you know make it move you can think of imagine what that would normally look like a logo kind of scaling in and maybe moving around or something and I don't know what made me think of it but I had my daughter's iPad with like the crazy like case on it and I had my camera set up and I just put it the iPad under the camera poured canola oil on the iPad with the logo on the iPad and then that was it and everybody thought it was like 3D because it looks kind of like one of these 3D exper experiments everything but it was literally just like 20 minutes pouring the oil on the iPad cleaning it up and then that was it and it was amazing how much it resonated with people I think because we've all forgotten sort of the power of you know the analog just like yeah you know take a photo of even like for mobile designs too I find that people react much more strongly to my work when I film it than when I just share it static or flat even did you ruin her iPad or it still works trust me her iPad has seen far worse than Cana oil that is a very small mark on a otherwise well traveled iPad so like you

work have so many different companies and you wrote this blog post about why you left Facebook but now you're back but you left you wrote a blog post and I think the gist of it was like you know we were working on Facebook live together it was a pretty small team he felt pretty empowered and then a whole bunch of PMs and teams got involved and became kind of annoying doal with so I'm curious like what do you think the ideal environment for a designer is like just to it's a good question I think well certainly there is no one siiz fitall I think as my career is a great example it's like the person who wrote that blog post is not the same person you're talking to because obviously I've returned to Facebook you know so there are things about what I value that have changed and I think that'll be the case for almost anybody at that time I was almost a religious follower of the mythical manmon concept you know and felt like almost nothing good could happen if more people were being added you know that was something I believed very strongly at that time I do still feel like you know the best work is accomplished by small teams and that like adding Manpower really does add time it doesn't add power it adds it just adds time I do still believe that but I think that as a designer you can learn so much and you can add different types of value in so many different contexts that it is really worth getting to experience all of them you know and I think I would suggest when I talk to other designers I always suggest if they're evaluating say between a startup and a big company you know it sort of depends on the stage in their career but I think there's probably no faster way to learn than at a big company I think a lot of people will say you know at a startup you have to do so much that you can learn so fast that's sort of true but I at least for me personally found that like my person capability expanded exponentially when I worked at Facebook the first time and I felt so much more capable than when I went into the startup world for this last fiveyear burst because I'd kind of done a five-year burst before Facebook before where I was just a new designer out of school I didn't know anything you know I didn't know what I was doing I can't even believe back then you know and so yeah I don't know that there really is an ideal environment it really does depend what you're looking to get out of the experience so and that changes and I think you should be okay with that change you know like I think a lot of people like even when I came back to meta were surprised because when I had left I had very strong feelings about certain things and I still feel those things but I also and now am you know looking for something different in my career and that's just kind of how it goes what about like let's talk about some specifics right so

like at a big company you kind of have the luxury of like there's a process where like you know you don't just design whatever you want to ship next you Leap Forward 3 years especially since you're what kind of gener of AI right now like you leave for three years you designed the Northstar experience and then you walk backwards I've always had a little bit of skepticism about that stuff because like who the hell knows what the hell is gonna happen in three years like no one predicted this J stuff three years now that you kind of being around the block like how do you feel about this like do you think just design should just focus on what's uh shipping or like should focus on longer term stuff yeah really interesting and gen is a great example I mean I think the expression is refer I don't know who said it but they're referring to product Market fit about how it can feel like chasing a boulder down the hill as opposed to pushing a boulder up a hill it's like as soon as you hit product Market fit it's like you're actually now chasing this thing that feels to me like gen compared to like you know let's say we were to go build like a I don't know a dating product or something the sculpture of that like that product object is stationary in the ground has been sculpted for many years by lots of different people and if we were to go approach it would be static and we could just kind of look at every side of it J is the rolling Boulder down the hill it's like it's going so fast that like we there is no like let's all take a beat and like see it from every angle it's like it's moving very quickly and that's obviously very exciting but in terms of you know the value of a Northstar and kind of how to balance that with tactical execution I'd personally like to think of it a bit like a barbell I guess where it's important to do a lot of work at either end of that spectrum and I guess maybe personally enjoy doing the Northstar stuff quite a lot but its ultimate value is you know you're not going to ship it as you said so if you actually want to kind of keep the engines running you have to be doing the Tactical execution at the same time and the reason I like to do both is because if you have in your mind a target of where you hope one day it will end up everything you do tactically at the moment you're aware of how that might one day fit into the broader system that you you've you know at least dream will maybe one day come to pass and you know I think maybe when we worked on Facebook video I had I was always doing a lot of work on this sort of dream Ultimate Super player that sort