Founder and principal at Cramer Office, a design studio for founders at inflection points
Joined June 2010
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Today I'm sharing Cramer Office—my design studio for founders at inflection points.
Here's my thesis
steel: armco, middletown, ohio. edward weston, october 1922.
the most beautiful my hometown has ever looked. the future gets built faster when people can see it as beautiful.
who's shooting data centers and battery plants like this?
weston was in middletown visiting his sister and her husband worked at the plant.
the rest of his career looked different after taking this.
he took the print with him to mexico and hung in his studio next to a picasso.
moma.org/interactives/object…
a great designer is a person who helps you translate
• your idea into something you can test
• "user wants x" into something you should build
• what you're building into how it should make someone feel
if your product isn’t easier to explain, you bought a coat of paint
every company runs on a worldview, whether it's written down or not.
but most aren't, so they don't show up coherently.
i'm working on a brand system for the studio and started with a philosophy.md
most friction in creative direction is upstream of what you think the work is
as a designer i can't wait for local-first inference to be the default for all but the most phd level shit.
in the sine curve of tech it'll be a heavy-client era again and those are more fun
we’re using local apple intelligence models a lot these days in our product for a lot of little things & they work incredibly well, especially for personalization & copy.
you can cache these so you create a pretty lovely little experience in subtle places where the app feels tailored than just one to many (all for free!).
it’ll feel cool as hell when they get even smarter.
there's a lesson in this building render for those of us making software. i think we'll see a shift like this back to particularism.
you can't tell from looking at yet another glass tower whether you're in toronto or miami or shanghai.
and you can't tell whether most products have been built for radiologists or college students. it's all the same conventions and choices.
now after twenty years of that and the first onslaught of llm-generated visual design, we're seeing a resurgence in traditionalism: serif type, oil painting backgrounds, arts and crafts wallpapers.
some of that is reactionary but some of it is also status. when everyone can generate the same inter x shadcn x gradient look for free, looking distinct becomes the only way to signal that a human with judgment was actually in the room.
but i don't think that's the final form, because mostly it's ornamentation. a monet behind a generic ui is a brick facade on a concrete box.
the place i think software heads is this building: particularism with purpose. it has an aesthetic emergent from its actual use, environment, occupants, and their history.
that's what the models can't help you do yet. you can't apply judgment if you skipped the listening and the learning.
solo founders and builders: when something feels off and there's no one to think it through with, what do you turn to?
help am i the only designer not working at cursor or anthropic now
Excited to share I've joined @cursor_ai!
One thing that stood out to me was how much this design team cares about building excellent products. Looking forward to contributing and learning from everyone here.
tech's auteur era. what a time to make stuff for a living
.@pmarca on the "three-way Mexican standoff" between coders, PMs, and designers:
"I'm seeing it in a bunch of the early leading edge companies in the Valley, they're circling around a job title loosely called 'builder,' or something like it. And basically the idea is that you had these separate jobs in the past of programmer, product manager, and designer."
" I've been describing what's happening in the Valley companies as sort of this three-way Mexican standoff, where the programmers think that they don't need the product managers and the designers anymore 'cause they can have AI do that, and then each of the other two doesn't think they need the other two either."
"I've been predicting they're all correct. The product manager can generate code and design now, and each of them can do the job of all three. The idea is the jobs change so now the job is builder."
@MTSlive
mcp is the worst way to give agents tools, except for all the other ways that have been tried from time to time.
- winston churchill
watch this baseball coach break down the fundamentals of playing first base during spring training. catching the ball, body position, angles, all of it. masterclass
most laptop jobs today don’t get this anymore. we rebranded good coaching as micromanagement
parallel vs perpendicular businesses (relative to the frontier labs) is one of those mental models that just immediately snaps into place and I can’t unsee it
feels like the successor to vertical vs horizontal in @stratechery aggregation theory
great read
nailed it
This is really neat but it’s not a design tool as much as it’s a design _production_ tool.
The practice of design is mostly about what comes before production.
There’s no doubt in my mind that all parts of software production will become automated very soon. Writing code, making web pages, putting pieces of a design system together etc.
And that’s fine. I think few people actually enjoy this kind of production work. Wouldn’t it be better if we spent our precious time in life on what is more meaningful?!
At the core, the practice of design is methodical; like architecture, not like art. In a nutshell: We find constraints, form comprehension of the whole and propose solutions that honor those constraints. First after that do we enter some form of production phase, usually prototypes first, learn about some constraints that were hidden before, loop back, prototype and then build the production-grade “final” artifact.
These last few tasks are quickly losing value because AI tools can do it much faster (not yet better though) than humans. It’s simply just what has the best RoI for a business.
Some companies and individuals will continue to spend human time on certain parts of the “production line” as a market differentiator, but it will cost them a relatively high price compared to competitors.
Anyhow, I still haven’t seen a tool better than Figma that supports the actually-interesting part of the design process.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Figma focused their products on that, maybe separating “products for production” of “products for ideation & exploration.” The latter would obviously still leverage AI, but not to do the work for me but rather to support my efforts the way a therapist helps me live a better life (not living my life for me.)