Rasmus Andersson
@rsms
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Adventures in software & design. Founder of @playbit_, designer of Inter, @Figma, @Spotify. Eng & design @Facebook. (https://t.co/cS300CeZsH)
Berkeley
Joined March 2007
Inter version 4.0 → After two years of work on a new version of Inter, I'm so proud that it's finally released. (It's been in beta for the past year). The changes are vast. Most notably there are six additional "Display" designs for large delicious type
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Me as a novice programmer 20 years ago: “I’ll use an array”. Me as an intermediate programmer 10 years ago: “I’ll use a fancy N-branching trie with hashing and linear probing”. Me as a more experienced programmer: “I’ll use an array”.
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Inter is now available from @googlefonts!. Congrats to @ThunderNixon who worked tirelessly on getting Inter on-boarded to Google Fonts.
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During the past six months I've been working towards something big which I believe in: Playing around with computers should be fun. Playbit is an ambitious project to create an environment that encourages playful learning, building & sharing of software.
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After almost a year of work I'm happy to introduce Interface — a font family for computer on–screen text.
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Playbit is an endeavor to build a new operating system for software creatives. After over two years of reserach, Playbit is now a real company and I'm hiring Playbit's founding engineers. Are you up for the challenge?.
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This is a pet peeve of mine. Light and its temperature plays a significant role in how we feel. Putting cold (high color frequency) LED lights on streets is a terrible idea and I surely don’t want to live in a place where there are “blue” lights. It’s just negligence — we have.
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New to CSS grids? Check out Raster—a simple approach to grid-based design on the web →
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Started jamming on a new font today. Kind of like a compact display geo sans that can be used to complement Inter. What do you think?
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Inter UI has been renamed to simply "Inter". Oh, and there's a brand new, significantly-improved release available!.
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I've been a macOS user for a very long time and I see myself as someone who knows a lot of the little "hidden" features spread across the system. But I was surprised to learn about this today that I for some reason haven't seen before. Very useful!
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Figma Branches just announced at Figma Config. This was in the works even before I joined, over 5 years ago! Think about that, 5 years. Great software is not built in months; it often takes a long time to get things right enough for a first version.
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Some personal news:.This Friday will be my last at Figma. It has been an absolutely amazing and delightful ride, challenging and changing design tools together with the most incredible people I have had the pleasure to work with. I am so very proud of everything we've done.
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Ex twitter employees, get together and build this:. 1. Make a twitter clone (only text for v1) Shouldn’t take more than a day or three. 2. For the first year people can only sign up by authenticating with twitter; their username, tweets, followers and followees are copied.
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@apixelpusher 2009 version: 20MB fully native cocoa app, launches in less than a second, instant feedback when you click stuff, playback usually starts within 50ms
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This is a nice-looking 25” e-ink display. I’ve been excited about the idea of a good e-ink display for a long time. Compared to transmissive displays, reflective displays like these put less cognitive pressure on our minds, creating a calmer experience.
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I guess I should have monetized Inter (alt: I'm a bad business person. Inter will always be free and open source; just LOLing at the situation here).😆
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Love this. Haven’t seen a novel & utilitarian take on scrollbars in a very long time.
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UI design world: let’s clear this up once and for all:. “Modal” is when user input goes into an alternate mode. It is _not_ an overlay window. Better language for an overlay window: “Dialog box” or “Pop-up window.”. (Don’t agree? Context menus are modal but not windows :-).
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New version of the Inter typeface family has been released. Highlights:.→ Much smaller variable font files.→ Enclosing combining glyphs (circles and squares).→ More arrow glyphs and a warning-sign glyph.→ Improved kerning, spacing, fixed bugs, etc etc.
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While going through some old photos I took during the early days of @Spotify (for an upcoming book about Spotify!), I came across this photo of the state-of-the art Spotify Server Operations Centre (aka a closet with 19" servers.) Spotify ran off of these the first few months.
