Ryan Atkinson

Building joyful systems. Dabbling in brand and product design. Jiu jitsu and art to stay connected to reality.

[Ryan Atkinson @ryanpatk]

I have decided that everything I build or create from here on out is in the service of one single emotion: joy.

Art, product, design, even how I carry myself and interact with others.

[Ryan Atkinson @ryanpatk]

Let them eat slop

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

Sound on.

[Ryan Atkinson @ryanpatk]

I wound up buying one of these v8 chunk boiz.

[Ryan Atkinson @ryanpatk]

I really miss the chunky and colorful design of trucks and suvs from the 2000s. I think about them every single day.

[Ryan Atkinson @ryanpatk]

I also can’t stand when software hides the relative depth or volume of different organizational branches. This is why I find notion and most notetaking apps completely unusable.

[Ryan Atkinson @ryanpatk]

I hate software that forgoes content organization in favor of search. It feels like living in a soupy mess, and fundamentally disregards the fact that memory has a powerful spatial element. I want software that feels like stacks of paper of different heights sitting on a desk.

[Ryan Atkinson @ryanpatk]

I will Claude, I will

[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.

[Ryan Atkinson @ryanpatk]

Cell shaded comeback now

[Ryan Atkinson @ryanpatk]

Complexity is often entropy disguised as order

[Ryan Atkinson @ryanpatk]

Installing matte screen protectors on all of my digital devices has been a huge quality of life improvement. They also add some blue light filtering.

[Ryan Atkinson @ryanpatk]

Ordering taco bell on Uber eats so I can keep coding (creed playing in background). I think I locked in.

[Ryan Atkinson @ryanpatk]

The esoteric elements of superprompt have made me start thinking of prompt engineering as a form of prayer.

[Ryan Atkinson @ryanpatk]

minimalism in physical space.

maximalism in digital space.

[Ryan Atkinson @ryanpatk]

Touching grass (rucking) while pondering the beauty of the cosmos (looking at clouds)

[Ryan Atkinson @ryanpatk]

I see a software philosophical divide. There are programmers and then there are product builders.

To one, the code is the endgoal, to the other the code is an implementation detail.

I am a product builder.

Lots of overlap with the specialist vs. generalist mentality.

[Ryan Atkinson @ryanpatk]

Just cancelled my chatGPT and Github Copilot subscriptions... @AnthropicAI and @cursor_ai are so so so good together.

[Ryan Atkinson @ryanpatk]

@TheCinesthetic Scrolled down the comments and NO ONE mentioned The Young Pope. Absolutely insane how underrated this show is.