The Draft Board
Every kid on the bench, in draft order: 178 real designers, real portfolios, real follower salaries, one 400,000-follower cap. Click any name for the full scouting report.
The Captains
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Tommy Geoco@designertom
Design LeaderFilms other people’s design teams for a living, burns AI tokens like spell slots, and DMs on weekends.
The Players
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Jason Yuan@jasonyuan
Product DesignerDesigned MercuryOS which landed him a role at everybody's favorite fruit company.
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ÌníOlúwa Abíódún@IniAbiodun
Product DesignerLawyer-turned-product designer at AirOps making interfaces behave in court.
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Mery Kaftar@merycodes
Design EngineerDesign engineer at Vercel who redesigned the dashboard navigation everyone's been resizing since February.
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Katie Dill@lil_dill
Design LeaderHead of Design at Stripe, from checkout flows to the Stripe Press hardcovers on your shelf.
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Evil Rabbit@evilrabbit_
Design LeaderVercel's founding designer since 2016 and now its creative studio director, which makes that severe black-and-white aesthetic something of…
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Marvin Schwaibold@MSchwaibold
Design LeaderCo-founded Molly, sold it to Shopify, and the whole team became the in-house Product Design Studio.
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Josh Puckett@joshpuckett
Design LeaderLed design at Dropbox, Wealthfront and Groupon before co-founding Iteration.
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Matt Sellers@msllrs
Product DesignerTwenty years deep in design systems and custom iconography, now doing interface work at Lovable and Reshaped.
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Roman Tesliuk@RomaTesla
Product DesignerDesigns at ElevenLabs out of Berlin and apparently cannot stop shipping side projects: Daily Dispatch, Portal, App Stacks, and Droppable at…
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Gabriel Valdivia@gabrielvaldivia
Product DesignerBills himself as 'design co-founder as a service,' embedding with startups like Daylight and Slingshot AI.
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Jamey Gannon@jameygannon
Brand DesignerBrand designer running rapid-fire sprints for early-stage tech and CPG out of Brooklyn, posting all the while as 'techbimbo.' Also founded…
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Kevin Twohy@kevintwohy
Product DesignerRuns a one-man studio doing zero-to-one work for, in his words, 'ambitious toys and serious business.' The range checks out: the NYT audio…
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Ryo Lu@ryolu_
Product DesignerDesigns at Cursor after early stints at Notion and Stripe, working toward a world where anyone can make software.
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Jenny Wen@jenny_wen
Design LeaderRedesigned Claude and set the vision for Cowork at Anthropic, then left this July to run design at Cursor.
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Rauno Freiberg@raunofreiberg
Product DesignerDesigner at Vercel and author of Devouring Details, an obsessive catalogue of interface micro-craft that has quietly become required…
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Ammaar Reshi@ammaar
Design LeaderLeads product and design for Google AI Studio, where he rebuilt the thing from the ground up and shipped its vibe-coding experience.
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Pranathi Peri@pranathiperii
Product DesignerDesigns Claude Code at Anthropic, which means designing a terminal, which is a genuinely strange brief.
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Phi Hoang@apostraphi
Brand DesignerRuns the creative studio at Perplexity and is a large part of why the brand got so much attention from designers.
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Mariana Castilho@mrncst
Product DesignerDoes software design and code at poolside, previously Vercel, v0, and Pierre.
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Gavin Nelson@Gavmn
Product DesignerInteraction designer at OpenAI working on ChatGPT voice and CarPlay.
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Maggie Appleton@Mappletons
Design EngineerStaff research engineer at GitHub Next who describes herself as 'actually a designer.' Writes hand-illustrated essays at the intersection…
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Rogie King@rogie
Product DesignerProduct designer at Figma behind Draw and Shaders, plus a prolific run of plugins that do things Figma never planned for.
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James McDonald@jamesm
Web DesignerRuns Wireframe, a studio promising world-class visual design in weeks rather than months, after staff design stints at Clerk and Tailwind.
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Grace Walker@graceongrid
Design LeaderCreative director at Spellbook after years as a Webflow-wielding independent in Calgary.
