Mentions personal use of Framer.

Transcript context

…Well, I like to give you a little background on the person. You don't have a lot of detail on LinkedIn, just like myself. I just found out just before recording that you're also a late entrance into tech. So maybe just like, what's your background coming into something like tldraw? What makes you so unique at doing sort of creative collaborative experiences like that? I know you and I've actually used tldraw, so I have some appreciation for how hard this thing is. Yeah. Like you said, I kind of came into this a little late and kind of came into it from a weird angle. My background is actually in fine art and studio art. I have my master's from University of Chicago in visual art, would write about contemporary art and put together exhibitions and do my own paintings and drawings. And that was back when I was living in Chicago. And then when I moved over to the UK, you know, got a new studio, kept that going. But when I turned 30, I kind of decided I should probably make some money and work with other people closer than I was at the time. Studio art is primarily a solo thing. I'd always had kind of like an analytical kind of side to me. My day jobs were, you know, I was working for lawyers. I was doing this writing, like magazines and stuff. So when I did that kind of that switch back eventually to design and product design, I was also able to use a tiny little bit of technical skill that I had had just building like WordPress websites for myself and other artists as portfolios. Kind of take that, just some natural curiosity around the way that products work and kind of create a career direction that was more around prototyping and like technical design and kind of like doing the design on the bits of a product that really couldn't be designed otherwise. So the interactive bits, the bits which are maybe more, there's more questions about them. There's no clear answer to terms of like, how should this work? You know, in all those places, you kind of have to build something in order to, to figure out what you want to build. It turns out, you know, to skip right to the end for a moment, like canvas is full of those types of problems. So it's no surprise that I ended up there. It's like kind of an extreme form of the same problem. But yeah, so I was working, this was back in like 2017, 2018. And I used at the time a product called Framer. That was back when it was more of like a code product than what it is now, which is more of like a visual builder that is kind of backed by code. So I'm sort of just drilled into that. It was cool. Uber was using it. No one knew how it worked. No one could use it. So I got good at it and got a lot of advancement, early traction, whatever in my career based on that. But it also taught me to code, taught me to think about building things that other people are going to use. Taught me about kind of like the type of code that you write when you're in an exploratory phase rather than like in an execution, like production phase. And I actually ended up working for Framer. I did their education for a year, which was very different than the type of product design that I was doing before that. I did a lot of video tutorials and writing and tweeting, trying to figure out some way to make technical design content interesting, you know, in little chunks that people could consume. I joke that like they probably got less out of me in that job than I got out of the job itself. way to make technical design content interesting, you know, in little chunks that people could consume. I joke that like they probably got less out of me in that job than I got out of the job itself. Like because, yeah, I walked away from that. Not sure if I'd helped anyone really learn how to use Framer, but I certainly learned how to, how to tweet and learn how to record a good GIF and learn how to talk into a microphone and all that type of stuff. And so in the next roles that I had, I worked for a company called Play out in New York who is also doing design tools and I really wanted to work in design tools after that. Play's doing like a mobile, I guess right now it's like just general iOS, macOS platform specific design tools where you're using actual elements from the kind of widgets from that component collection in your designs and kind of bringing that a lot closer to the end product. At the same time I started getting into open source, I'd kind of done some popular open source before. This was now 2019, it was, it was locked down. I had a little bit more time. I also had a daughter, so not that much more time. I guess that open source that I started getting into started swinging back towards some of my kind of artistic interests or studio interests and kind of visual interests. Those are the parts where I felt like the problem space was, was really underserved. It wasn't necessarily like technical problems that were really hard. It was more subjective problems where I think the thing that was lacking was the taste or the opinions or the like feeling for what good solutions were. So the first kind of problem like this that I got into was arrows. I had, you know, two boxes or two points arbitrarily placed. I want a good looking arrow, like a quote mark, like good looking arrow between the two. Well, that could be anything. That's not a math problem. Maybe it involves some angles and linear geometry and vectors and all that, but it's like the good looking part was just like my own taste and my own eye and like tons and tons of iterations and arrows are super tricky and there's a million ways for this, you know, edge cases when things are overlapping or things are too far away or too close and all this. But I was working on this and I was working on this in public on Twitter, recording gifs of boxes and arrows kind of squishing together and all that. And I think people really liked that and they liked kind of following me on this somewhat obsessive journey, which was technical, but it wasn't like it wasn't like trying to crack an algorithm. It was like trying to trying to figure out and identify the the rules governing an aesthetic experience or an ecstatic thing, which was a good looking arrow that became perfect arrows and that was pretty popular. But the next one really is what kind of broke my popularity on Twitter or just in the space and that was a project that ended up being called perfect freehand. This is a little hard to describe. If you've ever used like an iPad pencil or drew with like a stylus in Photoshop or something, like the harder you push, the thicker the line gets and the lighter you push, the thinner the line gets.…

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