Rasmus Andersson

Adventures in software & design. Founder of @playbit_, designer of Inter, @Figma, @Spotify. Eng & design @Facebook

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@caitlinxyz @gaybrick ✨

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@benbarry @jgebbia I spoke with ndstudio about using Inter or making a custom one or a fork. Not sure what they ended up deciding, but Inter would fit the bill pretty well (for the people, neutral, made in the USA, etc)

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@LinusEkenstam @soleio I dig the lower-case i. It’s hard to do anything else here. Either you led it out or squeeze in a dot which will look disconnected from the ı

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@dwhilldesign Yeah, as someone who’s had multiple Ferraris this ain’t it. Seems more like an expensive Tesla in some ways

[Evil Rabbit @evilrabbit_]

A few months ago, I stepped into the role of Head of Creative Studio, a new team at Vercel focused on shaping the future of our brand.

We’re building the next generation of creative tooling and bringing the brand to life, from digital to IRL experiences, fashion to objets d'art.

Come join our team.

Brand Designer https://t.co/XV3C4Byyc7
Presentation Designer https://t.co/3toosYUjNW

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@krzyzanowskim Clown town. I bet this isn’t even “font smoothing” aka anti-aliasing, but sub-pixel anti-aliasing. My guess is that a web person did this without knowing much about macOS (which of course doesn’t have SPAA anymore lol)

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@jamesm Yeah, who cares. Been done before, will be done again. Ideas are worthless, execution matters etc etc

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@pieteromvlee Ha ha ha…

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

Over the past few weeks I've been spending a lot of time in Figma, working on the next phase of Playbit. Using robots for writing code, Figma feels like the perfect "grounding truth" for software.

In many ways it beats plan & design docs. I just tell the bots (in their AGENTS.md) to look in Figma as well as my docs.

Then, as they go along with their various tasks they look for guidance in my Figma doc, and I just keep working in Figma.

Sometimes I ask a bot to add a page with a GUI sketch (some UI state that's missing) or to draw me a schematic of some mechanism of the implementation.

It would be fascinating to see Figma take a more general step towards software making. Imagine Notion but instead of text it's a high-fidelity 2D canvas.

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@nikolasklein @Danielninom The sweet spot

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

We’ve been working on simply getting an account for our company for months. Been mailing back and forth with Developer reps at Apple. The latest roadblock is another company provided a false legal name, which is the same as ours, and now Apple can’t rename that other company’s legal name in their database and are asking us to use a false legal name as well, which is just clown town.

Once you have a developer account, you can get through most of the red tape with agents. I haven’t touched the Apple dev website in a long time (with my personal dev account.) My bots do all the TestFlight stuff, using chrome debugger, computer use and Xcode MCP to take care of it all

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@pxlboy @thdxr Dynamic Island was marketing to distract us from an awkward design constraint. They did a good job making a bad situation better, but no one wanted Dynamic Island. I find it distracting at best

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@thdxr Yeah… Apple has gone from a utilitarian design culture to a shock & awe one over the past decade 😥

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@steveruizok I have not but now I will! Likely a good fit for anything that isn’t actual GUI, like mechanical and logical design (like processing pipelines and data relationships)

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@juliomariutti I don’t use most fancy features in Figma. Just the pen tool

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@krzyzanowskim @thdxr Apple still rules obviously. But macOS feels a bit like abandonware maintained as a side project by the iOS team. iOS is really good I think, but good for what it does (consumer stuff)

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@longiy Humans are natural visual thinkers. I don’t think it’s a personality trait. Eg look at the history of early-stage education, like Fröbelgaben which led to Kindergarten

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@mateoszymkowicz Right click anything in Figma a copy link, give it to the bot (or just tell it where to look like you’d tell a human; they are incredibly good at vision.)

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

It’s the “manual” part that keeps you thinking about the user experience. When you design live with code or bots in code, you’ll be designing technology. You’ll see what looks like opportunities but are just affordable technological paths (“I can add a status bar here that shows number of things, yeah that could be useful”)

I often do “design live” like this, with a “hot reload” kind of workflow and so I know how hard it is to stay disciplined and not be led astray by technical opportunities. That’s why I use Figma for all the important stuff

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@_RandomYang Absolutely. I’m fine with that. Software is ever changing anyways

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@zetareticoli It’s from Apple’s Figma templates which all have a device frame (and I don’t care enough to remove it)

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

@nikolasklein @benblumenrose