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Fons Mans@FonsMans
Brand DesignerFounded Offgrid, a Dutch brand studio whose client list reads like a tour of your subscriptions: Lovable, Intercom, Ramp.
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Brett Williams@BrettFromDJ
Product DesignerBuilt a one-man design studio past seven figures by charging a flat monthly fee and never hiring anyone.
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Flora Guo@floguo
Design EngineerFounding design engineer at Paradigm, working on agentic interfaces and co-authoring the company's rebrand.
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Pablo Stanley@pablostanley
Product DesignerDrew Humaaans and Open Peeps, the modular illustration libraries that ended up in half the startup landing pages on the internet.
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Benji Taylor@benjitaylor
Design LeaderHead of design at X, which makes him the man sanding down a decade of accumulated design debt one screen at a time.
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Loredana Crisan@loredanacrisan
Design LeaderStarted piano at seven in Bucharest, taught by her mother, and trained as a classical musician before design.
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Aakanksha Mirdha@mirdhaaakanksha
Product DesignerDesigned for Uber and Cruise before Playground AI, and now works independently as design lead for early-stage startups.
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Frank Bach@zendadddy
Product DesignerBuilding at Anthropic, with Instagram, Headspace, DoorDash, and Red Bull behind him.
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Hannah Ahn@hannah_ahn
Design LeaderHead of design and media at Superpower, a title that bundles product design and content into one job most companies split in two.
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Jhey Tompkins@jh3yy
Design EngineerBuilds interfaces and then explains them, which he'll tell you is the rarer skill.
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Inga Hampton@ingapng
Brand DesignerBrand designer and illustrator at Raycast, working out of Belfast.
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John Pham@JohnPhamous
Design EngineerAt Vercel by day and an angel investor the rest of the time, working out of Seattle.
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Janum Trivedi@jmtrivedi
Design EngineerDesigner, prototyper, and engineer sitting at the OpenAI and LoveFrom intersection.
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Adrian Kuleszo@adriankuleszo
Product DesignerRuns Designme, a design-and-dev partner that has shipped for Cluely, Ethena, Lightdash, and a hundred-odd other startups.
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T. Costa@tcosta
Product DesignerCo-founded Fey, an investing terminal handsome enough to make finance software feel designed, and sold it to Wealthsimple.
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Oğuz Yağız Kara@oguzyagizkara
Product DesignerCo-founded Lue Studio, a practice working across product and brand.
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Dann Petty@DannPetty
Product DesignerFounding product designer at Quiver AI, and before that the freelancer's freelancer — Epicurrence, the design retreat, was his.
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MDS@mds
Design EngineerRuns Shift Nudge, the interface design course a striking number of working designers quietly credit for their eye.
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Soleio@soleio
Design LeaderAn early Facebook designer who went on to Dropbox, now an angel investor.
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Katarina Batina@katarinabatina
Design LeaderVP of Design at Shopify, which means the commerce surfaces a large slice of the internet checks out through eventually run past her.
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Meaghan Choi@meaghaneschoi
Design LeaderLeads design for Claude Code and Cowork at Anthropic — the agent surfaces, not the chat window.
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Drew Wilson@drewwilson
Design LeaderFounder of Opacity and the person behind ValioCon, the conference.
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Daniel Destefanis@daniel__designs
Product DesignerProduct designer at Anthropic by way of Figma and Discord, working out of Chicago.
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Mike Smith@mikesmith187
Brand DesignerRuns Smith & Diction out of Philadelphia, a small studio with a big appetite for lettering and identity work.
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Christine Røde@chrstnerode
Product DesignerDesigns Dia at The Browser Company, having landed in London by way of Oslo and San Francisco.
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Jorn van Dijk@jornvandijk
Design LeaderCo-founded Framer and still runs it, with Festina alongside.
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Amy Hood@amyhoodlum
Brand DesignerCo-founded Hoodzpah, doing brand identity and type design out of Anaheim, and co-wrote "Freelance, and Business, and Stuff" for everyone…
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Daniela Muntyan@daniela_muntyan
Product DesignerProduct designer on Figma's Dev Mode team, by way of Craft Docs.
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Luis Ouriach@disco_lu
Product DesignerEx-Figma, where he unveiled Variables on the Config main stage and has been quietly hoping that isn't the career peak.
