With my “newfound” prompting superpowers, I tried to generate the code for an iPhone app and see how far I could go. Once again, I was pretty amazed by the Claude/Cursor workflow. In a rather limited time I had the scaffolding for a wedding app done. I ended up getting a subscription to Cursor which […]
Author Archives: Johan
Choose your own adventure (3)
- Posted in aspirations career
Last work week I spent a good chunk of time on my projects Screenshot to Layout and Obra Icons. I also spent some time investing the hype around Cursor and oh boy… the hype is real. I built a mobile-optimized Currency Converter app in a few hours of work mostly by prompting what I wanted. […]
Choose your own adventure (2)
- Posted in aspirations career ondernemen
My search for a new adventure is starting in earnest after some holidays. Two weeks ago I wrote about two main options, one was getting a product designer role in a US startup/scaleup, the other one was restarting agency life. I’ve been looking at jobs on read.cv and on workatastartup.com. Ideally I can find a […]
ShapeShifter plugin for Figma
- Posted in figma figma-plugins
Fresh from the plugin press, this plugin by Vijay Verma provides some shortcuts to easily access important vector tools In Figma. This can help as a bit of a bandaid, since Figma’s UI team inexplicably decided to hide the vector tools behind extra clicks in UI3.
High-end fonts included with macOS
- Posted in resources typography
Did you know that macOS comes with some wonderful, super high quality fonts that normally cost hundreds or thousands of euros to license? I believe they came with an update to Pages templates a few years ago. If you open Font Book — the app used to manage fonts on macOS — and then search […]
Converting an .mp4 to a .gif using ffmpeg
- Posted in productivity workflow
Today I was converting an mp4 video to a gif and I figured I’d document some commands that helped in the process. I used ffmpeg to do this. You can install it on Mac or Linux using homebrew: For optimal quality, generate a color pallette based on a timestamp in the video: This will generate […]
Choose your own adventure
- Posted in aspirations career ondernemen
When I started as a freelancer in 2011, I dove into the world of mobile apps. But that’s the short story. The longer one is that I first did some branding and web design. Then, I had a stint as a photographer. I worked for advertising agencies (not really my thing…), development companies (interesting but […]
A next phase + new portfolio link
- Posted in career
Change is afoot for me; After 2,5 years working with Doccle I’ll be working on finding new design challenges to take on with my agency Obra Studio. At this moment, I am not sure where things will go. One part of me dreams of going back to agency life and build out a bigger, stronger […]
Claude and keeping context when interacting with an LLM
I’ve been experimenting with Claude lately. So far for me, it’s the most meaningful competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The software looks great and has all these neat little UX touches. Every time I use it I come back more impressed. The company behind it, Anthrophic, also seems to make conscious efforts to do AI “well”. […]
Deep thoughts on Figma’s AI features: where do we go from here?
At Config, I was particularly looking forward to what kind of AI features Figma would announce after acquiring Diagram. This blog is a deep thought piece and also a piece of criticism thinking through those features. It’s also a reflection of what design app features that venture into the realm of creation mean for a […]