His work focuses on using VR to treat conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, autism, and anxiety disorders. One of his most recognized contributions is Virtual Iraq/Afghanistan, a VR exposure therapy system used to help veterans process combat trauma.

Rizzo’s career is defined by merging psychology, neuroscience, and immersive technology to create clinically validated tools that improve mental health outcomes. He is widely regarded as one of the key figures who established VR as a legitimate therapeutic medium.

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Skip on LinkedIn | USC

Through The Waldorf Project, Sean has conceived and directed large-scale, radical performance environments often described as “empathy engineering” experiments. These works dissolve the boundary between audience and performer, combining ritual, architecture, sound, choreography, and psychological framing to explore connection, vulnerability, and collective consciousness. The project has been realised worldwide, involving over 5,000 participants in Thailand and a high-altitude performance for 400 people aboard a Lufthansa flight, an unprecedented context for live immersive art.

As a natural continuation of The Waldorf Project, Sean expanded his practice into virtual reality with Virtual Serenity, translating his principles of collective experience into a large-scale XR environment. Conceived as one of the most ambitious location-based VR empathy experiments to date, Virtual Serenity enabled up to 288 participants to share a synchronized virtual journey, extending Sean’s exploration of presence, emotional resonance, and shared human states into the digital realm.

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Sean on LinkedIn | Waldorf Project| Waldorf Project on Instagram

Her work in longevity centers on translating complex fields such as cell therapies into systems people can understand, trust, and navigate.

She founded her first company at the age of 22, building a software-driven business for collaborative 3D/4D/5D workflows in design and construction. That early venture bridged architecture, technology, and large-scale production, serving both infrastructure projects and high-end creative studios.

Her career shows a consistent pattern: entering complex industries and restructuring them through clarity, aesthetics, and system-level thinking.

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Mila on LinkedIn | Decima Longevity | Le Chacuel

Earlier in his career, Carl co-founded Tictail, the Stockholm-based social shopping platform and marketplace known for its design. Shopify acquired Tictail in 2018, bringing Carl into the organization. He has since held product leadership positions at Shopify, where he led major initiatives serving millions.

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Books from the conversation

• The Bhagavad Gita

• The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

• The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by Carl G. Jung

• How to be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shaughnessy

Carl on LinkedIn

Adrian Shaughnessy is a British graphic designer, writer, and educator, best known for bridging design practice with critical thought. A self-taught creative, he co-founded the influential studio Intro and later the publishing imprint Unit Editions, producing landmark works on design culture. His 2005 book How to Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul remains a favorite worldwide.

Adrian teaches at the Visual Communication program of the Royal College of Art in London as an associate lecturer. He has contributed essays, critiques and editorial work across major design publications, and under Unit Editions has published monographs on figures such as Herb Lubalin, Ken Garland, Lance Wyman, and Paula Scher.

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From the conversation:

• Graphic Design: A User’s Manual by Adrian Shaughnessy

• Herb Lubalin: American Graphic Designer by Unit Editions

• How to be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shaughnessy

• Manuals 2: Design & Identity Guidelines by Unit Editions

• Paula Scher: Works by Unit Editions

• Pentagram: Living by Design by Unit Editions

• Studio Culture Now by Unit Editions

• What is a Designer: Things, Places, Message by Norman Potter

uniteditions.com | x.com/AJWShaughnessy | shaughnessyworks-prints.com

Sari Azout is the founder of Sublime, the knowledge management tool designed to spark creativity. She was previously a partner at Level Ventures, head of strategy at Rokk3r Labs, and co-founder of Bib and Tuck, a curated community for pre-owned fashion.

Sari is an active thought leader in the spaces of creative work and AI productivity. She has spoken on how to be un-LLM-able at the Sana AI Summit in Stockholm; and written about about how creativity is the new currency of success, how storytelling is the most differentiating business skill of the 21st century, and how we can use AI to expand our creativity and our humanity.

Sublime’s latest release Whoa, Vol. 2: Conversations on AI × Creativity features in-depth conversations with original thinkers, including Seth Godin, David Perell, Venkatesh Rao, Seth Godin, and Substack’s head of design Mills Baker.

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From the conversation:

• Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

• Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

• Tom Ford by Tom Ford

• Ralph Lauren: A Way of Living by Ralph Lauren

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig

• The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing by Adam Moss

• God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'Gieblyn

• The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present by Byung-Chul Han

sublime.app | x.com/sariazout

Weber has a background with diverse experiences spanning venture capital, investment banking, poetry, history, and more recently, studies on interactive art at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. We discussed how these experiences shaped his approach to building one of the most exciting startups in the space of design and creative work today; and his unique perspective on the present and the future of design.

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From the conversation:

• Strategy by Lawrence Freedman

• Innovators by Walter Isaacson

• Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates

• Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight

• The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro

• Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle by Matthew Symonds

• Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech

• Dieter Rams: The Complete Works by Klaus Klemp

• Hiroshi Fujiwara: Fragment

• Hiroshi Fujiwara: Fragment #2

• Digital Art: 1960s to Now by Pita Arreola

florafauna.ai | x.com/weberwongwong

We discuss:

• Building systems and structure in creative work

• Imposter syndrome as part of personal growth

• Allowing time and others’ feedback to develop your creative identity

Read more

He has practiced design for more than 12 years and experienced multiple success stories in his career, including tenure at 2 technology startups that were acquired.

Currently Andres runs multiple ventures, all sharing a foundation of design. He is founder and creative director of ALL HANDS, the design studio that continues his practice of leading visual identity and product design. He also runs the SAFEHOUSE membership lounge in San Antonio.

Connect with Andres

x.com/andresjasso | instagram/@andresjasso | linkedin/andresjasso

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We discuss:

• Best practices for designing UX portfolio website

• Why you should use a template

• Color theory and typography

• How to present case studies effectively

• Responsive design and mobile optimization

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• Framer: build websites, the easy way

• Rize: magically track everything you do

• Color AI: generate meaningful color palettes

• Sublime: turn ideas into worlds of inspiration

For decades, design engineering referred to the intersection of industrial product design and mechanical engineering.

Now, in tech, design engineering refers to the union of visual design and software development, and it’s one of the current things — In 2024, more than 10 thought leaders in the industry created discourse on design engineering with essays and educational material. (Links at the end.)

This popularity of design engineering in tech is a result of macro developments in the last 5–10 years, like the following:

• Hardware — It’s now feasible to run impressive visuals and motion on the average computer.

• Developer tools — With new web standards and the likes of Figma, React, Tailwind CSS, Vercel, and Framer Motion, design-focused developers achieve much more than before.

• Economics — Software is now a commodity, where design is a competitive differentiator.

As a result, my inbox is full of young people asking how to learn design engineering and get jobs. To set you up for success, I’ll throw light on 2 questions:

1. What are actually the jobs that design engineers do in tech, day-to-day?

2. How can you learn to do these jobs?

What Even Is a Design Engineer?

A design engineer is an engineer with design skills, so that:

• They don’t need designers designing what to build — they can take inputs that designers take and deliver the outputs that engineers deliver.

• When working with designers, they communicate very efficiently and make contributions to design work.

• They build with production-grade materials (e.g. code) for design decisions that can’t be experienced on any other material (e.g. interactions).

• They build tools to make designing easier, better, faster, and to design things that could not be designed before.

Doing these things today requires extensive skills in both design and engineering. There are very few educational programs and resources that specifically teach software design engineering. Most software design engineers learn by dual-classing: separately learning design and software engineering.

In the future, I expect books, courses, and other resources will emerge to specifically and efficiently teach this discipline — just like we have for industrial design engineering. Right now, software design engineering is a unique opportunity for creative self-learners.

What Do Design Engineers Do?

Despite the new technological capabilities that resulted in its popularity, design engineering in tech is not a new job — it’s simply a re-configuration of the jobs that designers and engineers have been doing for years.

Here are 4 kinds of things that design engineers work on in tech:

Marketing

Design engineers on marketing teams build impressive websites and make their company look attractive on the internet.

One reason why marketing hires design engineers is when the website is large and feature-rich — beyond what makes sense to do with website builders like Framer or Webflow. Large companies like Stripe have this need. This work requires strength in traditional front-end and full-stack development skills. With higher budgets, these projects also call for impressive animations and creative graphics while retaining accessibility.

Marketing websites might also involve rich animations, 3D, and game-like experiences. Also known as “creative development”, Unseen Studio’s work is a great example in this category. This kind of work requires advanced skills around HTML/CSS, 3D graphics, motion design, typography… These devs often push innovation on immersive design and interactivity, at the expense of conventional accessibility.

Product

There are two focus areas for product design engineering:

1. “Polish” of the user interface – motion and interactivity – which is challenging to hand off from design to engineering.

2. Design systems, which accelerate design, and facilitate the design to engineering handoff.

The scope of shipping a product involves user research, backend engineering, test-driven frontend development… So, this role is highly collaborative — this job posting from GitHub lists “product design, design systems, design ops, front-end development, and illustration” as the talents that span the team. The design engineer speaks all of those languages.

Product design engineers do whatever it takes to steward product quality — a mix of front-end development, graphics, UX, UI, and motion design skills, in a way that plays with others on the team.

R&D

R&D design engineers build prototypes of new things, to visualize and test new products in the real world.

This kind of design engineering has been around for much longer than roles focused on websites and product interfaces. However, these jobs are rare, found at larger and economically stable companies — see Ivan Poupyrev’s work at Google, and Jordan Singer’s Figma-funded innovations.

Worth knowing, from a job market perspective: At the first signs of distress, R&D is the first to get canceled at even the most stable companies — see Ikea’s innovative Space10 lab, which closed doors last year.

In R&D, you constantly learn new skill trees. I’ve done 10 years of R&D and learned the Python, Lua, C#, MATLAB, Unity, JavaScript, Arduino, and Processing platforms, as well as electronics, robotics, physical fabrication, and photography. It’s the Wild West — you have to draw quickly.

Founding

The founding design engineer can execute UX, growth, and brand identity design as well as product-building — life-altering combination for solopreneurs and small early-stage teams.

Arguably, all of the internet-famous software solopreneurs like Pieter Levels, Danny Postma, and Marc Louvion are design engineers: They not only build but also publish themselves, taking care of UX design and marketing as well as their core engineering work.

I have been selling this skillset as a service to early-stage founders since early 2023, and done some of the most valuable work in my life. Of course, there are downsides: early-stage ventures have massive economic uncertainty, and demand extreme breadth of skills across business, design, marketing and engineering.

How to Learn Design Engineering

As said above, we don’t have many resources today that specifically teach software design engineering. However, if you have an existing foundation in design or engineering, there are resources tailored to help you dual-class.

For designers, here are my favorites:

• Harvard’s CS50 – one of the top online courses in the world – teaches computer science and programming from the ground up

• The Odin Project and freeCodeCamp are free resources that teach web development, highly acclaimed by professionals

• The UI Engineering 101 for Designers course by veterans Mariana Castilho and Derek Briggs. goes for “polish” in frontend

• Scrimba is the most innovative online coding school, for all levels

For developers:

• Refactoring UI is one of the most efficient textbooks on interface design

• Ellen Lupton’s Thinking with Type demystifies typography and layout theory

• Awwwards Academy offers courses on visual design and creative skills taught by seasoned professionals

• Animations on the Web is a cutting-edge course by Emil Kowalski

And once you feel ready for the challenge, the job board at designengineer.io is an excellent place to start looking.

Tech moves very fast. Some of you might be already working on textbooks, courses, and other resources that specifically and efficiently teach interface design engineering. If that’s you, please reach out and say hi.

Thanks to Dmytro Kondakov, Mert Düzgün, Emil Kowalski, and Mariana Castilho for improving this article with their comments.

Others on design engineering:

1. I think I might be a design engineer by @trysmudford (2021)

2. The Case for Design Engineers by @jimniels (2022)

3. The Case For Design Engineers, Pt. II by @jimniels (Feb 2024)

4. Comprehensive analysis of Design Engineer as a term by @david_luhr (Feb 2024)

5. Why a Design Engineer career is an investment for your future by @emilwidlund (Feb 2024)

6. Design Engineering at Vercel (Mar 2024)

7. A Collection of Design Engineers by Maggie Appleton (Mar 2024)

8. Design Engineering: An emerging role in software by David Hoang (Mar 2024)

9. The Attributes of a Design Engineer by @ryngonzalez (Apr 2024)

10. UI Engineering 101 for Designers course by Mariana Castilho and Derek Briggs

11. Animations on the Web course by Emil Kowalski

We discuss:

• How to find your place in the tech industry as a designer with an alternative background

• How to use AI to level up your job-seeking strategy

• How to win at positioning, messaging, and curation on a design portfolio

• How to win at visual design – layout, typography, color, and interactions – on your design portfolio

Links:

• Samuel Ross

• Hyper Island

• Perplexity

Supported by:

• Color AI: generate meaningful color palettes with cultural references

• Design Discipline Bookstore: hand-picked design books

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We discuss:

• What is design engineering?

