📸 Snapshots of past events

[SF] Design Meetup Cafe with Rivet

📅 What’s coming up

Make sure you’re subscribed to our Luma calendar to be the first to know of them.

1. [NYC] DESIGNERS WALK - Design Humans x Design Meetup (Sep 6): We’ll walk a set route, stop for photos, and mix up who you’re walking with throughout so you meet more than the one or two people you showed up with. A few conversational prompts and games along the way to get past the small talk! RSVP at luma.com/y2c69li5.

👀 All aboard! Announcing our Board of Advisors

Welcome our amazing advisors! Over the next year they'll be speaking at our events, hosting us at their offices, and opening doors for the future of designers. Read the full list here.

🦄 Opportunities

These jobs were posted in the past 2 days, so they’re still fresh!

Internships

• Delta Intern, Innovation UX Designer (Spring 2027)

• UX Design Internship - Summer 2027

• Sony Trainee, People Experience Graphic Design & Communications

• Johnson & Johnson Design and Development, Co-Op Spring 2027

• Empirical Foods Design Engineering Intern - Summer 2027

New grad roles

• Meta Product Designer, Human Interface

• Rogo Product Designer

• Novig Product Designer

• Instagram Product Designer

• Ivo Product Designer

• Conduct Product Designer

✍️ Why interfaces got emotionally flat

An excerpt of Yao Adantor’s article on Substack

For years, product design got better at what it could measure: usability, conversion, speed, and efficiency.

The problem is something like emotion is much harder to put on a dashboard.

You can track whether someone completed a task but it is harder to measure whether the experience felt warm, memorable, playful, or reassuring. So those qualities slowly became secondary.

The result has been a generation of products that work beautifully but often feel the same: clean, efficient, and emotionally forgettable.

Now the pendulum is swinging back and teams are rediscovering that usability and personality are not opposites. The best products can be clear, functional, and still feel like they have a pulse.

The three levels every product is felt on

Don Norman’s Emotional Design gives us a useful way to understand why some products simply work, while others actually stay with us. He describes three levels of emotional experience:

1️⃣ Visceral: the immediate gut reaction
This is what happens before we have even properly used the product. The visual style, motion, responsiveness, and overall polish create an instant feeling: this looks good, this feels good, I want to explore it.

2️⃣ Behavioral: the feeling of using it
This is the emotion created by the experience itself. Does the product feel intuitive? Does it respond the way you expect? Does completing a task feel effortless or frustrating? Good usability creates a quiet sense of confidence and control.

3️⃣ Reflective: what the product comes to mean
This is the deeper layer: the identity, memories, and meaning we attach to a product over time. It is why people become loyal to certain tools or brands, even when plenty of alternatives exist.

The insight for 2026 is that these three layers map almost perfectly onto where interfaces are heading, and the best products are starting to trigger all three intentionally rather than accidentally.

🔍 Designer spotlight: Joanna Chen

Joanna Chen | Product Designer @ Adobe | Director of Events & Partnerships @ Design Meetup | From NY, Based in SF

Favorite design tool right now?

Still Figma! Love to get granular and there’s a level of polish and control that I still haven’t gotten with other tools. But these days, I do find myself really loving Figma MCP for slide decks and diagrams, plus quick prototyping in Codex and Claude Code. It really frees up a lot of my time that I can use to think strategically about my work.

Plus I’m a BIG FigJam user — my second brain lives on FigJam <3 Love dumping screenshots, meeting notes, and any thoughts I have and lay them out in a visual way!

Where do you draw your inspiration from as a designer?

Recently, talking with people has inspired me a lot. Diff ways of thinking, life experiences, and POVs help me reach ideas that I wouldn’t have thought of myself!

More tangible places (recommended by friends!) are X, Cosmos, Mobbin, museums, podcasts, books, life!

What advice to early career designers do you have?

Reach out to as many people as you can! Whether it be someone you admire, look up to, or seen once! I’ve met some of my best friends and mentors through just a cold DM or showing up to a random event. You never know what opportunities lie in just a conversation, so I would be open to talking to as many people as I can — and not just in tech but also across different fields! I think that’s why building Design Meetup has been so rewarding and fun!

🎨 Design Twitter roundup

See you soon,
Brandon + Ilyssa

🎥 A little video about us in case you forgot…

Featured at our event with Apple at their Cupertino HQ. Recap photos coming soon!

📸 Snapshots of past events

[NYC] Spotify x Design Meetup

Special shoutout to Emily Shen and Sabria Islam for holding down the fort in NYC!

📅 What’s coming up

Make sure you’re subscribed to our Luma calendar to be the first to know of new events.

