Johnnie Manzari

234 posts

Johnnie Manzari

Johnnie Manzari

@johnnie

Interaction Designer

Katılım Nisan 2009
111 Takip Edilen11.6K Takipçiler
Johnnie Manzari
Johnnie Manzari@johnnie·
The value of this iteration isn’t just in improving the design, it’s also a way to understand if you can clearly and concisely articulate the problem and your proposed solution. A cyclical perspective on this is that you’re iterating on superfluous internal marketing material. A wiser perspective is that ultimately if you can’t explain internally why this work is significant, you’ll probably struggle even more when it comes to explaining it externally.
Dasha Anderson@DashaAnderson_

The pattern described by former Apple designers was: show rough work, get feedback fast, improve it, show it again, and repeat. They compared it to an SNL-style cycle: early ideas, midweek critique, late-week rehearsal, then executive review.

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Johnnie Manzari
Johnnie Manzari@johnnie·
Yes. On the one hand, natural language is a difficult way to explain visual and interactive experiences; for example, imagine trying to describe the Mona Lisa with only words. But natural language paired with this speed of output is a magical experience… you’re creating things with just your thoughts
Julien Barbier 🙃❤️🏴‍☠️ 七転び八起き@jbarbier

Using Claude Code has a weird side effect: You don't just get more productive, you actually want to work more. There's something addictive about watching a product being born in real time in front of your eyes. "One last feature" after "one last feature" and it's already past 3am.

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Johnnie Manzari
Johnnie Manzari@johnnie·
This lesson from 2000 is just as relevant today. (From "In the Plex" by Steven Levy, published 2011)
Johnnie Manzari tweet media
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Johnnie Manzari
Johnnie Manzari@johnnie·
@Celesteamadon Are you opening a physical space across from Mixt on Fillmore or is that just a placeholder while the owner finds someone to lease it?
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Celeste Amadon
Celeste Amadon@Celesteamadon·
Hi my name is celeste and I'm on a mission to help sf people find love (and hopefully ppl nationwide soon too) I left stanford to build Known which is an app that plays matchmaker for you and sets you up on dates without swiping. We have set up a ton of people in sf and hopefully you're next ;) While I'm busy building, I'd love to make new friends in sf or have you join our events. DMs are open!
Celeste Amadon tweet media
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Johnnie Manzari
Johnnie Manzari@johnnie·
I’ve felt firsthand how AI speeds up design and engineering, but if your customer is a human being then you will have diminishing returns on jamming option after option, and feature after feature, into your product. This acceleration of development makes it harder than ever to edit ideas and distill options to only the essentials, but the successful products won’t confuse volume of output with product success.
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Johnnie Manzari
Johnnie Manzari@johnnie·
Reading this reminded me that some designers would mistakenly assume that Jony cared primarily about aesthetics. They would lead a presentation with how things looked. Those presentations rarely went well in my opinion. He mostly cared about ideas. If you went in with research that lead to interesting insights--unique points of view that others had missed--you didn't even need to give those ideas concrete form. You could present them abstractly, and those meetings were far more interesting and productive. letters.stevejobsarchive.com/jony-ive
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Johnnie Manzari
Johnnie Manzari@johnnie·
@wolfr_2 Dylan’s not mad about it, he reached out. I think the criticism is good if it leads to stronger ideas.
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Johan Ronsse
Johan Ronsse@wolfr_2·
@johnnie Personally, I don’t think Figma is responsible for boring design because they didn’t provide designers with the right tools. Then you might as well blame any tools company from the last 20 years.
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Johnnie Manzari
Johnnie Manzari@johnnie·
Figma is culpable here, maybe more than anyone. It trained a generation of software designers to focus on design systems and static flows. Because it was canvas based and not code based, it discouraged exploring ideas that would only work in a time vector or that only made sense interactively. Macromedia Director and Flash were far better tools for designers. But I agree with Dylan that times are changing.
TBPN@tbpn

Design used to have a ton of variation until the iPhone came out, says Figma CEO @zoink. After that, Skeuomorphism and Swiss minimalism became the standard everyone copied. Dylan says that now, AI is causing the pendulum to swing back: "We can go into such interesting places, and try so many interesting patterns in the UX side, too. It's not just UI and the visuals. It's also the structure, the IA, the way that people navigate through these things. And I think there's innovation that's going to be flourishing on all of it." "People are going to try things we haven't seen in a while, and things people haven't seen, ever. Because that's what it's going to take to stand out now."