of was able to play any kind of video and it was a concept always because we had lots of different video players but anytime I did anything on the live player or any other um video player I was working on I was always sort of aware of where I want to end up one day and so even just simple decisions about like where certain buttons will go or the spatial model associated with showing more information you know knowing that I wanted to end up let's just say in like a modal presentation I wouldn't then go and say Hey you know where I think description should go like it should go behind the video it's like no I would never do that because like that's not where I think it should ultimately end up and I think you're only really able to do that kind of balance if you're have one foot really in each camp and then as you said like time will change everything so like what happens in between is sort of an unknown it's almost not even worth like predicting sometimes but I guess your point is that like the Northstar is worth it if it actually affects the decisions you're making for what where you want to ship next right so that's how I think yeah it does yeah and I think maybe it depends on how far it depends how long your barbell is you know if it's like I'm here and then 10 years from now here's the Northstar that's probably not very helpful you know I think in my mind my little barbell that I always sort of work around is like the length of time between the two ends is probably like eight months you know it's like still tangibly within sight you know like you might actually be able to do it would be yeah you know I don't often do the kind of work where it's like what if everything was different and there is no interface and you can do it this you know you can talk to it and it's like an AR video like I never do that kind of work because it's just so arbitrary and unbounded that I don't really have anything to grab on to you know like getting from here to there the barbell is like I said years long so it's kind of pointless I've never really enjoyed doing that kind of Northstar got it yeah dude a Northstar do like eight months to a year out it's actually perfectly shippable right like you should have a yeah like especially at meta or these big companies you should have a year long map I think yeah you know and obviously you can change things as you go but and I think also a lot of times for me the norstar when people hear Northstar usually they think like maybe we've all seen these videos on YouTube that like Microsoft will put out where it's like what if your car was your best friend and it's like doing I don't know like some weird some crazy Northstar video to me a Northstar is more just like it's like one or to three clicks Beyond cyclewise like Beyond where we're going to go next and it's like it's a it's more of a like a practical goal it's like hey at some point wouldn't it be great if we could end up here it's like I know like we got to do this and this first and we don't know what's going to happen with this but like if all that stuff goes well we could be here and it's like we can feel we can all agree that we probably could get there and it's like yeah maybe you could just stop everything and do it right now and it's I have had experiences where a Northstar is actually like more of a pivot you know like at a startup where it's like hey actually let's just do this instead kind of thing but at a big company it's worth keeping it within the site and within reason I think got it I also think it's useful to just like maybe even show the norstar to customers see if it gets them excited yeah like definitely you know like a lot of times in big companies we just like try to convince the execs but like why not just show it to the actual customers yeah for sure yeah we did that at cocoon we had a 2. 0 kind of launch that we I remember Road showed a little bit with customers and yeah I mean that's always super valuable and it's so humbling too because it's very easy to sort of get blinders on and feel like what you have is obviously what has to happen and it's not always quite so obvious for everybody you know

dud so let's talk about AI a little bit why don't I start this what how do you use AI in your personal life whether as a designer or just like as a dad yeah well I've over the last few years kind of used a blend of all of the certainly on the like llm front I use sort of a blend I remember before chat GPT became chat GPT and it was just GPT I think I wasn't work I was in between companies and I remember some friends were like let's build an email AI where you could respond to your emails you know and that it's hard to go back to this place where like we nobody really understood the capability of AI like we didn't understand what it could do and so even that was wait what it could respond for you like how would that work and this was pre- chat GPT and I remember the first demo somebody had gotten an email it was maybe like an automated email about like asking them if they wanted to donate to some campaign and the AI responded that sounds great I've wired you $500,000 you know like it had like fabricated this response of sending the money and we were all like oh my God this is the craziest thing we've ever seen and then of course you know like I don't know two months later chat GPT came out and I thought that was such a FAS thing because we had been playing around with the technology in this really weird way like the way you used to have to interface with it was like you know I forget even what it looked like but it felt almost like you were coding yeah and then all of a sudden you know it was released in chat format which to me that is just a very the technology was basically the same it was just a small tweak of presentation and interface and then it became the fastest growing product of all time you know and it's like pretty crazy you know and I think like an amazing maybe I'm simplifying it but like kind of an amazing example of how framing can really alter someone's perception because the technology was available it wasn't as if you couldn't use the technology that powered the first version of it you know so I think that was pretty cool I thought anyway I was just gonna say I've been using you know all of the various tools since as long as I've had access I think the one that I had the most experience with and probably the most fun with especially early on was mid Journey reminded me a lot of when my daughter was born and I had a lot of time like on the couch