The Extra Mile
How do you stand out when everyone has AI? Focus disproportionately on a few elements.
4 principles to design everything
The world is a draft. Design everything. Build your tools and craft. Let joy in all sing.
You become your city
Choosing where you live is the most important decision of your life.
Design is intentioning
If designing had a synonym, it would be "intentioning".
Hackathons and AI - a new paradigm
AI hackathons field guide to build impressive demos faster, alongside the most talented people of your city
Books I recently read and recommend
Selection of books I recently read and recommend
From sketch to product using AI
Using ChatGPT to draft product ideas in minutes
Tiny product challenge with Ran Segall
The ups and downs of working with other creatives
Glue entrepreneurs
How great products can now be built by composing APIs
15 habits to be organized as a designer
Sharing apps to organize my tasks, time and thoughts.
Creative tempo (Part 2): Diverging, Testing, Converging
Exploring new ideas at a controlled beat
Creative tempo (Part 1): Setting the rhythm
Creating more to be more successful
A theory of what makes something interesting
What makes an idea interesting?
ABC framework: How to give better feedback
A better framework to give feedback and improve creative work
Moodboards as a creative escape
A tale of same energy, covid toes and rabbit holes
Tiny products
Tiny products 1. take two weeks to build, 2. generate income and 3. require zero ongoing maintenance.
The Monthly Investor Update
Applying the transparency and rigor of public companies to freelance businesses.
The Extra Mile
In the last six months I've reviewed over 5,000 portfolios of brand and product designers I was hiring for at Rox.
About 90% felt heavily AI-generated, which means I spent two seconds on the site and left. I was looking for the ones who went the extra mile.
What does that look like in practice? It means doing the things that used to be very hard. For a designer, it means that once you've prompted a website to life, you don't stop there. You make a custom font, custom icon set, custom sound effects.
How do you stand out when everyone has AI? LLMs tend to add clutter. A good way to go the extra mile is to subtract everything that feels generic, then pour disproportionate care into the few things that remain.
I tried this with a weekend project called Dream Screen. It's a reaction-diffusion simulation, and there are hundreds of those. But I made a custom font for the logo, generated custom icons, composed the background music, and drew the minion and pet characters myself. I simply cared more than the average one-shotted AI project.
The same idea applies to generating video. The extra mile is custom sound design, reworked color, typography that feels you and no-one else.
AI is raising the bar for what counts as good work, but it's also pulling more of us toward average which makes “care” worth more than it used to be. The same effort that once put you one standard deviation above the mean now puts you two!
This article is an invitation. Pick one thing on your next portfolio update and make it exceptional.
Let's keep in touch:
The Extra Mile
How do you stand out when everyone has AI? Focus disproportionately on a few elements.
4 principles to design everything
The world is a draft. Design everything. Build your tools and craft. Let joy in all sing.
You become your city
Choosing where you live is the most important decision of your life.
Design is intentioning
If designing had a synonym, it would be "intentioning".
Hackathons and AI - a new paradigm
AI hackathons field guide to build impressive demos faster, alongside the most talented people of your city
Books I recently read and recommend
Selection of books I recently read and recommend
From sketch to product using AI
Using ChatGPT to draft product ideas in minutes
Tiny product challenge with Ran Segall
The ups and downs of working with other creatives
Glue entrepreneurs
How great products can now be built by composing APIs
15 habits to be organized as a designer
Sharing apps to organize my tasks, time and thoughts.
Creative tempo (Part 2): Diverging, Testing, Converging
Exploring new ideas at a controlled beat
Creative tempo (Part 1): Setting the rhythm
Creating more to be more successful
A theory of what makes something interesting
What makes an idea interesting?
ABC framework: How to give better feedback
A better framework to give feedback and improve creative work
Moodboards as a creative escape
A tale of same energy, covid toes and rabbit holes
Tiny products
Tiny products 1. take two weeks to build, 2. generate income and 3. require zero ongoing maintenance.
The Monthly Investor Update
Applying the transparency and rigor of public companies to freelance businesses.
In the last six months I've reviewed over 5,000 portfolios of brand and product designers I was hiring for at Rox.
About 90% felt heavily AI-generated, which means I spent two seconds on the site and left. I was looking for the ones who went the extra mile.
What does that look like in practice? It means doing the things that used to be very hard. For a designer, it means that once you've prompted a website to life, you don't stop there. You make a custom font, custom icon set, custom sound effects.
How do you stand out when everyone has AI? LLMs tend to add clutter. A good way to go the extra mile is to subtract everything that feels generic, then pour disproportionate care into the few things that remain.
I tried this with a weekend project called Dream Screen. It's a reaction-diffusion simulation, and there are hundreds of those. But I made a custom font for the logo, generated custom icons, composed the background music, and drew the minion and pet characters myself. I simply cared more than the average one-shotted AI project.
The same idea applies to generating video. The extra mile is custom sound design, reworked color, typography that feels you and no-one else.
AI is raising the bar for what counts as good work, but it's also pulling more of us toward average which makes “care” worth more than it used to be. The same effort that once put you one standard deviation above the mean now puts you two!
This article is an invitation. Pick one thing on your next portfolio update and make it exceptional.
Let's keep in touch: