to celebrate 2025, I'm dropping a bunch of presents 🎁 this week for the design community. 1st up: my guide to product design is officially live and free for everyone! it includes 24 chapters of my thoughts & advice for new designers. 📓 read it now: courses.designisaparty.com/course/cours...

Another great Black Friday deal from @lalizlabeth.bsky.social! I know lots of devs are interested in learning visual design, and I can’t think of a better person than Elizabeth to teach it. 😄 www.artofvisualdesign.com

👀 guess the dupe: channel your inner miranda priestly and try to identify designer dupe. yes, i did manually find all these dupes myself! made this in figma make over the weekend: harp-care-29087468.figma.site

some figma grid experiments from my students today~

trying to make a pink editor theme and it's a lot harder than i realized 😭

i love this synth created by my student dennis for prototyping with cursor~

a guide to navigating the saturated design advice internet for aspiring designers~

i've been working solo for 2 years now and here are some of the tips i have for managing my very unstructured work days:

✨ explored the art of collage with some of my art of visual design students today! everyone had a blast using the figma draw radial feature for the first time too~

the new material 3 expressive design principles feel like a breath of fresh air! i especially love their new take on using a variety of shapes within interfaces. less consistency, more expressiveness ✨.

my favorite thing about building my own courses is including way too many references to the devil wears prada 😇

told cursor to make something "look ugly" and tbh it did a pretty good job. pls watch til i press "spin everything." a little peek at how i got here in the thread:

👀 a tip for new product designers: one of the best ways to improve your product thinking skills is to imagine the conversations behind product launches. let's take @figma sites for example. these are a series of questions, discussions, and debates I know the product team had~

my amtrak activity last weekend: organizing classical saxophone repertoire in a notion database 🤭

does anyone else take photos of placards at art museums and then never look at them ever again? 🫣 i'm thinking about making something that helps me look back at the little placards i found interesting.

recently, i made a mini website for an interview ✨. with cursor, it only took a few hours to make! i had way too much fun exploring chaotic mode~

prototyping with cursor is actually all powered by notion! i can visualize where all the students are and update course material all in one place 🥰 i love being able to customize the course experience myself without being constrained to specific tools.

loving @jitachi.bsky.social's fun little "add dog" feature for their prototyping with cursor project 🐶

thinking about how we all used to learn html and css with this guide 🥺 maybe some online learning tools are too complicated now~

✨ i wrote a little bit about why and how i'm teaching cursor on my blog! and yes, this is a real message that a student sent me yesterday 🥰 www.designisaparty.com/blog/lessons...

a little peek at the custom course website i built powered by notion 🥰

✨ my new course prototyping with @cursor_ai is live! to celebrate the launch, it’s on sale this week only. ⬇️ sign up now~

"breaking the grid" posters by mauricio for the art of visual design (elizabeth's version) 💖

i also revamped the design is a party website this week in preparation for the new course ✨! all my design edu projects are now in one place~ www.designisaparty.com

✨ prototyping with cursor launches on april 17th. explore both the creative and technical ways of working with cursor with me in my new online course. check out the landing page below~

i recently used cursor to create a custom presentation deck 🤭. i'm excited for a potential internet where we all create our own little apps for everything~ p.s. take a peek at my process around the 15 second mark.

since i started design is a party, i've noticed that the vibe of comments across each social media are incredibly different: 1/ tiktok has the funniest (& sometimes most brutal) comments. i also get the most genuine questions here! every comment is clearly written by a real person 💖

👀 check out the amazing student projects from my Type Electives course "designing interfaces for connection." in a world where every chat window looks identical, how might we reimagine these spaces for connection? www.designisaparty.com/designing-in... also threaded below~

still refining the details, but i'm excited with how this is turning out 🥰

sparkly~

a windows 98-inspired note taking interface by ryan. ✨ created during my "prototyping with cursor" workshop this past weekend!

i just wrapped up my first "prototyping with cursor" workshop and it was a success! the majority of students joined with little to no experience with code. i was so inspired by how creative the students were with their work! the following prototypes were all created by john during the workshop~

experimented with some chaotic web typography this morning 🫨

a little highlight reel of the little prototypes i made in cursor yesterday~ using it reminds me a bit of when I used to make silly things in neopets. heads up that there is sound on all the piano prototypes! the cyberpunk one is especially grating 🥲

i've been having so much fun iterating with cursor in preparation for my workshop this weekend 🤭

over the last few months, i've been playing a lot with cursor! in fact, i was able to build my design aesthetic quiz and design prompt generator in less than a week because of it. if you're a designer eager to learn how to prototype with cursor, i'm hosting workshop~ sign up here: lu.ma/pybswfhg

👀 here's a peek at the 1st day for my new course "designing interfaces for connection". over the next month, we'll be pushing the boundaries of chat-based interfaces! i wanted to kick off the series with a design exploration encouraging students to think outside the box~

riso printed origami critters~ what other animals should i add to the collection?

behind the scenes peek at my unfolded origami project~

1st riso project of the year complete~

at the end of last year, i started working on a little project called "who wore what when why"~ i wanted to trace the story of iconic red carpet looks! it's been fun to do research for each of the garments 💞 i'm hoping to launch it soon 🥰

i'm featuring some student work from "the art of visual design"! this is ashley's digital mood ring, a project that’s all about exploring color and shape and how it relates to our emotions. i love how she explored color and built a beautiful prototype 💖.

absolutely blown away by how beautiful my student maddie's moodboard is for the color project 🥺💖

i started the "exploring color" workshop with an exercise where students made gradient orbs representing how they feel today~

i took an intro to riso printing class at sva's risolab this fall! for my final project, i combined my love for music & design by creating a visual dictionary of music words 🎶 this class was so much fun! i felt like i was living my high school dream of going to graphic design school 🥺

my friends and i did a book exchange white elephant edition! it was fun to guess what some of the books were based on the wrapping.

i'm excited to share that i'll be teaching a new course with type electives called "designing interfaces for connection"! the goal of the course is to explore chat interfaces through both playful experimentation and critical analysis~ 👉 learn more: www.typeelectives.com/courses/desi...

✨ here's a peek at a portfolio revamp challenge i did yesterday! i asked my instagram followers to nominate a style or adjective. i challenged myself to redesign the original portfolio in a few minutes using their nominated words~

finished my riso class final project 🥰

designers are some of the hardest people to gift because they can be a little particular 😇! here are some ideas that my friend lisa and i put together~ www.artofvisualdesign.com/gift-guide