• How to educate yourself as a design engineer

• How to pick technologies to learn and invest in

• Opportunities in freelance and employment as a new design engineer

• What companies are looking for when hiring design engineers

Links:

• galos.work | LinkedIn | x.com/galonaranjo_

• CS50: Introduction to Computer Science by Harvard University

• designengineer.io job board

• Learning React by Alex Banks and Eve Porcello

• Lindy effect

• Stack Overflow Annual Developer Survey

• The Road to React by Robin Wieruch

• UI Engineering 101 for Designers on Maven

Supported by:

• Color AI: generate meaningful color palettes with cultural references

• Design Discipline Bookstore: hand-picked design books

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We discuss:

• How to balance client work and self-owned projects for financial stability

• How to allocate your time effectively

• How iteration and repetition makes perfect

• Building a business based around assets rather than time spent

• Building many small projects vs. one big project

Links:

• 7 Rules of Power by Jeffrey Pfeffer

• Anything You Want by Derek Sivers

• Build To Last by Jim Collins

• Good To Great by Jim Collins

• Great By Choice by Jim Collins

• Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling

• How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

• Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t by Jeffrey Pfeffer

• The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

Supported by:

• Color AI: generate meaningful color palettes with cultural references

• Design Discipline Bookstore: hand-picked design books

Read more

He’s currently working full-time on his self-owned portfolio of internet businesses after a decade freelancing. When he’s not building online he loves to surf, travel and listen to 90s punk rock.

Products from the Conversation

• 7 Rules of Power by Jeffrey Pfeffer

• Anything You Want by Derek Sivers

• Build To Last by Jim Collins

• Good To Great by Jim Collins

• Great By Choice by Jim Collins

• Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling

• How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

• Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t by Jeffrey Pfeffer

• The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

Connect with Rob

robhope.com | onepagelove.com | yo.fm | x.com/robhope

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• Color AI: Generate meaningful color palettes with cultural references

We discuss:

• How to get a job at a design agency, fast

• Why work at an agency

• Why you should get an education

• How to make professional friends, fast

• How to display your work effectively as a junior designer

Links:

• 7 Rules of Power by Jeffrey Pfeffer

• Mohammed Yarroum

• Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't by Jeffrey Pfeffer

• The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al Ries and Laura Ries

• The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber

Supported by:

• Color AI: generate meaningful color palettes with cultural references

• Design Discipline Bookstore: hand-picked design books

Read more

Desperate, founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia get on a 6-hour flight to New York and book stays with 24 different Airbnb hosts to experience the user experience and figure it out.

They have wasted their money. There’s nothing wrong with the homes, and nothing wrong with the hosts. The problem, according to Gebbia, is the “Craigslist-quality” photos of the homes on their app — shot by landlords with cameraphones from 2009.

But now, they are already in New York. Chesky and Gebbia – both designers – rent a $5,000 camera and take the matter into their own hands. By the end of the month, the listings they photograph have doubled their revenue. Airbnb as we know it is born.

Luxury Software

In many industries, design is an external service used to create packaging and marketing materials. In software, design is a core competence for product development, and inevitably featured on the product itself. This will not change, as long as software is used by humans — we have relied on our eyes to navigate our world for millions of years, and we’re not evolving new organs anytime soon.

On the other hand, we are evolving new ways to build software, extremely fast. We have come from punch cards and Assembly language to high-level languages like Python and JavaScript. Software becomes easier and easier to create, as each generation’s engineering knowledge is embedded in the next generation’s tooling. AI is the ultimate example of this.

In short: the engineering competence we need to create useful software is always diminishing, but the design competence does not. If anything, as technology scales, we expect more from designers.

This is why the early generation of computing startups like Apple, Microsoft, HP, and Intel defined themselves (at first) through engineering and sales. Today, design-driven startups are common: Airbnb, Uber, Vercel, and Linear reap significant competitive advantages from investing in design as a first-class citizen.

This is well-known in economics and psychology: In commoditized categories – clothes, software, and stays – consumers crave “scarcity, craft, and story.” It is not enough that the product is functional, usable and reliable. To be preferred, the product must provide pride, status, flex, and aesthetic experience.

Steve Jobs knew this well. He built Apple as an engineering company first, then came back and rebuilt it as a status symbol.

