Aakanksha Mirdha
@mirdhaaakanksha
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Making small things I want. Previously designer @playground_ai @Cruise @Uber
San Francisco, CA
Joined October 2014
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Pinned Tweet
Gave a talk about my plugins at
#config24
It was my first time presenting to such a big and enthusiastic audience. Thanks to the amazing people who helped me prepare for the big stage.
@actuallyakbar
@rogie
@wowitsmrinal
it wouldn’t have been possible without you all
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Made a Figma plugin to add a fractal glass effect to your images. No more switching to Photoshop to make graphics look cooler
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Perspective grid generator for Figma - no more switching to Illustrator or hand-drawing lines. Try it out!
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I recently completed 6 months as the first and only designer
@MightyApp
. Lots of learnings and takeaways so I thought I’d share some here -
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Perspective generator plugin just got an upgrade! In addition to perspective grids, now you can create grid tunnels with just a few clicks. Enjoy!
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4. Sharing in-progress work is useful.
Initially, I’d share designs with my team only when I felt they were polished enough and I’d thought of all the edge cases. Later I realized iteration was a team sport. The sooner, the wider I shared my work, the more bulletproof it'd be.
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5. Putting ego aside leads to the most constructive conversations.
At startups you're often debating ideas. And sometimes your ego will stand in the way of accepting a good/ bad idea for what it is. In such situations, pausing and re-evaluating while keeping the ego aside helps
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1. Talking to users is crucial.
This seems obvious but I underestimated how close one wants to be with their users when working at a startup. When I started, I talked to a few users every month. Now I talk to a handful every week. It helps build intuition for good ideas.
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AI art will be to hand-crafted design what photography was to paintings. The tools and skills needed to express creativity changed but a whole new way of being creative still emerged.
When making AI art, you spend tons of time iterating on possibilities. Tweaking. Finding new variants until you find the perfect shot. Kind of like using a camera to take many photos during a photoshoot:
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Very excited and honored to be sharing more about my plugins at this year’s Config
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3. Majority of product ideas that come to your mind will not impact the bottom line.
And that's ok. It’s part of the challenge of joining a startup. To counter this, one can build a robust framework to quickly filter ideas worth pursuing.
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2. Talking to users is hard.
At a big co UX researchers talk to users, offering them $100 gift cards in exchange for their time. At a startup you're the researcher but without $100 gift cards. You need to find creative ways to get users to talk to you.
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Give it a spin
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As for what’s next, I’m joining a small and mighty team at
@MightyApp
😄 as their first designer, to help build a more performant and delightful browser. Excited for the adventures and learnings ahead! (2/2)
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The attention to detail here 😱 on this balloon animation in iMessage that most people don't even know exists
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The new model is here. Better colors, better aspect ratios and lot more. Give it a try!
1/ We are releasing Playground v2.5, our latest foundation model to create images.
We tested our model across 20K+ users in a rigorous benchmark that went beyond anything we've seen to date.
This model is open weights. More information in the tweets below. 👇
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I have zero experience with 3D modeling but was able to create these models using
@vectary
in under an hour. The tool is extremely easy and intuitive to use, quite unlike traditional modeling softwares. Feeling so optimistic about the future of 3D design tools.
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Designing creative tools is unlike designing any other product. Wrote an article about the challenges we encounter as we develop
@playground_ai
, our emerging solutions, and how various creative tools tackle similar problems. Enjoy 🎨🛠️
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After two incredible years, my ride with Cruise 🚗 ended last week. Got to design two new tools from scratch, kick off a new design system, rethink autonomous rideshare and delivery experiences, secure design IP through many patents, all while having way too much fun. (1/2)
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Took a stab at redoing the macOS Preview icon. Never thought that lighting would be the hardest part of putting together a good composition. So much more to learn, so much more to improve.
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Designers love aligning things but this alignment was something else
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Always delighted when products hide details in the most unexpected of places.
You can tear open the sleeve on Siggi’s yogurt to read their origin story and then recycle the paper sleeve separately from the cup. So thoughtful😍!
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As a painter in the 19th century, it would’ve been easy to opine that photography wasn’t creative coz it was mere button pushing. But 200 years later we see beautiful, inspiring “Shot on iPhone” billboards all over. The tools changed and a whole new creative field still emerged!