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Adam Whitcroft@AdamWhitcroft
Product DesignerDesigns at Owner, but a generation of developers knows him for Climacons and Batch — the free icon sets that ended up in a decent slice of…
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Darrin Henein@darrinhenein
Design LeaderChief Design Officer at Owner, previously VP of Design at Shopify.
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Derek Briggs@PixelJanitor
Design EngineerDesign and code at Shopify, previously Clerk, and an angel investor on the side.
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Cory Watilo@watilo
Product DesignerLead designer at PostHog, where he owns the entire website and calls himself the webmaster without irony.
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Ian Silber@iansilber
Design LeaderHead of Product Design at OpenAI after eight years shaping Instagram and a stint at the game studio OpenAI bought.
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David Hoang@davidhoang
Design LeaderVP of Design at Atlassian by way of Replit, Webflow, and One Medical.
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Maxim Leyzerovich@round
Product DesignerDesigns at Flora and teaches on SVA's MFA program, which makes him one of the few people here grading the next wave instead of just…
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Meng To@MengTo
Design EngineerFounded Design+Code, which has spent a decade teaching designers to code and developers to design.
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Charlota Blunarova@0xCharlota
Brand DesignerBrand designer for tech startups out of Prague, with a niche list specific enough to count as a personality: AI, creative tools,…
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Sebastiaan de With@sdw
Product DesignerCo-founded Lux and designed Halide, the camera app that won an Apple Design Award by making a phone behave like a proper camera.
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Tobias van Schneider@vanschneider
Brand DesignerBuilding mymind, a private digital garden for everything you meant to remember.
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Femke van Schoonhoven@femkesvs
Product DesignerDesign lead at Gusto, but better known for the YouTube channel she started in 2019 that has taught 70,000-odd subscribers how to be…
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Kyle Zantos@kylezantos
Design EngineerDesigner, builder and self-described agentic engineer out of Seattle, shipping under the banner of software as a gift.
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Charlie Deets@charliedeets
Product DesignerDesigns Dia at The Browser Company, having come through Apple, WhatsApp and Facebook first.
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Jessica Strelioff@jstrelioff
Design LeaderBrand designer and creative director leading Goodside, the independent Austin studio working across strategy, identity, art direction,…
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Resham Khanna@Reshusaur
Product DesignerSan Francisco product designer whose handle has been doing dinosaur duty since 2016.
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Steve Lauda@stevelauda_
Design LeaderRuns Blissful Studio, doing full-stack design and development for early-stage companies from Singapore.
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Pauline Wee@pau_wee_
Product DesignerNew York designer-engineer and host of New Interfaces, a show about the people shaping how humans and computers meet.
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Wes Bancroft@WesleyBancroft
Design LeaderRuns the brand studio Lunour and talks about identity work alongside life as a dad of nine.
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Riley Jones@rileyj_s
Brand DesignerFreelance brand designer in Chattanooga, crafting and nourishing identities for startups.
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The Undesigner@ninepixelgrid
Brand DesignerFull-stack designer who made the PostHog website and works with Watilo.
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Jordan Jenkins@jkane
Design LeaderWelsh designer and director, founder of Outland and builder of Tagteam.
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Justin Rands@jayrizpop
Brand DesignerBrand engineer at Clay, previously Intercom, Oyster, and Blend.
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Darshan Gajara@WeirdoWizard
Product DesignerBerlin-and-Mumbai designer and maker behind Product Disrupt, With a View, and Beanpresso.
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Andy Orsow@andyorsow
Brand DesignerMakes hype videos at Framer and describes the job as a design-motion-marketing chimera.
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Nick Chella@nickbakeddesign
Design LeaderRuns Baked, the product design agency for founders, after Meta, Netflix, and Expa.
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Nick Pattison@thenickpattison
Brand DesignerRuns Primary, where a rebrand takes two weeks rather than two quarters.
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Kyle Barber@kbarber
Product DesignerRidd's cofounder at Inflight, by way of Meta, Tinder and Airchat.