Auteurs

The software industry is maturing rapidly to resemble another mature industry: Fashion. The factors of production are commoditized, and the barriers to entry are low. Ask any software founder in 2024, and they will tell you that sales, marketing, and customer satisfaction are what keeps them up at night — not code.

My point:

In this landscape, the people positioned to create the most extraordinary value are auteurs — individuals with a distinctive approach and wide-ranging control over every aspect of the product and company experience.

In generations of software companies until now, despite the elevated status of design thinking and process, the impact of the individual designer was attenuated. This did not happen because engineers and salespeople conspired behind closed doors, around the mythical “table” where designers were not allowed a seat. Rather, it happened because engineering and market challenges were in fact more challenging and critical, compared to design. But what happens now, as building and selling become easy, and design is still hard?

I’m pleased to predict that many of the next generation of software companies we look up to will be led by auteur designers at the helm, working with small teams of engineers, and standing for a cohesive vision that permeates everything they touch. The most coveted job in tech will be the Creative Director.

Creative Directors

Today, it might seem that we don’t have prominent creative directors leading tech companies, in the same way that we do in fashion. This is actually not true.

In the fashion industry, the Creative Director often takes on business responsibilities that might eclipse the creative work. Tom Ford, for instance, not only revitalized Gucci's aesthetic during the 1990s, but turned the entire business around from near-bankruptcy to a $4 billion valuation, before going on to build and sell his own label – which was profitable from day one – in a transaction where he personally netted $1.1 billion. At Louis Vuitton, the succession of Virgil Abloh by cultural icon Pharrell Williams was clearly motivated by his cultural influence and market understanding, rather than traditional design skills.

Similarly, the Creative Director role is already taking root in tech, in the form of designer-founders and founding designers who are creating market advantage from distinctive aesthetics and experiences:

• Airbnb co-founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia met at the Rhode Island School of Design and applied Design Thinking to create a beloved product. Airbnb still invests massively in design, including a multi-year collaboration with Jony Ive’s consultancy LoveFrom.

• At Vercel, designer Nicolas Garro (aka Evil Rabbit) created a distinctive visual identity to underpin a luxurious user experience, making it the preferred platform for millions of developers, including yours truly.

• Linear, co-founded by Karri Saarinen, stands out among project management tools with high-end aesthetics and experience design. (Saarinen was previously a designer at Airbnb.)

• Cosmos won market share from established competitors like Pinterest with its curated library and creamy interaction design that clearly follows from its founders’ impeccable taste.

• Fey, with designer Thiago Costa among its founders, positions itself as the quintessential “luxury software”, catering a polished, artistically-driven interface to investors with the resources to pay for it.

• Andy Allen’s Apple Design Award-winning Not Boring Software builds essentials like timer, calculator, and weather apps to the highest level of playfulness and aesthetic experience.

Markets

The Creative Director role is a trend to watch in tech. But not every software company will benefit from the auteur approach. I expect the auteur role and the concept of “luxury software” to mature together, in very particular markets.

The lowest hanging fruit for auteurs, counterintuitively, are the most saturated markets. For the design auteur, established incumbents, commoditized products, and fierce competition are not challenges — these are the signs of a healthy and hungry market, ready to receive the auteur’s creative vision. “Boring” categories like email, calendars, browsers, and weather are bustling bazaars where an already-critical mass of customers are actively looking for something exciting and luxurious. (See: Superhuman, Amie, Arc, and Not Boring Weather.)

Another great category for auteurs and luxury software is professional tools, specifically, those aimed at freelancers, startups, small businesses, and other use cases where the user and the buyer are the same person. You can count on people who make money using your product to spend money on a better money-making experience. See: Linear, Cosmos, Rize, Midday, and Screen Studio.

And as the auteur speaks the language of design, they can speak beyond consumers, to the job market — attracting talent to a culture and lifestyle that situate the auteur’s aesthetics.

Brand

I love this soundbite from auteur designer Vadik Marmeladov:

Brand itself is the most interesting thing to me… Any brand can create any product. Then it's like, becomes like a human. You have to find the characters.

Imagine, if all brands are doing all products, same products… Every brand can build a speaker. Every brand can do cosmetics. Every brand can do a t-shirt. Every brand can do a car. Then how you would make them different?

It only comes to narrative design. The story. And that's the most interesting to me… From the beginning, imagine that any brand is not focused on one thing, but focused on all things, and how to tell the story using those products…

The narrative, usually, it comes from founders — their background, and what they're trying to say.

