Dive Club with Gavin Nelson

Dive Club has been one of my favourite podcasts this year, specifically as I’ve been really working at growing my skills a designer. This podcast with Gavin Nelson, formerly of Linear and Github, now OpenAI, taught me about the power of prototyping and conveying your ideas by doing so.

Of course I know prototyping is a big part of what I do. However, I’ve always used it as a later stage artefact when the fidelity increases and you are thinking about interactions. However, Gavin talks about prototyping throughout the process to convey ideas early and getting buy in a lot sooner.

He uses advanced prototyping tools like Origami and SwiftUI to make production ready interactions. This was where my code-curiosity came from. Code was always another language to me, and it still is, but I am verrrry slowly getting familiar with some concepts.

Claude helped me get my ideas onto the canvas with specific code components as I physically couldn’t design what I wanted to. This then goes back to Gavin’s point about being able to prototype to showcase ideas to team members and the importance of doing so.

I've now been prototyping much earlier in projects to not only visualise what each stage of the experience and interactions should look like, but collaborating with stakeholders and engineers - this has worked wonders since implementing.

Now this portfolio has launched, I’m going to improve my skills further on advanced prototyping, animation and interactions. Code may be the best way to get production-ready interactions down, and it is very much my Everest. How do we climb up a mountain? One step at a time.

Listen to the podcast below.