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This is what large parts of the commercial WWW has become. It really saddens me. It’s like a hundred tortured voices screaming in desperation. How do we fix this?! How did we get here?
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A thread with some diagrams, as y'all seem to like them :-)
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Scripter used to animate a scripted "walk-around" in a Figma file. Try it yourself:
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After 13 years of git I just now discovered `git diff --color-moved` — It detects and displays chunks that have moved, which is pretty common, in my experience. I find it really useful to be able to separate what has changed from what just moved around when reviewing some code.
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This is pretty neat. Functioning QR codes that are pretty. Would be neat to integrate something like this as an artist’s signature in the corner of a painting. (en translation:
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I'd like an email app like this, with a focus on reading & writing rather than "email technology."
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The new "layer" explorer in Safari is pretty fun and useful. I've seen this approach to visual debugging in many places before, so not a new concept, but nice to see this in a mainstream browser. (opt-in under experimental features in the dev console.)
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Fresh new release of the Inter typeface. Major improvements from months of work by @katja_schimmel, @ThunderNixon et moi. →
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New Inter font release just dropped — 3.19 🎈.Mostly minor changes.
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Put together a little e-ink display powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero. Sat-ur-fun-day.
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Spent a few hours this Sunday morning adding lower-case a with tail to Inter, which has been a popular request for a while. What do you think?
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I’m convinced this was a mistake because I don’t think anyone would intentionally do something like this. It’s like turning on the lights when they are off. Obviously makes no sense. I bet it will be fixed ASAP. [Before vs after:]
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Made a simple homepage with HTML (and CSS!) features available in the late 1990s and got it running in era-appropriate web browsers (IE 4 and Netscape 4)
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For years I’ve used just a plain text file for tracking todo. Plain text data is just the finest thing, isn’t it. Just stick a notes.txt into Dropbox and you’re done.
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@joshuapekera This is what 99% of my figma files look like. Good design has nothing to do with how you name layers. In fact it has little to do with anything at this granular level of tooling. Bad take.
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App development on macOS has become such a complex mess. To make users able to even launch your app, you need to not only 1. maintain an Apple Developer account and 2. code sign your app (which is a mess in itself). You nowadays also need to "notarize" the app, meaning you send.
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There's a shiny new release of the Inter typeface available today. This version packs a lot of improvements including some new glyphs like the Bitcoin sign.
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A new version of Inter has been released with lots of little quality improvements.
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I miss the 2000s web. So much experimentation with relatively little political constraints.
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Had a nightmare. First one in ages: Was working with a group of people on an exciting product. It was fun at first. Then no progress was made. Instead everyone were being super nice to each other and stopped telling the truth about anything that mattered. Just endless meetings.
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Sometimes I just want to quit computers, day dream I live on the countryside where tend to a garden and work on some old cars and motorcycles, because damn oh boy have we built a steamy mess of complexity.
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Inter 4 will ship with completely overhauled tabular figures, including uniform width across all 12 designs allowing you to mix any VF axis values without affecting your layout.
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Made a little booklet to help contributors of Inter getting a grasp on its design system.
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Software that started off simple and was amazing, then slowly degraded into noise, complexity and “growth opportunities”:. 1. Flickr.2. Messenger.3. Twitter.4. Instagram. Time for a new era of things to solve these problems. “It’s called a revolution b/c it goes in circles”.
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Just finished my Swedish tax declaration in 4 minutes and signing it all with FaceID ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
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Are you a computer software professional and unhappy with your workstation OS?. If a brand new OS shipped tomorrow, what about it would make you excited?.
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Years in the making!.Big congrats the the whole team at Figma for a fantastically restrained and simple auto-layout solution.
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@natfriedman This perpetuates a fundamentally bad idea: that you need to sacrifice health and friends etc to succeed in sv tech. Of course that’s not true and it sets young people on the wrong path.