As the cost of building software approaches zero, brand and human creativity will be the differentiator and success factor for software products.

The typical software founder today is an engineer. The archetype for the next generation of tech founders will be the Designer.

Thanks to Thiago Costa, Mert Düzgün, Will Thomson, and Mohammed Yarroum for improving this article with their comments.

Supported by:

• Daylight Computer: the healthiest computer

• Baked Graphics: amazing 3D video mockups

• ProtoPie: the best hi-fidelity interface prototyping tool

• Framer: the best website builder for designers – code partner25proyearly for 3 months free on annual Pro account

We discuss:

• How to increase sales as a creative freelancer

• How to navigate client expectations

• How to design our clients’ experience

• How to identify ideal niches using our own data

Check out Chris Krecu at krezu.se

Links:

• 24 Assets by Daniel Priestley

• Cashing Out by Jon Kolko

• The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al Ries and Laura Ries

• The Embedded Entrepreneur by Arvid Kahl

• The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber

• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Supported by:

• Color AI: generate meaningful color palettes with cultural references

• Design Discipline Bookstore: hand-picked design books

Read more

Wästberg is a Swedish lighting company that builds high-quality lamps, created in close collaboration with some of the world‘s most renowned architects, designers and lighting experts — including David Chipperfield, Ilse Crawford, and John Pawson. They have earned awards for their combination of aesthetics, cutting- edge technology and resource conservation.

Adapted from their Principles of Good Light, this masterclass with Wästberg breaks down their thinking on lighting design.

Creating Modern-day Fires

Why do certain kinds of light make us feel better than others?

For more than a million years, fire was our only artificial light source. It frightened off wild animals, brought us together, kept us warm and made us feel safe. Above all, it was a light source that we could keep close, that we could control.

Electric light has been around for little more than a century – a blink of an eye in comparison with human evolution.

Today, we find ourselves trying to tame our primitive needs to meet the demands of a modern, high-tech world, where light has more or less become a world of electronics. In our overly-lit spaces – created under the mistaken notion that more light equals greater productivity – we feel exposed, small, with nowhere to go.

We believe in creating modern-day fires.

Three Tenets of Light

To create modern-day fires, we rely on lighting designer Richard Kelly’s three tenets of light, presented in 1952. While his fundamental principles remain just as relevant today, we use slightly different terms and definitions, adapted to a contemporary context.

Simply put, to us good lighting is the interplay of three kinds of light, where focal glow is usually the most dominant.

Focal Glow

A focused light with clear direction and definition – often in the form of a task light, a suspended pendant lamp or a spotlight. Focal glow draws attention, separates the important from the unimportant, helps people to see. Ideally, focal glow is adjustable and dimmable, allowing for a wide range of uses and atmospheres.

“Focal glow is the campfire of all time. Focal glow is the follow spot on the modern stage. It is the pool of light at your favorite reading chair. It is the shaft of sunshine that warms the end of the valley. It is candlelight on the face, and a flashlight on a stair.” – Richard Kelly

Ambient Luminescence

Ambient luminescence produces shadowless illumination and is undoubtedly a necessity in many environments, but benefits greatly from being kept to a minimum, as a complement to focal glow. At Wästberg, we recommend plug-and-play fixtures; these not only provide good quality light, but also offer the flexibility and agility lacking in conventional overhead light fixtures.

"Ambient luminescence is the uninterrupted light of a snowy morning in the open country. It is foglight at sea in a small boat, it is twilight haze on a wide river where shore and water and sky are indistinguishable. It is the before-the-show lighted dome and amphitheatre of the Hayden Planetarium, the full cyclorama of the open theatre. It is any art gallery with strip-lighted walls, translucent ceiling, and white floor. " – Richard Kelly

Atmospheric Accents

Here, we offer our own revised version of Kelly’s original play of brilliants, translating his focus on dazzling sparkles and gleaming highlights into gentle atmospheric touches of comfort and intimacy. While perhaps not viewed as functional in a traditional sense, atmosphere nonetheless plays an important role. Like a candle, lantern or fireplace, an atmospheric accent provides a dimension of inviting warmth, a comforting glow that appeals to the senses. Whether used for decorative emphasis or as a soothing mood enhancer, an atmospheric accent can be placed anywhere you want – in a bookshelf, on a nightstand or in a window

Two Kinds of Needs

Paul Klee’s elegant description of the way we perceive the world around us is an excellent summary of Wästberg’s lighting philosophy.

