Johnnie Manzari

Designer, Google DeepMind

[Cyrus Daniel Irani @cyrusirani]

@johnnie One of my first projects as an EPM. The tape length being accurate in each spool 👌

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

My contrarian belief is that this was a great UI.

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

I’ve been using this for UI design, and it’s incredible. I’m old enough to remember when getting a video to loop seamlessly was a whole project unto itself.

[Sam Sheffer @samsheffer]

i don’t think you understand how insane omni is

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

@benblumenrose @gokulr I’ll take the opposite position and say the number of jobs will increase not decrease.

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

@jhong I missed it the last time 😌

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

I’ve joined the Google DeepMind design team. I’ve spent my professional career working as a toolmaker, and while I’ve been lucky to have contributed to some incredible products in the past, I may well look back on the work here as the most important when it comes to building tools that are helpful, delightful, and genuinely enriching to people’s lives.

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

I haven’t worked at Apple in 6 months and the multi lens switching to hit focus on this still gives me anxiety. (It starts Macro on the Super Wide lens because the bottom of the window is in focus then realizes it needs to hop to the Tele.)

[Reid Wiseman @astro_reid]

Only one chance in this lifetime…

Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him.

I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

@WestsideLAGuy I was in this class but only had a Stanford water bottle.

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

A student asked me to help her with an interview question. She asked for a good reply to: “What do you do if you’re given a project you don’t like?” I said this isn’t even a hypothetical, it will for sure happen. My answer was that, counterintuitively, you need to do the best work of your life on those projects. If you do bad work you doomloop your career— they will become worried about giving a more important project, you get stuck, you do more bad work, repeat. If they ask you to design a “blow dryer for a fish”, you need to design the best damn fish blow dryer the world has ever seen. Yes it will fail commercially, but then when you ask to help the “blow dryer for barbers” team, you have leverage to move over, and that team will be pulling you in.

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

@kevinweil Glad I got to squeeze in that lunch! Epic run 🙏🏼

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

I was there today and can confirm.

[Soleio @soleio]

The @noondesign team showed me Canvas 6 on Tuesday and my brain has been spinning since.

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

@frederic_ooo @SGuergachi @ddynmcs I’m no longer at Apple, but during the beta period for iOS 26 there were iterations to this design, and the final design was based on the learnings from that process.

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

I remember Portrait mode was running behind, and it risked not being in the keynote for iPhone 7 Plus. The quality wasn’t there. So the story of the second lens would have just been about zoom quality, rather than unlocking something profoundly new. It was Joz who, upon hearing this, sent an email to a few of us: “If I can give you until December what can you do?” With that additional time we were able to bring in a
machine learning block, and that was the big unlock for the quality improvements. The feature made the keynote and was released in October as a Beta. He fought every day for the purity of the ideas.

[Tony Fadell @tfadell]

Most tech companies break out product management and product marketing into two separate roles: Product management defines the product and gets it built. Product marketing wires the messaging- the facts you want to communicate to customers- and gets the product sold. But from my experience that's a grievous mistake. Those are, and should aways be, one job.

There should be no separation between what the product will be and how it will be explained- the story has to be utterly cohesive from the beginning. Your messaging is your product. The story you're telling shapes the thing you're making.

I learned story telling from Steve Jobs. I learned product management from Greg Joswiak. Joz, a fellow Wolverine, Michigander, and overall great person, has been at Apple since he left Ann Arbor in 1986 and has run product marketing for decades. And his superpower- the superpower of every truly great product manager- is empathy. He doesn't just understand the customer. He becomes the customer.

So when Joz stepped into the world with his next-gen iPod to test it out, he fiddled with it like a beginner. He set aside all the tech specs- except one: battery life.

The numbers were empty without customers, the facts meaningless without context.

And, that's why product management has to own the messaging. The spec shows the features, the details of how a product will work, but the messaging predicts people's concerns and finds way to mitigate them.

- #BUILD Chapter 5.5 The Point of PMs

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

I got introduced to the Noon team through Soleio last year and decided to invest alongside him and a host of other great designers (@rsg @joulee).

The future of design is not about the ability to round trip into code and back; these are now one unified entity. We aren’t just stringing together static pages with transitions. That is done. In the future designs can’t be described without an interactive environment backed by code.

I’ve been doing software design for a long time and couldn’t be happier with where it’s going.

[Soleio @soleio]

There is a longstanding idea in software: WYSIWYG

@noondesign is a canvas environment where humans and agents can create, edit, and ship product design. Its substrate is code. WYSIWYG.

The canvas affords us selection-based workflows and structure that text alone can’t match.

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

It wasn’t just Pixar, he did this for everything. All the software ideas/features were presented in prototype form, many times with numerous variations prepared in case he didn’t like some aspect of it. Apple Park had numerous full size experience prototypes built…

[hinata @HinataMotivates]

Steve Jobs: Talking about Pixar and storytelling.

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

The main camera on smartphones has gotten so good in bright light that the differences between generations are subtle and only in subjective domains like color processing and tone. But as it gets darker the differences are more clear. In very dark conditions anything before iPhone 11 would have been an RGB 0 rectangle.

[Marques Brownlee @MKBHD]

iPhone 1 thru iPhone 17 vs LOW light

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

This is exactly right. The verb is “selection” or, I prefer, “editing”. Taste is a noun, so it fails to fully communicate the work needed to be done. AI is an incredible collaborator, but you need to still own the ideas with clarity and conviction.

[Soleio @soleio]

Taste is selection.

Even the act of generating and creating sits downstream of selection process: the tools that survive the Darwinian process, the words and forms we first inherit then deem most resonant, the editorial scrutiny we apply to our own work.

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

The value of this iteration isn’t just in improving the design, it’s also a way to understand if you can clearly and concisely articulate the problem and your proposed solution. A cyclical perspective on this is that you’re iterating on superfluous internal marketing material. A wiser perspective is that ultimately if you can’t explain internally why this work is significant, you’ll probably struggle even more when it comes to explaining it externally.

[Dasha Anderson @DashaAnderson_]

The pattern described by former Apple designers was: show rough work, get feedback fast, improve it, show it again, and repeat. They compared it to an SNL-style cycle: early ideas, midweek critique, late-week rehearsal, then executive review.

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

Yes. On the one hand, natural language is a difficult way to explain visual and interactive experiences; for example, imagine trying to describe the Mona Lisa with only words. But natural language paired with this speed of output is a magical experience… you’re creating things with just your thoughts

[Julien Barbier 🙃❤️🏴��☠️ @jbarbier]

Using Claude Code has a weird side effect: You don't just get more productive, you actually want to work more.

There's something addictive about watching a product being born in real time in front of your eyes.

"One last feature" after "one last feature" and it's already past 3am.

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

This lesson from 2000 is just as relevant today. (From "In the Plex" by Steven Levy, published 2011)