Geoff Teehan

Design co-founder at Previously VP Design at Meta. Co-founder Teehan+Lax. Creator of &

[Lightspark @lightspark]

Building a global business is hard enough.

Moving money shouldn’t mean stitching together banks, payment processors, and local integrations.

Here’s how we’re helping @whop get sellers paid 🧵

[Geoff Teehan @gt]

@rsg Social Reckoning is more my era. Anyway, obligatory zuck photo.

[Geoff Teehan @gt]

Good list. I have been thinking a lot about portfolios after that review. Perhaps showing the real thing in a very human way is a large differentiator right now.

Yes, i love a slick portfolio with high production value animations of what was built. But i think it’s become the norm now.

I’m getting interested in making the work real and sharing it in a human way. Long form video. Your voice over top of it. Showing stills, animated cuts that arent overly produced. Live action video of the thing working. A talking head. If it’s really outstanding work, it deserves to be made as real as possible.

The example below isn’t a portfolio, it’s a blog post where I did a half-asses version of the above to show off a hack project with @lightspark infra. First attempt. It’s not great, but if I was going to create my own portfolio site, this would be where I start pushing and exploring.

https://t.co/Eky57tMbeX

[Geoff Teehan @gt]

@ridd_design @mds @femkesvs @IniAbiodun @joshpuckett @gabrielvaldivia @maheen_sohail This was a lot of fun

[Geoff Teehan @gt]

@OhAnotherAlt @emilkowalski https://t.co/PFLep4iGkm is still up! Can see all those case studies in the menu. Also, I think it looks like a children's book now with the huge body copy. I much prefer way smaller sizing now.

[Lightspark @lightspark]

Every day, 10 to 15 people make their first $20K on @whop. Today, Lightspark powers a new way for them to cash out instantly to their bank accounts.

[Geoff Teehan @gt]

Of course the Roadster demo was a spectacle. He’s selling cars. He’s going to show the most outrageous things the tech can do.

And it was pretty fucking impressive. Watching it hang upside down, defying gravity, was cool. Watching it fall from the sky and stick the landing was insane.

The prototype isn’t practical in its current form -- don’t care. It’s not hard to imagine practical applications for this tech beyond jumping police barricades and retina detaching acceleration.

That same tech can help a car stop on black ice, avoid a collision, or prevent a rollover. Practical stuff will inevitably make its way into regular production cars.

F1 gave us safer tires, better transmissions, more efficient aerodynamics… all from engineers trying to make cars go faster around a track. The guy who invented the 3-point seatbelt previously worked on ejection seats.

Useful applications aren’t always obvious until later, though I think many are obvious in this case.

The next few demos will be more Evel Knievel than anything you’d actually want to do in a car. Cool. We’ll probably see some practical stuff in there too.

[Geoff Teehan @gt]

@vanschneider @ryanbrewer I love both for completely different reasons. One is an awesome car. The other is insanely cool tech that actually does have practical uses — we just didn’t see them in their practical context.

[Geoff Teehan @gt]

@robertmacarthur The car’s performance.
The performance put on for the audience.
The stock’s performance over that period.

[Geoff Teehan @gt]

A $50,000 deposit on the Tesla Roadster in 2017 would be worth $844,571 today if invested in Tesla stock instead.

Incredible performance. Both the Roadster and the company.

[Geoff Teehan @gt]

@tomfgoodwin About $42,000

[Geoff Teehan @gt]

@YitzyMytelka I’ll take a look. Any feature request that adds complexity probably won’t make it. I’ll always look and consider it though. It’s simple on purpose

[Geoff Teehan @gt]

Is this thing gonna run a 7.55 second quarter mile? FSD is going to need a mode beyond Mad Max.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Timing is everything

[Geoff Teehan @gt]

@sciencegirl Plenty old. We designed some OS stuff for them in their death throes.

[Geoff Teehan @gt]

Uses spacex tech to suck it to the ground to deal with the fact that it needs more traction at the speeds it’s capable of? Can drive upsidedown? Inverse for party-trick hover? All i know is its gonna be the fastest production car and the still be able to self drive you anywhere better than anything else available. Sold.

[Geoff Teehan @gt]

@ccatalini Pretty sure the thing can drive upside down, so maybe the 88mph is the one-more-thing moment

[Geoff Teehan @gt]

(I wrongly said left when I meant right in my first reply)
I can get behind that in principle, but I would bend the rules when the platform decides to add heavy-handed effects and embellishments. I wouldn’t conform if I felt their aesthetic pulled my own brand too far away from itself.

I think you could also argue both fit given the inconsistent state of today’s app icons (for better or worse). Many companies clearly don’t subscribe to Apple’s current aesthetic preference.

The one on the left looks does more native against some of the default apps, but also looks ridiculous with those effects.

[Geoff Teehan @gt]

Well designed things used to be more a differentiator. The design industry has matured a lot in the last few decades . There are more people doing it. There are more people doing it well. There is more good work and people to learn from, reference, emulate, steal, yoink, iterate on or copy. There are tools that give you some head starts and also much faster ways to find goodness. So it's continuing to shift I guess, and some people are going to feel that differently, and feel very differently about it depending on what they are doing and where their superpowers and weaknesses are.