• My Design Process - Part 1

    When I first got into designing products, my first year or two was spent mostly in Photoshop designing high-fidelity mockups a single screen at a...

  • The Dark Corners of Your UI

    The other day, the engineering manager on my team was testing some stuff and happened upon this heartbreakingly terrible interface: He pinged the...

  • Free to Be Great

    When I first joined Etsy, it was my first job attempting to manage a team of people. In previous jobs, I'd been senior to other designers, and even...

  • The Switch from Designer to Manager

    Nowadays, when I mention that I manage part of the Etsy design team, the reaction is nearly always the same. First, the person I'm talking to asks...

  • Show Work Every Day

    >Most people - if you can imagine this - you can't draw very well, but even if you can draw very well, suppose you come in, and you've got to put...

  • Scaling a Design Team

    As we've scaled up to twenty-four designers, I've gotten a few questions about the processes we've developed to keep the design team connected and to...

  • Getting the Most from Critique

    When I started my Creative Writing degree, my least favorite weeks were the ones in which I had my work critiqued. I'd toil tirelessly on a short...

  • My Role as a Manager

    I’ve been in quite a few conversations lately about the role and questionable necessity of management. From new startups to established companies...

  • Building a Design Process

    >How do you break the habit of not doing design thinking properly and jumping right to your tools? Question from Charles Peters When I was a kid, I...