Head of Design, full-time or fractional. ex-VP UX Design, BlackRock. Product, brand, AI. https://xitter.cf/t.co/lzkLFBhc6U
San Francisco
Joined September 2008
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Qian Jiang's Microsoft video says the quiet part: the designer's medium is no longer the interface, it's the model's behavior and what it remembers. That's the whole job now. Everything else is layout.
My new video on ai and design is now live on @Microsoft’s official website!
I believe designing intelligence means shaping humanity.
In the video, I talk about:
- Building @copilot into a thinking partner
- Designing beyond interfaces: models, memory, evaluation...
And a question I keep coming back to: as ai reshapes our world, how can we live fully, creatively, and meaningfully?
Metallica is trending so here's my 51 track Metallica mashup album from 2021, which Lars would have sued me for in 2000 and which nobody at the label will notice in 2026. that's the entire history of the music business in one sentence. link below
theoriginalmagic.bandcamp.co…
Start with Master of Puppets, track 8.
theoriginalmagic.bandcamp.co…
start with Master of Puppets, track 8.
If all you can do is rage-bait post on the internet about taste, you're kinda cooked
If taste is your only moat... you’re kinda cooked.
In pre ai days taste used to feel personal, hard to replicate and took years to develop. Taste today can be insta-learned, trained, mixed with other tastes, pushed into weird new directions, and iterated endlessly.
Taste still matters. It’s just not nearly as defensible as many of designers think.
"Made with AI" is the default now. That's not a prediction, it's the feed you're looking at.
It's also why everyone is tired. Doomscrolling and AI slop are the same fatigue arriving from two directions: infinite supply, and no care anywhere in it. Your eyes know the difference before you can name it, which is why you keep scrolling past work that somebody paid real money for.
So if you want to build a brand that matters over the long haul, you need real art, made by artists. The amount of care that goes into the work is the amount of care an audience returns to you. Not more, and not less. I've been doing this since the ZDTV days and I have not seen one exception.
These 12 marks are what survived out of 216. I wrote the rules, agents drew the variations overnight, and I threw out 204 of them the next morning. The throwing out is the art part. The machine does not know what to be embarrassed by.
I'm taking fractional Head of Design engagements right now, four weeks embedded with your team at a fixed price, and I'm open to the right full-time seat.
Portfolio and the offer: seanrosscreative.com/?v=3
Humans have a right to exist. All states are questionable. Some more than others. I think things would be much easier if we returned to a stateless world.
Everything I ship with AI started with a glue stick or a sketch.
For example, the four floppy disks are brand studies I made by hand in 2019. LinkedIn, Facebook, Airbnb and Salesforce, cut from exquisite papers, xeroxes, gold foil, actual money, paint and whatever else was on my desk. Painstakingly cut out with scissors, by hand. They were never going to ship anywhere. This was how I calibrated my eyes at the end of a long day looking at screens. The photos don't really do them justice.
The rest of what you see is what I can do now with a studio of agents. 24 brands that don't exist, a logo modernism study, 216 marks drawn in code, backgrounds rendered overnight by a pipeline I set up and went to bed on. Experiments based on a long ongoing conversation. Most will fail, but some might end up being useful.
The agents are fast and they are tireless, but they have no taste whatsoever. No curiosity, no unmet need to be inspired. Design needs to move the needle for business, and that spark still has to come from somewhere human. For me it came from years of drawing and cutting paper. I make every decision that matters. The agents make the several hundred that don't.
I'm taking fractional Head of Design engagements right now, and I'm open to the right full-time seat.
Portfolio and the fractional offer: seanrosscreative.com
And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make
When someone asks for my time as a design professional, I weigh it against the times I asked for a favor and it was granted. Like the take a penny leave a penny jar. This is the definition of "what goes around comes around", or simply "pay it forward". Simple laws of the universe stuff. Just last week I donated an hour of my time to a CEO who is launching a new user testing platform. He needs feedback from designers. Then this Sunday I got an email from a VC partner who is going to check his portfolio companies for possible design roles. Two different people, but they both make an input and an output. The more you keep this type of thing on the downlow? The better it works. My .02
No, I won’t check out your portfolio.
Here’s why.
Anytime you ask someone to do something, it’s a pitch. In a pitch, say what’s in it for the other person.
What’s in it for me to check out your portfolio? Why would I spend my time, energy, and attention—all of which I value highly—on that as opposed to anywhere else?
If there’s nothing in it for me, then you’re asking for charity.
If you’re asking for charity, then ask for charity. Make it clear. I like doing favors sometimes and being charitable sometimes. But I can’t tell if that’s what you’re asking for, and I won’t assume it.
Even if I agreed to it, you haven’t even given me any criteria. Is there something specific you want help with? Something to improve? Something you’re stuck on? Some job it’s not doing?
General questions get general answers. Specific questions get specific answers.
Since I don’t know what you want help with and there doesn’t seem to be much incentive for me, it’s a pass.
Here are some examples of pitches I would consider more (even if I’d still say no):
“Dan, would you be willing to do me a favor and review my portfolio to help me land a design job working on a U.S.-based team for a fintech startup?”
“Dan, can you please review my portfolio to see if the UI design work feels closer to junior or senior caliber? I’ll make a donation to your favorite non-profit as a token of thanks.”
“Dan, would you mind looking at my portfolio to see if I’m the kind of person you’d hire? I know you value your time, attention, and energy, so I’d gladly take any feedback you can provide after looking for even 30 seconds.”
@odeniransulaimo, wanna pitch again? I’m open to you trying again if you’d like.
But even better: pitch someone who’s in a closer position to help you get what you want. If you want a job at a sports betting startup, pitch a hiring manager at a sports betting startup to check out your portfolio. Even if they won’t hire you for THEIR startup, their feedback would be way more relevant to getting a job at a sports betting startup than my feedback would be, since I’ve never worked at a sport betting startup.
In short, when you pitch, make it about them and make it as easy as possible for them to give you what you want.
All forms of human communication are a moving target. You can teach an agent the rules, but you can't teach them when to break the rules, and what that means over time as the "state of the art" evolves. What keeps a brand relevant is fresh movement. This doesn't happen in accordance to rules. Robots alone will never get good at this, because what moves humans to act is fundamentally other humans.
taste is for humans not machines. machines don't care about taste, it's not a form of communication them, or rather it doesn't have to be for them to be successful.
taste is for humans, let it be for humans. building machines that copy what humans do just to signal to other humans the humans that built those machines have better taste than you is... weird.