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Nev Flynn@NevFlynn
Design LeaderLeads design and engineering at ElevenLabs, by way of Evervault, whose site designers kept reverse-engineering rather than just asking him…
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Michael Flarup@flarup
Brand DesignerRuns Northplay and Pixelresort out of Copenhagen, and drew a good share of the icons already on your home screen.
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Jesse Showalter@imjesseshow
Design LeaderRuns Good Fight Creative and Design Champs after teaching a generation of designers through hundreds of YouTube lessons.
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Ioana Teleanu@ioana_teleanu
Design LeaderPatent-holding AI and product designer documenting AI Design OS in public, after Miro and UiPath.
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Escha@eschadiol
Product DesignerWorks across product and design at Perplexity and music and operations for Noalia, after Daylight, Descript, and OpenTable.
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Grace Ling@gracepace_
Design LeaderFounder of Design Buddies, the global community she started as a student and grew past 150,000 members.
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Seb Cornelius@SebCornelius
Design LeaderIndependent London designer and creative director with more than a decade across product, identity, and digital work.
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Lee Black@mrblackstudio
Design LeaderDüsseldorf designer with 25-plus years in the work, running 1042 Studio and a small constellation of tools, components, guidelines, and…
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Finn McKenty@thefinnmckenty
Design LeaderMarketer, designer, and fractional CMO at Brotege after a 750,000-subscriber run as The Punk Rock MBA.
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Andy Allen@asallen
Design LeaderFounded Not Boring Software to put play and craft back into everyday apps, after co-founding FiftyThree and helping make Paper.
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Jayneil Dalal@jayneil
Product DesignerRuns Sneak Peek, documenting the real workflows, files, and portfolio rituals behind top designers rather than settling for the polished…
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Soren Iverson@soren_iverson
Design LeaderDesigner behind the daily unhinged app concepts and co-creator of Stompers, the step counter where friends can hit each other with cartoon…
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Lele Zhang@CherrilynnZ
Product DesignerProduct designer at Tolans after studying psychology at Berkeley and working with Every and Write with Parallel.
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Marisa@meshtimes_
Product DesignerDesigns soulful technology and vlogs the whole process, with a particular weakness for little gadgets, disposable cameras, and making the…
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Tatiana Tsiguleva@ciguleva
Brand DesignerPerplexity's first creative ambassador and a prolific AI-art experimenter, turning curiosity into entire visual worlds.
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Shane Levine@theShaneLevine
Design LeaderFounder of Turbo, the Brooklyn product design studio that stays with startups for the long haul.
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Alex Aperios@AlexAperios
Design LeaderCreative director behind Aperios Design, giving founder-led companies the identity upgrade they need after the first one stops fitting.
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Ben Fryc@benfryc
Brand Designer3D artist, motion designer, and creative at Framer, with work for OpenAI, Figma, Google, Wealthsimple, and Loom.
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George Hastings@soulegit
Design LeaderDesign engineer with fourteen-plus years across product and agency work at IDEO and AREA 17, now building Unicorn Studio and the color tool…
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Joshua Guo@jshguo
Product DesignerDesign engineer and V2SPACE founder building design systems, visualizations, Figma tools, and Framer components.
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Tom Johnson@tomjohndesign
Product DesignerStaff product designer on v0 at Vercel after founding design at Basedash.
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Jared Erondu@erondu
Design LeaderHeads design at Span, after running design and marketing at Lattice.
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Rasmus Andersson@rsms
Product DesignerDesigned Inter, so a good share of the interfaces you looked at today were set in his typeface.
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Aleks@aleksliving
Product DesignerWorks on AI at Figma, and holds that the only thing that matters is the output — sorry, process bros.
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Alvish Baldha@alvishbaldha
Product DesignerFounding designer at Operate, by way of Clerk and Kosh Money.
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Stephen Haney@stephenhaney
Design EngineerCEO of Paper, where the canvas is real HTML and CSS instead of a picture of it.
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Raphael Schaad@raphaelschaad
Product DesignerSwiss designer and MIT engineer who built Cron and sold it to Notion.
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Joey Banks@joeyabanks
Product DesignerBuilds design systems at Baseline for the teams shipping what's next.
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Joe Bell@joebell_
Design EngineerDesign engineer at Operate, where the job title he lists is defence against the dark arts.
