Kevin Cannon

Post A few months ago, I came across a recording I made of my personal portfolio presentation and thought it would be good to share as a resource for other designers...

back when i was interviewing, i recorded myself to practice. now, i'm uploading that take as a resource for others on what a "principal product designer"-level presentation looks like:

jedmund.com/universe/por...

this is exactly what i'd show in an interview, so at 25 mins it is a little long.

I remember when tech was mainly about building things that genuinely improved the world, rather than extracting value from it.

I've been thinking lately that there's quite a big difference in designing software that people buy for itself (e.g. Linear, Todoist, Slack) Vs designing something you help you browse the content (e.g. Spotify, Amazon, Zalando)

We call ourselves product designers, but not everything is a product.

I've always found the internet situation in fancy hotels and hostels fascinating.

Hostels, free and good quality, just use the password.

Fancy hotels, expensive, with a lot of ads, and portals, and probably sell your data.

Doing some well overdue clean up of my domain, hosting and email providers.

Step 1 is mapping it all out.

Been a Raycast user for along time, but just tried out Spotlight on Tahoe. Dear lord, what have they done to it?

Design at Superhuman Insider look at the design culture at Superhuman post rebrand

I sat down with Tom Scott recently to talk about a wide range of topics about how we design at Superhuman (formerly Grammarly).

We touched on hiring, how roles are shifting and how AI is changing everything.

open.substack.com/pub/verified...

The "death of SaaS" could well be the "death of SaaS that is not API-first"

A story on how 30-person startup Craft Docs is moving off Zendesk after they built much better internal AI workflows (with a tool they open sourced, Craft Agents)

Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-first-m...

Starting with something a little smaller first.

Just picked up this, let's see if I can get it running!

I guess the issue is just as you scale the amount of icons and platforms, the bill for icon design starts to look too big to the finance team.

I'm still bitter from when Google redesigned their icons.

Pages application icons that increasingly look better designed the longer back in time we go all the way to 2005

“If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design”

(Source: mastodon.social/@heliographe...)

8-bit pixel art retro icons in a grid. White on black background.

I made some icons. They’re 8-bit tiny.

Found this artist on Spotify, trying to get plays by naming tracks after common voice assistant actions 😅

Oh, that's super interesting!

Looking forward to hearing more.

Claude Code doing non code stuff is really impressive. I use it for all terminal actions these days.

Oh, there's a lot that makes sense about that.

It's not competing directly with any other product.

A simple click + speak button works really well for dictation for saving later.

Microphone is close to the mouth so you don't need to speak loudly.

Can be paired with headphones for voice chat.

Just in time software I didn’t plan to write software in the grocery store last night. I was tired and hungry, kids in tow. My long shopping list sat in a text message. I wished I could check items off as I found them.…

After reading this I gave exe.dev a shot and the combination of cheap VMs, the HTTPS proxy with passkey auth and link sharing, and the built-in LLM agent is... incredible.

Like, I know how to use each of these things individually, but combining them feels like when I first learned to script things.

"creating is faster than searching"

That's such interesting framing!

lmao finally someone is making a game "inspired by the joy of people watching"

- prototype went super viral on itch (100k players, 1k reviews)
- interact with things and make cute stuff happen
- see how tiny guys react
- hidden object game, full version coming to Steam
- Nippets

I mean, that's actually...fine?

A shared Google Doc isn't algorithmically trying to hack your nervous system to make you feel bad about yourself and then sell you things.

The PayPal mafia wields more power than the US populace though, and they want pliant consumers of their products, not competition.

It's crazy how fragile our digital identities are, and how dependent we are on them.

In many cases your data is as important as your money, but banks have much tighter rules around regulation and access etc.

📣 New article on @frontendmasters.com about a visual problem that bugged me for years: making a card that truly feels deep.

frontendmasters.com/blog/the-dee...

Would love your thoughts.

Apparently children up to the age of about five though, pick up accents and sounds, so it gets harder and harder to sound like a native speaker after thatm

Absolutely. What you're saying is backed up by evidence, it's one of those conventional wisdom that's only half true. Put an adult in total immersion and they'll probably learn faster if motivated. That's what diplomats do.

If that's Mobbin, then yes, it's extremely useful.

Font Making Course — Type Design Class Learn to make your own fonts in this online video course, at your own pace, in your own time, anywhere in the world.

My friend Viktor is offering 20% off all his font making courses and type-related templates today and tomorrow using the code BLACKFRIDAY.

In this thread, I’ve got links to each. Full transparency: they’re affiliate links. BUT! I took (and paid for) the Font Making Course and thoroughly recommend.

Setapp | Powerful apps for Mac & iOS Setapp is a large collection of powerful Mac apps available by subscription. Sign up and get full access to top software right away. Explore, discover, enjoy.

CleanShotX is also included in a SetApp.com subscription, which is a great way to get a whole collection of top quality Mac apps.

Setapp | Powerful apps for Mac & iOS Setapp is a large collection of powerful Mac apps available by subscription. Sign up and get full access to top software right away. Explore, discover, enjoy.

This is why I love SetApp.com. It's one subscription for a whole bunch of well designed Mac utilities.

It's kind of a Netflix model and they get paid by the amount you use the apps.