I got really into drawing I haven't hadn't done art for a long time but I got really into using procreate and doing like isometric drawings and just drawing was like a therapeutic thing you know and using mid journey and in the same way that sort of replaced what prior was like browsing Twitter or something like if I was sitting on the couch maybe I'd be like scrolling the feet or something I started drawing instead mid Journey also sort of replaced that sort of kind of browsing with more of like a it was sort of like a hybrid of creating and browsing like I think like oh I wonder what it would look like if like an espresso machine was designed by deer ROMs and you know was as tall as a small apartment build you know and it's like so there was like a creative aspect and then the browsing was just sort of looking at that output and be like oh that's kind of cool like it was a really like I've never really had an experience like that where creation and browsing were combined in into like one experience it's like kind of a weird thing because when you're drawing it's like you don't really think of your output as being something that you're like browsing It's like because you're drawing it it's like all at one time but like since there's a little bit of a handoff between like the create creative aspect of prompting a generative Ai and seeing its output that I think that little handoff period is enough to be like you know you're trying this thing out which is kind of fun yeah I think like it's a lot easier to create something that's a remix of something else that you see than to just make it from scratch so yeah like you can see Majors like for me like you know I see people post memes on Twitter and I just like repost it with like another description maybe that's same thing for Mid Journey yeah commentary yeah let's talk about this whole chat bot thing man like you know we talk about chat GPT like how do you think the interface you think interface will go from buttons and menus to chat Bots or you think there's something else out there with the well I think with AI one thing I've learned is that you know predicting what will happen too far into the future is usually a Fool's erend you know which is one of the reasons why I enjoy working in the space is how quickly it evolves it can feel sort of it's you know it's really hard to grasp the power and what the possibilities are so I think like I don't spec I don't speculate too often but I do think that you know it's as with many things you know like when we bring the old assumptions of the way tools work and to new capability usually that's like the first step usually you know it's like here we have like even using mid journey is like kind of hilarious if you think about what you're actually doing you know like literally talking to it through Discord using these really abstract commands and then the buttons you get in return are like really random it's like here's an image would you like to see it twice as big or half as small to the right of the image or to the left of it's like what why are those my options you know and it's really feels like a literal mapping of like what does this what are we able to do oh well we could make it twice as big great button we could also see we could like you know we could expand the sides great four bar buttons you know it's like it's a literal mapping of like what are we able to do to what is the interface and I think like as and I think even you know there I think releasing now a web interface which will obviously evolve some of that stuff but I think like over time as we move away from the sort of just like literal map of what can it do to what buttons we expose I think that will obviously become a lot more intuitive to use my favorite word you know I think it'll get maybe a lot more I would suspect it would become a lot more free form and less like literal you know like I think a lot of those interfaces now are like super like limited and literal so I mean like maybe something where like you just have a canvas and you like draw some boxes and fill stuff in or resize it and then you know expands itank yeah I don't know yeah exactly you know it's like it's really it's I guess I don't know yeah it's got to follow all the AI newsletters yeah exactly okay all

right man well I guess last topic so you know there's been like a lot of like layoffs in Tech and like I told you Scott who is like the CPO of adobe he talks about how the talent St is collapsing in fact I asked him like how do you find a product leader who's really good at design and he say just hire a designer so I guess the question you know as someone who has like really good design taste and has been through this how does someone who's not a designer start learning design or start acquiring taste so to speak yeah definitely I mean I think I started my I guess creative career in music and a lot of designers have I suppose but I think there's a lot of good parallels between how you become good at music and design and you break that into three categories probably you obviously have to listen to a lot which in the case of design is just constant exposure to let's we'll use product design as an example recognizing that design is much broader than product design you know obviously but product design just since we've been talking about it you know if you want to become a good designer you need to be exposed and aware of what is out there you know and that's everything from reading the Hig you know the interface guidelines and the Android material guidelines reading that from cover to cover but also just using as much as you can because you know the way Apple does a traditional modal presentation is one way but then like a couple guys in a garage are going to think of some crazy weird way to do it like I saw that it's not that often you see a new interface Paradigm but I was just using the Amy calendar and they have this like pretty wild thing where the interface is like split in two and it's like there's an implication that you've actually got like almost two planes of app that can kind of move in parallel and it's like I never really seen that before and it's like that's awesome and if you're not exposing yourself constantly to that kind of ideas it'd be very hard to conceive of that kind of thing completely on your own all the time same is true and then so from there I think if you're listening to a lot of music so to speak the next step usually to learn is to copy it you know and I think through copying and in music it's