Product designer. Co-founder of Akima Studio.
Australia
Joined May 2017
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- Following591
- Followers284
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Good chat with the homie @brendenvonhouse
my AI can get done 100 times more than i can review in a day.
i'm the bottleneck now.
and i still check it, because unchecked AI work is just slop.
get your free 90-Day AI Search Growth Plan.
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Been collecting some rogue colour palettes lately. Everything’s starting to look pretty similar, so im itching for something outside the box.
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Something in that for sure
>all my close friends or people I look up to that have generated mass amounts of wealth in their endeavours are absolute schizo theorists
>they have alternative lifestyles, world views, and their forecasts and predictions almost always bare their fruit
>all my friends who are still wearing sunscreen, arguing over politics & sports are working 9-5, taxed and waxxed up to their eye balls and only just making ends meet
Lovely people don’t get me wrong but these people would make up 90% of my known world
And imo there’s a lot of lessons in that
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bro opus 5.5 continues to blow my mind every day 🤯 my agent replying to a client email, found an opportunity in the email thread and upsold them on a solution, which they agreed to. all without any prompt or suggestion to do so. future is about to get wild.
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Serious question: why are people using Paper over Figma right now?
I know it builds designs in HTML, but using Claude MCP into Figma and then just telling it to bring the designs back into code produces perfect results for me.
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Opus 5.5 High: Best reserved for complex, multi-file codebases, tricky edge-case debugging, or scenarios where you don't have a human review step and need an extra layer of self-verification.
Me getting it to move a button 4px:
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Designer / agency hack for the young guns: always jump on a call to present your work to the client if it's their first time seeing it, never just send a link and hope for the best.
Spend 20 minutes upfront taking them through the experience and save yourself hours of revisions and questions down the line.
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Okay my design process has completely changed again in the last month. If someone told me even a year ago that this is how we would be designing in 2026, I would have laughed at them. Will drop the full process here soon.
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Personal software is the future. Opus 5.5 built me a fully personalised app that tracks my life in under an hour.
Habits, sleep, mood, motivation, daily voice journal, all plugged directly into my locally hosted personal operating system.
Every week my system reads the data and gives me insights into what’s working, what isn’t, when I feel my best. Hopefully keeping me operating at my peak.
Definitely not for everyone but this is something I've wanted for a long time. Incredible time to be alive.
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Having a tonne of fun running these UX and CRO audits. I get asked so often "can you just take a quick look at my website and let me know what you'd fix?"
So naturally I turned it into a product.
akima.studio/quick-audit
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Big fan of this trend. 9 games that shaped who I am. Bringing back that childhood nostalgia.
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New podcast with the legend @jarradgrigg
AI was supposed to make design easier. For Strath McKay, it has done the opposite.
Strath is the co-founder of Akima Studio, a boutique studio working across websites, digital products and e-commerce. His path into design wasn’t conventional: he left his job as a mechanic, learned through real client projects, moved into product design and crypto, burned out, stepped away, and returned to an industry being rapidly reshaped by AI.
In this episode of Beyond the Brief, we talk about why static Figma screens are no longer enough, how client expectations have changed, and why designers increasingly need to build what they design.
Strath walks me through how Akima moves between Figma, agents and code, builds complete Shopify experiences, turns meeting transcripts into polished proposals, and creates small purpose-built tools around its own workflow.
We also get into taste, craft, AI slop, the pressure to keep up, and why sometimes the best thing a designer can do is put the blinders on, focus on real work and keep shipping.
Episode five of Beyond the Brief is live. Watch the full episode here on X.
Chapters:
00:00 Cold Open
00:25 Intro
00:37 Meet Strath
01:46 Strath’s Story
09:04 Crypto and Web3
14:18 AI Made Design Harder
19:28 Burnout and Reset
24:40 Starting Akima
27:58 Inside Akima Studio
31:31 The New Design Process
39:38 Designers Need to Build
41:10 Akima’s Proposal Tool
47:24 Purpose-Built Tools
52:46 Agentic Websites
56:11 Advice for Designers
58:17 Wrap-Up
Learn more about @StrathDesign and Akima Studio: akima.studio/
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Something I’m noticing in this new era of 'design' is how much less time there seems to be for the actual creative process, and how much more emphasis there is on technical implementation.
Which is super fun in its own way, but it also feels like we’re losing some of the early stage exploration and experimentation that made for truly unique work.
This is depending on your role, of course, this is coming from me as an agency founder working on tightly scoped one off projects.
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