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Johnnie Manzari
Johnnie Manzari@johnnie·
@wolfr_2 My entire career is building tools for creative people. Look me up on LinkedIn.
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Johan Ronsse
Johan Ronsse@wolfr_2·
@johnnie You’re a designer who worked at a company with more resources than almost anyone in the world. So what did you ship… instead of calling Figma “culpable”?
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Johnnie Manzari
Johnnie Manzari@johnnie·
@leozera It was all about interactivity and motion. People would build entire games with it.
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leo
leo@leozera·
@johnnie Curious about the Flash comment. In which way it was better than Figma? Timelines? Symbols? ActionScript?
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Johnnie Manzari
Johnnie Manzari@johnnie·
@sdw All the old guard designers I’ve been talking to recently have been excited to rethink everything for the AI era. You can even build your own design tools if you don’t like what’s out there. There’s never been a better time to be in software design.
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Sebastiaan de With
Sebastiaan de With@sdw·
@johnnie I think beyond the limits of canvas based it was prescriptive and inherently limited by what web technologies could do, which made things even worse.
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Johnnie Manzari
Johnnie Manzari@johnnie·
@ericjackson There was a brutal -30% drawdown in 2018 when sentiment was that Apple was going to lose to Android and Chinese handsets. Would have been a big mistake to sell into that narrative. Takes a strong stomach to ignore the noise.
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Eric Jackson
Eric Jackson@ericjackson·
In May 2008, $AAPL peaked (in today’s dollars) at ~$6.77. By January 2009, it was ~$2.79. A 59% drawdown. Nine months of “dead money.” This was after the iPhone launched. Back then, bears said: “Overhyped.” “Fraud.” “Not revolutionary.” “Bulls should be embarrassed.” Today? No one remembers the Apple bears. The iPhone changed the world. $OPEN is down ~57% from five months ago. If it were to mirror that 2008–09 Apple pattern, it would need to go sideways for another four months before the next leg. Most people can’t sit through the valley. They confuse volatility with fraud. They confuse time with thesis failure. They confuse patience with stupidity. Sometimes the product wins. Sometimes the team wins. Sometimes the market is just early. Let the bears rant. History is not written by the impatient.
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Anders Drage
Anders Drage@AndersDrage·
@johnnie Do you ship this work, or merely use it for handover to engineers who then makes it again?
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Johnnie Manzari
Johnnie Manzari@johnnie·
A few months ago I moved to doing my design work directly in Xcode using Cursor. This isn’t “vibe coding”, it’s the same pixel level precision and control that you would get with a drawing tool like Figma/Sketch/Photoshop. The speed gains are incredible, it will handle the grunt work of making content for you (photo grids, profile images), it helps you get over the blank page problem… it’s a new world.
Jordan Singer@jsngr

the thing about still using Figma is that there’s no AI model or tool which has beaten me at user interface design, yet unlike code where i’ve ceded writing new code to coding agents

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hari
hari@hariamogh·
@johnnie Got it! So you prompt on Cursor and run build on Xcode?
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hari
hari@hariamogh·
@johnnie I haven't figured out the best way to use Cursor on Xcode. Have you tried the agentic coding in Xcode 26?
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Johnnie Manzari
Johnnie Manzari@johnnie·
@aidanhornsby Cursor is writing code directly into the Xcode project. You can also manually change anything in either Cursor or Xcode. For example, sometimes I find it faster to change padding, type or color values manually than through a prompt.
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Aidan Hornsby
Aidan Hornsby@aidanhornsby·
I love Cursor and have been interested to try building something in Xcode when I can find a moment. I'm super curious how the two can 'play nice' (my only Xcode experience is fooling around here and there as a non-dev). Have you found any good resources on that / can you give a one-sentence overview of what's working for you?
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