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Mackey Saturday@saturday
Brand DesignerIdentity design out of New York, for the world — which is the whole of his bio and, honestly, enough.
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Jaytel@Jaytel
Product DesignerDesign Studio at Shopify, after co-founding a company Shopify bought and doing design at Apple before that.
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Ben South@bnj
Product DesignerBuilding Variant, after a VP run at Postmates and two companies that got acquired.
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Rob Hope@robhope
Web DesignerRuns One Page Love, a long-running archive of every good single-page site on the web, plus the Yo podcast.
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Mackenzie Child@mackenziechild
Web DesignerDesigner by way of Webflow, Gumroad and Podia, and the man behind Flowmingo — the Webflow course whose pink flamingo mascot taught a…
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Sara Vienna@sravienna
Design LeaderChief Design Officer at MetaLab, leading research, strategy, product, and brand teams behind products from Slack to Midjourney and Windsurf.
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Adrián Mato@adrianmg
Design LeaderDesign director on Copilot at GitHub, by way of Spain, the UK and the US.
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Maheen Sohail@maheen_sohail
Product DesignerWorks on AI at Instagram, after Meta's Super Intelligence Labs, and teaches a course on becoming an AI product designer — a job title that…
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Justin Farrugia@justinmfarrugia
Product DesignerDesigner behind Curated Supply and CMD Supply, which between them amount to a standing argument that taste is a thing you can ship rather…
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Henry Modisett@henrymodis
Design LeaderFormer VP of design at Perplexity, and its founding designer.
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Paul Stamatiou@Stammy
Design LeaderHead of Design at Sesame after nine years drawing Twitter’s camera, composer and threads, with a stop co-founding Limitless before Meta…
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Zeh Fernandes@zehf
Design EngineerHands-on head of design at Resend, and four World Cups deep into turning match data into generative posters — chrono-grids, brush strokes…
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Eve Bouffard@eve_bouff
Design LeaderHead of design at Y Combinator — or head of fun, going by the X bio, which is the kind of edit only someone genuinely good at the first job…
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Beni Issen@ben_issen
Product DesignerFounding designer at Rox, and a self-described designer of machines — which is a more honest job title than most of the ones on this bench.
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Jordan Singer@jsngr
Product DesignerCo-founder and CEO of Mainframe, after Figma, Square and Diagram, which Figma bought.
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Bradley Ziffer@bradleyziffer
Product DesignerBuilding at Ramp, after Antimetal, Daylight and Acorns — a clean sweep of everywhere your money goes.
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Greg Huntoon@GregHuntoon
Product DesignerRuns advocacy for Figma across North America, eats mostly plants, and is Ridd's arch nemesis in fantasy football — a rivalry that has…
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Eugene Fedorenko@efedorenko
Product DesignerWrites Figmalion, the newsletter an alarming number of designers use as their actual Figma release notes.
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Joel Miller@_joelmllr
Product DesignerProduct designer at Granola, after Figma — which means he now designs the thing that remembers your meeting so you are free to not listen…
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Tim Van Damme@maxvoltar
Product DesignerSoftware designer at Figma, by way of Instagram, Dropbox and Gowalla.
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Claudio Guglieri@claudioguglieri
Brand DesignerIndependent now, after art-directing Fluent at Microsoft and a long run at Fantasy.
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Dan Holdsworth@pizzaboy
Brand DesignerBrand identity and design systems for dev tools and AI startups — CodeRabbit, Zed, Hacktron.
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Dan Mall@danmall
Design LeaderRan the design-systems consultancy SuperFriendly for a decade and sold it, wrote the book on making systems scale, and now teaches agency…
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Kumail Nanji@kumailnanji
Product DesignerDesigns at Monogram after a run at Airbnb — a fairly direct route from the world's most photographed spare rooms to whatever AI is doing…
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Lucas Crespo@lucas__crespo
Brand DesignerDescribes the job as putting lipstick on capitalism, which after creative directing at Every, VML and BBDO New York he has more than earned…
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Ryan Miyoshi@ryry__mimi
Design LeaderHead of design at Column, a bank built for developers — which means the interface has to stay completely calm while it moves other people's…
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Polly D'Arcy@pollyinthedart
Design LeaderVP of design at Wealthsimple, having gone from individual contributor to VP without ever changing companies — an arc rare enough that Dive…
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Lauren LoPrete@laurenloprete
Brand DesignerHead of design foundations at Mercury, after leading design systems at Dropbox and Cash App.