1. [BAY AREA] 🤫 (Hint: A lot of 🍣🍣🍣🍣)

2. [NYC] COMING SOON

Two quick things:

1. Sponsorships: If you work at a company/space where you want to host a Design Meetup event, reach out to us at contactdesignmeetup@gmail.com. We’re building out our calendar for the next 6 months and would love to collaborate.

2. Get Involved: We’re getting a lot of feedback that you guys want to get more involved and that’s so exciting! We’ll be opening up something special coming soon for those who want to join us.

🦄 Opportunities

These jobs were posted in the past 2 days, so they’re still fresh!

Internships

• TikTok Product Design Intern - 2027 Summer

• TikTok Creative Design Intern - 2027 Summer

• Product Designer Project Intern (TikTok-Design-UX) - 2026 Start (BS/MS)

• Ancestry Product Design Co-op – International Growth

• OXOS Medical UX/UI Intern

• Skydio Product Design Engineer Intern

• Gumloop Design Engineer Intern

New grad roles

• Design Engineering Graduate (Design System & AI Workflow) - 2027 Start

• Metaview Member of Product Staff, Designer/Design Engineer

• Klaviyo Product Designer

• Accenture Designer

• Inspire Product Designer I

• Jam City UI/UX Designer

📝 The next five years of product design

An excerpt of Balint Bogdan’s article on Substack

Will entry-level design jobs survive, or will AI replace the tasks that juniors used to learn on?

Junior designers historically learned by doing the work nobody else wanted to do. Cleaning up Figma files. Building out component variants. Documenting spacing and color tokens. Filling in the screens between the ones the senior designer already figured out.

AI is now capable of doing most of that. And companies know it.

Scenario A: Junior hiring slows down. Companies figure they can give a senior designer AI tools and get the same output that used to require a senior plus two juniors. Entry-level roles get scarce. The people who do get hired are expected to be AI-proficient from day one and operate more like mid-level designers immediately.

Scenario B: Junior roles evolve instead of disappearing. As AI handles the production grunt work, juniors are freed up to do more interesting things earlier in their careers. More research exposure, more stakeholder interaction, more strategic work. The learning curve is steeper but the ceiling is higher. Companies that invest in junior talent early end up with stronger senior designers five years from now.

What to do about it: If you’re early in your career, don’t just learn the tools. Learn the thinking. Be the junior who can run a usability test, synthesize interview notes, and present findings to a PM, not just the one who builds clean components. Use AI to skip the blank canvas, but make sure you understand why the AI’s suggestion works or doesn’t. Build things outside of work. Show judgment, not just output. If you’re senior, think about what happens when the pipeline of junior designers dries up. Today’s juniors are tomorrow’s senior designers and design leaders. Cutting them off creates a leadership gap that’s hard to fill later.

Will “designer” stay a focused role, or will it absorb responsibilities from five other jobs?

This is already happening. Companies are expanding what they expect one designer to handle. Research, visual design, prototyping, copywriting, light front-end, data analysis, presenting to stakeholders. Roles that used to be split across a team are consolidating because AI makes one person faster at all of them.

Scenario A: The designer role expands into something closer to a product generalist. You’re expected to write your own copy, analyze your own data, prototype in code, and present to leadership. Specialists still exist in large organizations, but most companies want one person who can do all of it. The title stays “product designer” but the job description doubles.

Scenario B: The opposite happens. As AI handles surface-level work across all those domains, companies realize they need depth over breadth. Specialists in research, interaction design, content design, and design systems become more valuable because AI-generated work is decent but not deep. Generalists hit a ceiling where they’re okay at everything and great at nothing.

What to do about it: I think reality will land somewhere in the middle, which means the safest position is the T-shape. Go deep on one or two things (research and interaction design, or systems thinking and visual craft) and be competent across the rest. AI makes it easier to be competent at adjacent skills. It doesn’t make you an expert. Use AI to cover your weak spots, but invest real time in your strengths. That depth is what will be hard to replace.

🔍 Designer spotlight: Matthew Hope

Matthew Hope, Product Design Intern @ CrowdVolt, from Jakarta, Indonesia

Favorite design tool right now?

Adobe Photoshop

Where do you draw your inspiration from as a designer?

As with any other designer, I enjoy looking at online references from sites such as Pinterest, Mobbin, Cosmos, etc. Something that I have been trying to do more intentionally is to be more aware of my surrounding as I walk around the city. Being in NYC, theres is so much direct and non-direct inspiration sources even in a short 5 minute walk. I’ve been making it a point to go on a walk mid day everyday as a way to get more inspiration or just to refresh my creativity.

What advice to early career designers do you have?

Expand your horizons! It really easy to be stuck in a singular practice, especially with external pressure of being a expert in one area, but design is all about the craft and exploration. Practice other media forms and challenge yourself with something you aren’t good at. Designers come from so many backgrounds too, so I also find myself involving myself in stuff outside design too. This really makes you a well rounded designer and also prevent burn out (in my personal experience). Also do not be shy to post your work online! Exposure is always good and it’s also awesome to just look back and see your progression.