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.@figmadesign pro tip: Use components when drawing symmetrical shapes, like a vase or a flask. 1. Draw rough outline for one side.2. ⌥⌘K to make a component.3. ⌘D to duplicate and ⇧H to mirror horizontally.4. Move the duplicate to the left or right.5. Edit the component
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@krzyzanowskim You’re both right and wrong at the same time. Books are reflective whereas (most) computer screens are transmissive, so really, black background on a computer display is equivalent to a white background in a book.
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(Now that I'm no longer working at Figma I can do this:). Hey @figmadesign this is _so_ confusing. Can we plsss reverse the direction?
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Excited to announce a fantastic new feature in @Figmadesign today which gives you layout superpowers.
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We’re getting close to releasing the biggest update in the history of Inter: version 4 with “display” styles. Six additional key designs for large optical sizes, made available as a opsz variable-font axis. Excited to work with Fons on an updated website & showcase.
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This trend in automotive UI design is TERRIBLE. When you drive a car your attention on the road & outside environment is of utmost importance for your life and others lives. UIs in cars need to trend toward simplicity and minimalism, not tiktok levels of distraction.
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We're about to send out the first early-access invitations to Playbit, starting with 100 randomly selected email addresses from the early-access signup form on our website. If you have the curiosity, feel brave and are comfortable with computer programming, let me know if you'd.
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The way we make desktop apps today is so broken. So wasteful and inefficient.
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Profound realization from the Design Principles Behind Smalltalk:
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Scripter is my first real @figmadesign plugin. It enables playful exploration of the Figma API and is great for automating tasks, or even creating animations.
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Humbled, excited and proud that Unity is using Inter!. “After careful consideration, we chose Inter, a modern typeface designed for computer screens. It’s highly legible and helps minimize eye fatigue. Additionally, it renders well across all operating systems. ”
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So fun to see little details like this noticed. A lot of the “craft” takes this shape on the surface; an iceberg of research and collaboration which summits to systems. When it comes to design there are two key elements: grid and gravity.
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I’m so bummed that Apple killed the iPhone “mini” (which is the upper limit of iPhone size I’m comfortable with.). If you, like me, have normal-sized pockets and hands, what are you doing? Stocking up on warehouse’d Minis or switching to a non-iOS device?.
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Today is a big day for us at Figma and hopefully for some of you. Plugins brings a whole new dimension to your design toolbox. We built the first internal "technical demo" prototype of Plugins in Figma over two years ago—this is a huge project involving the whole company. Proud!.
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The first known case of Touch Bar being remotely useful. What a time to be alive!.
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There are a lot of smart and clever people making various sciences and stuff, and then there is true genius.
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Both Spotify and Figma took years to get off the ground. If you believe in something you are building, don’t let the tech environment around you bring you down. Power through, even when it seems someone else already “won.” History offers plenty of good examples :-).
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Made some progress on Inter Display today. There’s an early alpha release available to try at
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Speed, actual perceived UI speed, was a corner stone of both Spotify and Figma from day 1. It is an incredibly important quality which is rarely in the limelight. For tools in particular it is absolutely key for over-all quality.
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@nikitabier Marketing “the grind” is doing young people a disservice. I’ve lived that life and there’s no money that makes it worth it.
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These kinds of GUI window decorations were so crisp and clear. I feel like we lost something when moving to these "opaque paper surfaces with heavy" shadows as are commonplace in macOS and Windows today.
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What are today's finest design agencies specializing in brand & identity with strong style & taste?. A friend at a company asked me this as they are planning a company-wide rebrand and I realize I have long lost touch with the design-agency industry.
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This is how you win. A quote I heard somewhere that has stuck with me for a long time:. “Customers come for the features but stay for the details”.
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If a car I wanted to buy offered a “delete screens and replace with analog dials” option, I’d pay extra for that. I refuse a future of horrid massive screens everywhere. We’re humans, not micro-trading bots.
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Made some progress on the next generation of Inter this week. In particular the display designs and thin designs need love.
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Positively surprised with a feeling of pride this morning, learning that is now set in the Inter UI font family :–).
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