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Got back to 3D after a long break. Starting small with this tiny house.
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Built monasteries of Meteora and a futuristic-medieval city in
@Townscaper
. Lively sounds and detailed animations of birds flying, bricks tossing make each interaction incredibly satisfying. This will keep me busy for a while.
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Product photography and 3D scene creation would be great applications of AR. Making 3D scenes in tools that are inherently 2D (Blender, C4D) introduces so much complexity and therefore a steep learning curve. AR interactions like these can make 3D design so much more intuitive
Next-gen pro headsets from
@Meta
and
@Apple
are dropping soon. Had us curious what the future of work might look like for Shopify merchants. 🤔
Could AR glasses revolutionize product photography?
🧵
#ar
#futureofwork
#quest
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As someone who dreads calling people on phone or talking to customer support, this lost item experience was one of the most relatable and fun challenges to think through. So happy to see this work come to light!
A
@Cruise
AV provides a superior ridehail experience, and we’re sweating the small details to make it even better.
For example, we’ve all left something behind in an Uber or Lyft, and then struggled like hell to get it back. We’re making it easy, stress-free, and automated!
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AirPod replacement came with return label affixed under the first shipping label. Just peeled off the first label and the packet was ready for return. Apple reducing user effort all the way through. Some inspiration for
@amazon
returns.
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Recreated this scene from Soul using
@figmadesign
. Shoutout to
@latestaaron
and
@eminsinani
for their powerful property randomizer and multiply plugins that gave me a headstart. (1/3)
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“Vision pro’s pass through is crazy good.”
10 mins later, “it’s the best ever but it’s nowhere close to my eyes”
The bar for user expectations never stops rising.
You can look at 15 min of the new OpenAI Sora videos and go "omg, amazing" and then on the 16th minute you're like "Ok, well, I can't tolerate anything worse and surely this should be better"
It's amazing how quick we change the quality bar in our minds.
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Checkout the talk here-
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Making new tab page more useful one step at a time
Coming to
@MightyApp
this week: Turn New Tab Page into a Whiteboard.
We wanted to make the fastest way to start a whiteboard to collaborate with your team while in a meeting. We've been enjoying it internally to brainstorm ideas with less rigidity than a Google Doc.
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For the past few weeks I’ve been working with a team of incredibly talented individuals from tech, healthcare & policy with an ambitious mission.
Excited to share the launch of , a non-profit, volunteer effort to help reopen our communities post COVID-19.
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MacOS menus appear instantly on right click but fade-out when closed. My initial guess was that instant appearance provides immediate feedback for the right click and maybe it's not so important when closing a menu.
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Sapiens graphic novel does such a good job of simplifying the original version into a more visual and sometimes comic narrative. Highly recommend even if you’ve read the original book.
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Made this tiny 3D scene using
@splinetool
Loving how easy it is to use this tool. 3D modeling made so much more approachable.
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Uber just released 'On Trip Reporting' for riders. This was one of the features I designed during my time at Uber. Proud to have been a part of this initiative.
#uber
#StandForSafety
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@debarghya_das
Yep! People want to be wealthy by saving on daily coffee instead of negotiating well on that job offer
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Interactive prototypes >> text for explaining technical concepts
This is just incredible. These interactive playful toys say more in a few seconds than weeks of reading. I hope this makes it into photography classrooms around the world. Wowza.
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For anyone just getting started in 3D I'd highly recommend
@GSG3D
3D can be so complicated and intimidating to get started in. Greyscale Gorilla has the most well-rounded set of tutorials and predefined lighting, material templates for beginners.
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But I’m probably wrong. If you right-click -> move cursor-> right-click again, it waits for the previous menu to fade out and then shows the new menu. It's not about instant feedback on right click 🤔
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Opened
@FlightyApp
mid flight and saw the other planes flying around me in real time. Don’t know what I'd do with this info but still kinda cool
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Check it out
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Such a good use of visuals to explain a product feature and its value.
@RobinhoodApp
leverages design so well.
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Figma file here for those interested in peeling the layers 🧅 (2/3)
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After spending so much time editing mask shapes for this composition, I’m curious why
@figmadesign
chose to use the lowermost layer in the selected stack as the mask. It’s painstakingly difficult to select and edit the mask if there are other layers above it. (3/3)
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