very it's less copying it's like you just learn to play other people's music it's like that's how most people get better in design it's hard to tell designers to be like go build like that interface I just described go prototype that and in doing that since you're not a good designer presumably there will be these mutations that occur that are sometimes delightful but also that becomes what your style is sort of The Amalgamated mutated combination of what you've tried to do with your own mistakes and that just eventually becomes your style like you mix a bunch of things together like if you like for me when I was learning guitar it's like I love Jimmy Hendrick but I also love John May and you know he loved jimmi Hendrick but his version of Jimmy Hendrick is obviously different than jimmi Hendrick and then my version of their version of it's like it becomes this like you know crazy mixture and I think that's an important step and then I think lastly you know if you're just trying to get good at design there's a absolute requirement to just do as much work as possible which in the music example would be practice but there's so much value to working constantly not only physical like I'm for example very fast like when I work on anything I do it very quickly because I've gotten so used to the keyboard commands and my mouse is fast and just I'm able to very quickly do what I need to do and that only comes through practice it's an essential step and then I think we either talked about it or you wrote it down before I can't remember but the irog glass interview which I've referenced and quoted before it's like every once in a while there's a person that says a thing that's like could not be more true and it's like it's almost like distills everything that's important down so precisely that it's like really you could just listen to how he talks about getting good in his case at doing radio interviews but like you could just treat getting good at his thing it's like it's so perfect that it's like you almost should just listen to that and do what he says and I'll do a terrible job of reiterating what he says but his basic point is like if you get into a field let's say design it's presumably because you have good enough taste in that thing that you appreciate it and we just have to assume for the sake of this argument that you have relatively good taste and the problem as he says when you start working in the field is that you are terrible and so you look at your own work and you're like this sucks you know because you have good taste and you're not good so it's like you like the Delta is enormous and it's just constantly frustrating and which but the interesting thing about that is if you have the good taste you have the barometer to know and evaluate yourself as you continue to work towards getting better and the only way to get better is to do as he would say is to just do it in a lot of work you know and eventually that Gap does start to close and as I mentioned for me like we're eventually when it closes what happens is that you'll do some work and you'll look at it and you're good taste and the work will be aligned and it will be good but then like I said for me that only lasts for a little bit of time and the longer it lasts the better the work probably was but like if I look at it I'm like that's great I go get coffee and I come back and I'm like crap it's terrible it's like it probably wasn't that good to begin with you know so I think it's not really like a total instate you don't get to a place where it's like yeah you know the work is objectively good forever but yeah anyway I think like those three categories you know exposure to lots of work replicating as much as you can and then practice Yeah that would be how I would tell a designer to get better got it so the first two are kind of like acquiring good taste right and the third one is kind of like level of your skill so you can make the good taste stuff yourself yeah and good taste is an interesting concept just generally I think the way I've always interpreted it is basically how close does your subjective understanding of a artistic field map to the general public you know so somebody like Rick Rubin you know who has you know one of the best reputations of all time of music producers perhaps it's just that his personal taste Maps directly to the Zeitgeist taste you know like maybe that's I don't like he's fortunate in that way because there are people whose taste is so far outside of what might be considered like Global or broad that they just end up having a very Niche career so I taste is a really funky concept and I think even it's not like solid object that has some true objective meaning you know yeah I do think you have to be honest to yourself right like you got to be honest what you think good taste is and yeah you're right it might not be the mainstream what the mainstream thinks good taste is yeah you have to really like have a good that's why I think it's important to constantly sort of be ingesting lots of work because you know if you are I think what ultimately becomes other people's perception of your good taste is that you have a really you're really in tunee with kind of what's out there what's happening what's fresh and what's interesting if you're totally out of touch and you're not really ingesting a lot of work maybe it's just that you're just exceptionally creative on your own but probably you will just be a little bit behind what is you know the actual yeah kind of current thing so you know I think that's why that's such an important part of the process because I don't know of another way to do that all right man so yeah thanks so much for this chat where can people find you online should I direct them to your Rising music career or you know I still maintain I uploaded music to Spotify maybe 15 years ago and it still gets you know I think it's over might be it's either 30 or 50 million I can't remember but it's like it's just been a constantly surprising wonderful outlet that I have only ever I plugged into it like I said a decade ago and it's just constantly sending me love back in a way that like feels so unearned at this point CU it was so long ago but no yeah so you can find me on Spotify if you wish but I think probably since the general landscape of networks is ever shifting I usually just like to send people to my website because I think if I say find me on some Network it who knows if it's there tomorrow you know so yeah just alexc cornell. com is a safe bet usually