We believe that light answers to two kinds of needs – physical and emotional – and therefore, we need to consider both its measurable and its immeasurable qualities. Light quality is, to a great extent, measurable – making it straightforward to evaluate in relation to physical needs such as ergonomy and differences in eyesight, as well to sustainability and cost.

Not as easily measured – but equally important – are light’s emotional qualities. Answering to our deeply-rooted human needs, these immeasurable aspects provide a sense of intimacy, safety, and control. In other words, they help us feel good.

Check out Wästberg at wastberg.com.

Read Richard Kelly on Lighting as an Integral Part of Architecture from 1952.

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• Design Discipline Bookstore: designer books and accoutrements

Thiago Costa is co-founder of Fey, the financial research tool that makes professional investing insights accessible to all of us.

Fey is famous for high-quality visual and interaction design across all of its product and marketing touchpoints.

Adapted from his X threads, this masterclass with Thiago breaks down his process for building luxurious user interfaces with classic art influences and state-of-art techniques.

The recently launched Features page on Fey’s website is the perfect example to illustrate Thiago’s philosophy and technique.

We’ll follow his process for designing this page.

Concept

The dynamic interaction designs begin their lives as static sketches on pen and paper.

In the words of Office of Possibilities, our guests from episode 11: “Still, even though there's all these digital tools, the absolute best tool is pen and paper. There's no faster way of communicating an idea. [We] don't see how that will change, even as it becomes a digital pen… Having the speed to be able to do the survival of the fittest idea, to be able to do many ideas, and to be able to iterate… [Pen and paper] is the greatest.”

Aesthetics

Following the interaction concept, Thiago defines the aesthetics:

First, define the tone! I always try to experiment with Chiaroscuro, and for this I drew inspiration from Caravaggio’s paintings. The goal was to embody the dramatic interplay of light and shadow to set the mood right from the start.

Buy from Amazon — Caravaggio: The Complete works

Colors are subtle in Fey, yet chosen carefully to jointly evoke classic and contemporary references.

Chiaroscuro meant embracing deep shadows and stark contrasts, inspired by Baroque paintings. And the Tesla stock wasn’t randomly chosen, that’s a subtle hat tip to Caravaggio’s palette, that always included red details.

Realism informs Thiago’s design as much as art.

Referencing real-world object textures and lighting effects achieves a grounded, legible feel to the interface. Art influences and modern interaction design deter cliches of skeuomorphism.

Realism is a constant in Fey’s brand identity. Thiago references surface properties of Apple products, which are synonymous with quality:

I can’t forget our signature touch: the laptop reflection. A simple trick with two images and adjustable opacity creates a cool reflection effect without too much complexity.

Technique

In web design, we build for devices with a vast range of screen qualities and performance. Powerful APIs for blur, transparency, and 3D are available, but may cause more pain than delight on less powerful devices.

Thiago knows the technical limitations, and how to conquer them:

I faked [transparency] with three glass styles. It’s subtle, but apart from the UI-filled, there’s clear glass and a darker one to simulate the background blur.

And while 3D modeling is the default tool for designers seeking realism, Thiago prefers vector graphics for their look as much as technical optimality:

Choosing vector over 3D gives me more control in Figma, while infusing the asset with a personal, handmade quality. Hard to explain, but this usually results in a sharper but pleasantly “imprecise” feel that I really like.

Creativity

Testimonials, features, and benefits are mainstays in web design. They must exist on your website, but since they exist on every site, viewers may de-sensitize to this content.

For testimonials, Thiago created an original interaction design, juxtaposing customer comments with animated demos of the app itself:

Each quote had to visually connect to the most relevant part of a feature, and I really wanted our customers to talk about them, rather than relying on traditional marketing copy.

He deployed smooth collapsible cards to present a list of Fey’s features:

I aimed to showcase additional features without lengthening the page or creating yet another “bentos” section. And for a touch of movement, we added a subtle transparency behind the wave.

For the benefits section, Thiago crafted subtle visuals that reinforce the idea presented in writing, turning to 3D painting in Nomad Sculpt to create the best texture and lighting:

I wrote the next section before designing it, and the phrase “sea of tools” really stuck in my head. The story I wanted to tell was that the outdated tools were sinking, while Fey’s features are raised above the water. So I created this wave in Nomad to enhance the narrative.

Check out Fey at fey.com.

Follow @tcosta_co and @narative on X.