In memory of my brother Lex, I’m cycling 1,200km from London to Denmark in 11 days to raise awareness about men’s mental health and suicide. I’m riding to raise £7,055. One pound for every life lost to suicide in 2023. havesomelove.com

Had a great time chatting with @ridd_design and giving into Oodles and more that we’re working on @metalab. As I say on here, it’s never been a more exciting and equally scary time to be a designer, but if you’re curious, adaptable and resilient I think you’ll be A OK.

DevDay and City official verdict all at the same time, my brain is going to hurt trying to keep up over the next 24h.

Yesterday @designertom and @ridd_design invited me onto Dive Club Radio to share a tool I've been playing around with at @metalab for designers to quickly and easily make parametric tools right from Claude, without having to worry about any of the plumbing. There’s 34 control types, exports, artboards, recording, presets, multiplayer, mic/webcam, animation timeline and deployment, all built-in. The idea is a designer should only have to focus on what it is they want to make and nothing else. It's called Oodles and it's a 'shell' I've made that taps into a range of libraries which can create pretty much any kind of tool you can imagine, just from writing a text prompt and using the /new-tool skill in Claude. Oodles also learns from itself: every error it hits while building a new Oodle turns into a guardrail for the next one and every piece of new functionality it uncovers can be fed back into the core shell for deployment to everyone. Everything is then published behind our own internal auth so we can control access easily. The ultimate idea is that these tools can be created and handed over to clients, who can then use them to export and create on-brand assets easily. Watch the walkthrough back on YouTube here: youtube.com/live/Vh8ogFIE8CA… Play with one shown here: sites.metalab.com/oodles/gla… Thanks again to Tommy and Ridd for having me on alongside such amazing guests!

Honoured to be running through a lil something later today! I have never been more excited to be a designer. I can be a maker again - my poor React knowledge doesn’t limit what I can do & it’s like 2014 when I learnt jQuery & I can just build tools, products & ideas solo again.

In 2024 I was fortunate enough to work with Marek on a new icon set and you won’t meet a more focused, detail oriented person. He is obsessed w/ the details & has worked really hard to change his practice from a great PD to a full-time icon designer, can’t recommend him enough.

I had been tinkering with a Raspberry Pi + eInk Display to render this generative flower thing I have where it goes through the lifecycle of a flower… but I guess now I have to jump on @steveruizok ESP32 fun instead.

1-0, time to stick Dan Burn on then? #FRAENG

The feels like watching United over the last few years, it’s just Burn instead of Maguire. Awful game management from Tuchel.

Headed to SF next week for #config for the first time, as well as something fun planned for @metalab 20th anniversary. If you're around and want to chat, gimme a shout!

Did a couple of things in @paper w/ Claude & if I was a solo designer right now I’d immediately swap over to it. Figmas lock-in at this point feels like collaboration, not sure how long that lasts. Needs better designing with AI, rather than just pipeline improvements for Eng.

Doing a talk at the end of the month in Shoreditch. It’s about how the obsession with “taste”, AI, tooling, the role of designers and “shipping things” is the wrong conversation. When everything references everything else and is fed to a robot, our systems collapse towards the safest possible middle and everything looks the same. Great work doesn’t come from software or prompts. It comes from taking risks, from courage and intention. At @metalab for 20 years we’ve created an environment where people feel they can take those risks, sit with ambiguity and go beyond that average middle. We need to get weird again before design eats itself. eventbrite.co.uk/e/interface…