Will Rice

design lead @doordash • NYC × IRL • student of error

[fiii @fiii___online]

current hyperfixation is the letraset typeface competition of 1970 in dublin, ireland that birthed tuam unical.

which, to me, is one of the best irish language display fonts out there, nothing has come close to it since.

sin é... slán xx

[Will Rice @_willrice]

@zendadddy It never has! Design is the most liberal of arts.

[Emil Kowalski @emilkowalski]

The people getting great UI results with AI aren’t using a secret model or a magic prompt. They know what a great interface looks like, and they know how to steer AI towards it.

Work that used to take a week takes a day, and the quality bar doesn’t drop, it goes up, because you spend your time on the things that matter.

At the end of the day, people that use AI best are the ones that were excellent before LLMs as well. The ones that got the fundamentals right, went that extra mile, and cared about the thing they were working on.

[Ben Blumenrose @benblumenrose]

If true would love to see the visuals/products/output... i have yet to see design + ai in the hands of a non-designer produce good design.
Reminds me of the time a doctor founder told me “you wouldn't believe it but my 13-year-old nephew designed this app”. My response: “I 100% believe a 13-year-old designed this”

[Frank Bach @zendadddy]

funny to see how many people are surprised to see Doordash are one of the most AI-pilled companies with top tier talent

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

A Call for New Aesthetics: https://t.co/1DEfcyqyEF.

[Benji Taylor @benjitaylor]

Even the biggest companies with the deepest pockets are struggling to hire top design talent. And as usual, it comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of what drives most great designers. They want to be surrounded by other great designers and a culture that cares.

[Benji Taylor @benjitaylor]

We cannot let AI ruin the em dash — one of the all-time best punctuation marks

[Will Rice @_willrice]

@ammaar @GoogleDeepMind Ah congrats Ammaar!

[Will Rice @_willrice]

@ammaar Congrats ammaar!

[Nikita Bier @nikitabier]

After advising 50+ consumer companies over the last year, the one thing that separates those who can execute and those who can't:

Having a full-time designer in the room at all times

I've met with countless companies that have raised millions—and even one that has raised billions—that do not even have a designer on payroll.

This makes product development broken:

1/ You simply cannot have constructive conversations about ideas without visualizing them in real-time
2/ Your experiments will frequently have inconclusive results because users cannot discover features or they misunderstand how they work
3/ There is no one who can galvanize the team with a vision of what the product could look and feel like

And to be abundantly clear: I'm not referring to visual UI or graphics. I'm talking about someone who can think through the fundamental building blocks of product comprehension—like navigation, interaction and copywriting—and is technically savvy enough to visualize those components in high resolution.

There can certainly be exceptions to not having a designer, like where the CEO is an exceptional visual thinker, but that does not scale beyond a small team.

At the end of day, products live and die in the pixels: it's what the users see and tap. And without someone shepherding that process, you are effectively wandering the desert blind.

[Patrick McKenzie @patio11]

Two occasional hobbyhorses of mine intersecting: the necessity of creating certain UXes which are broadly useable by population and the existence of a large contingent of users who cannot read in the sense that you read.

[Pedro Franceschi @pedroh96]

Today we’re announcing our 24’ Summer release at @BrexHQ! ☀️ AI-powered accounting with continuous close (first software ever to do so), two completely redesigned products, and a blazing-fast new UI with 100+ improvements that make Brex the most powerful *and* simple it’s ever been

Six years ago, we started Brex as a corporate card designed by a tech company, not a bank. We grew quickly along with our customers, and built so many products as they scaled – like global capabilities, robust expense policies, live budgets and more. Our product depth is why 120+ public companies rely on Brex every day to run their businesses.

But back in December, we decided to look inward. We realized that building so much, so quickly, sometimes came at odds with our original vision of simplicity. We made our main priority for this year to deliver not just the most powerful spend platform on the planet, but also the most simple, thoughtful and delightful user experience for founders and Finance teams.

We had to completely change how we run the company to make this release happen and I’m so proud to share it with you–as it’s our largest and most polished release to date. Key highlights:

📕 A new AI-based accounting workflow that allows customers to achieve continuous close and close the books every day – the nirvana of accounting.

💳 A new Card Control Center that makes it easy to manage cards and limits at scale (whether you have 5 or 50,000 cards), as well as spend requests that replace janky PO workflows.

💵 Bill Pay with AI-based line itemization, multi-entity support, and the ability to pay bills by card, earning rewards and cashback on spend that was previously going through ACH.

🔎 Redesigned tables, with consistent and blazing-fast responsiveness on filtering, pagination, grouping, sorting, as well as LLM-based search that is 400% faster.

🚀 100+ other updates, such as AI-powered Slack integration, account co-branding, audit trails, sandbox mode, stable credit limits, a new security hub and much more.

[Matt Bango @mattbango]

Amazing seeing Brex at #4 in the list, just behind OpenAI, Anduril, and Stripe. Such a great group of companies and we're still just getting started 🚀

[Will Rice @_willrice]

@mrcs1 there was a point in time where indesign was low-key the best web/app design tool out there — robust grids, linked .indd files as components, asset management, etc etc

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

Simplicity will be the next theme in product.

If you ask any company what made them successful I don’t think anyone will say their advanced and complicated planning process got them there.

[Jordan Singer @jsngr]

an embedded user researcher that's there from inception to the messy middle to the final product is a superpower for designers and critical to making the best thing you possibly can

[Will Rice @_willrice]

@simon_sweeney Masterpiece

[Andrew 🤘 @andrwlassetter]

🚀 Introducing Sticky for Mobile Web! 🚀

We're excited to announce Sticky is now available on mobile web!

To try it out, just sign in to your Sticky account in your mobile browser by opening https://t.co/IGjrqCKaXq

#Sticky #AI #Productivity #NewRelease #GenAI #LLM

[Will Rice @_willrice]

@petermcreaper @stanhuan Ah finally! Good man, Pete 🔥