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Adrien Griveau@Griveau
Product DesignerFounding designer at Linear, a product arranged entirely around never touching your mouse — and a house style a good share of the tools you…
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Amy Lima@amylimabean
Product DesignerDesigner advocate at Figma, by way of Duolingo, Amazon Music and Pinterest, and founder of Diversify Design.
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Levi Jones@Levidjones
Product DesignerDesigner in Pasadena, a decade into shaping product from the idea down to the last detail, and currently too busy shipping client work at…
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Tuhin Kumar@tuhin
Product DesignerApple, Airbnb, Facebook, Clara and Luma Labs — all filed under “past lives” on his own profile.
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Joel Lewenstein@joellewenstein
Design LeaderHead of design at Anthropic, which means owning the interface a great many people now talk to more often than they talk to some of their…
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Miggi@miggi
Product DesignerFigma's advocate for education, better known as professor figma — teaching the tool to the people who will be taking all of these jobs in…
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Nikolas Klein@nikolasklein
Product DesignerDesigned at Figma and then defected to product management, a betrayal this bench has collectively decided to forgive, because we do still…
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John Falcone@falcone_design
Product DesignerDouble Diamond makes John the designer mob boss of NYC: he sits down with the city's sharpest designers, asks what they actually think, and…
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Brad Frost@brad_frost
Design EngineerWrote Atomic Design, which is why your components are called atoms and molecules and why someone on your team is still arguing about what…
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Gui Seiz@guiseiz
Design LeaderDesign director for AI at Figma, Portuguese, and self-described as calm sad boi tinkering — which is the most honest job description…
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Rachel How@rachelhxw
Product DesignerDesigner and builder making tech feel more human, with 270,000 YouTube subscribers watching her do it — many times the audience she has…
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Julie Zhuo@joulee
Design LeaderWent from intern to VP of design at Facebook across thirteen years, then wrote the book most new managers get handed.
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Ryan Gilbert@rjgilbert
Design LeaderCreator of Workspaces, the weekly archive that has opened more than 500 real home offices to the internet — and photographed a surprising…
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Danny Trinh@dtrinh
Design LeaderDirector of product design at Meta, after building social products at Snap, Zenly, Sensei, Free, Path, and Digg.
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Adanna O.@Adxnna
Product DesignerToronto product designer, illustrator, and icon designer with more than a decade in illustration and a special affection for design systems.
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Vincent van der Meulen@vinvan
Design EngineerDutch-born design engineer and Mainframe co-founder turning agent work into watchable video recaps.
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Pooja Jadav@poojadav
Brand DesignerMumbai-born visual designer and product illustrator in Berlin, currently looking for her next opportunity.
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Siddharth@itsiddharth_
Product DesignerLanded at Superpower through the Dive Talent Network after product work on Robinhood Gold and three and a half years at CRED.
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Emily Campbell@elou
Design LeaderVP of Design at HackerRank and creator of Shape of AI, the living catalog that names the patterns behind human-centered AI.
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Kevin Wong@kvwong
Design LeaderVP of Design at Webflow, steering its AI-native web vision after leading design at Messenger and Airbnb.
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Liam Matteson@liammatteson
Product DesignerDesign lead at Browserbase building Director, after product work at Copilot Money, Vanta, Upperstudy, and Halftone Digital.
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Chloe Park@chloepark
Wildcardhead of product & design @MagicPathAI • pre-AI and not gen z @vectorDAO previously Coinbase, Lyft, Facebook, OpenTable
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Yann-Edern Gillet@yannglt
Product DesignerSoftware designer at Linear in Paris, shaping product UI, systems, and developer experience.
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Rafa el Conde@rafahari
Product DesignerDesign Engineer at Retro and longtime designer-maker of small, joyful apps.
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Dmytro@pqoqubbw
Design EngineerDesign engineer at Mintlify creating polished interface systems and teaching the invisible details that make products feel right.