Fill out this form if you’re interested in being featured in one of our next volumes.

🎨 Design Twitter roundup

See you soon,
Brandon + Ilyssa

📸 Snapshots of past events

At Scale: Google x Design Meetup

Scrappy Hours @ Notion HQ

📅 What’s coming up

Make sure you’re subscribed to our Luma calendar to be the first to know of new events.

1. [BAY AREA] Design Meetup x Apple (August 7): Hey Siri, play Apple by Charli XCX… Join us for a night bringing together designers, founders, and creative technologists. We’ll gather for food, drinks, a fireside chat with Apple Human lnterface designers, and a demo from a design influencer! RSVP: luma.com/ryw61pad.

🦄 Opportunities

These jobs were posted in the past 2 days, so they’re still fresh!

Internships

• SharkNinja, Fall 2026: Product Development Co-op

• Guess?, Design Internship, Women's

• ZOVU, UI/UX Design Internship (NYC)

• Streamable (YC) Design / UX Internship

• Honda, Creative Design and Research Co-op/Intern – Spring 2027

New grad roles

• Los Angeles Dodgers, Junior Product Designer

• Nagarro, Junior Product Designer

• Sunday, UI Designer

• ElevenLabs, Product Designer

• Goldman Sachs, Asset & Wealth Management, UI/UX Design, Analyst - New York

• Sunspell, Design Engineer

📝 What is visual craft, actually?

By Andrew Doan, Product Designer

I'm coming up on my first year as a full-time designer, and I've been reflecting on my growth. I can clearly feel the growth in problem decomposition, systems thinking, and product strategy. But visual craft is harder to articulate. After talking it through with others, I think I finally have a better handle on what it actually is.

There's a foundational layer to craft — hierarchy, typography, color, spacing — the stuff you can study. And then there's taste. The part that only comes from repetition, from looking at a lot of things, from testing and being wrong over and over.

It's tempting to think good craft just means making something look cool, but in UX, craft is really about making something feel the way it was supposed to feel, and making sure it actually works. I keep coming back to the cooking show Culinary Class Wars. One judge never scored dishes on his own taste; he scored them on whether the dish delivered what it was trying to deliver. A curry that tastes punchy and loud but was supposed to taste like home has failed, even if it's delicious. It didn't tell the story the chef intended.

My mentor told me every visual decision needs a rationale. If you can defend it, you're probably doing good design. I believe that too, but sometimes two defensible choices point in opposite directions, and just a "reason" stops being a useful tiebreaker. When that happens, prioritize the user. Everything below that is taste and testing. Ship it, watch what happens, and learn. That feedback is the taste you're building, an instinct you're accumulating one rep at a time.

The clearest way I've found to measure my own growth is looking back at old work. Stuff I made two years ago looks bad now, but a year ago, I couldn't have told you why. I hadn't built the taste yet. Now I can look at it and name exactly what's off: the hierarchy, the spacing, the gap between what it was trying to feel like and what it actually feels like.

If I strip away the principles and the rationale-chasing, here's what I think craft really is: it's storytelling. Every visual decision is a narrative choice. Along the way, it's important to ask: what am I trying to make someone understand and feel, and does every choice on the screen serve that? That's craft.

🔍 Designer spotlight: Chrisandra Vaz

Hi, I’m Chrisandra! I’m a product designer who also dabbles in community building and design engineering. I grew up in Toronto, and currently studying design and business at the University of Waterloo. I’m currently based in SF for the summer, working at Sentry on the AI/ML and Design Eng teams.

Favorite design tool right now?

Figma is still my favorite design tool. I do use other tools too like Paper, Granola for notes, Cursor and Claude when I’m working with code. But Figma is always in my loop at some point. It’s become the scratch pad that follows me throughout my workflow.

Where do you draw your inspiration from as a designer?

My inspiration comes from being observant and constantly training my eye. I’m often inspired by real life moments and the things around me billboards, museums, paintings, magazines, movies, and nature. I love noticing the small details like colors, textures, patterns and the layers that go into telling a story visually.
I think the more you pay attention to the world around you, the more inspiration you start to find.

What advice to early career designers do you have?

My advice to early career designers is to get as many reps as possible. A lot of becoming a stronger designer comes from building your skillset, expanding your range and developing your eye through practice, feedback, and critique.

I also think understanding how things are built helps you create better work. Learning the technical side and collaborating with different teams gives you more context behind the decisions you make.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to explore different types of design, teams, rotation programs or industries!! Trying out these different combinations helps you learn more about yourself and where you want to grow. And always have a plan. But don’t make it a one step plan. I’d recommend thinking about the different paths that can help you get where you want to go.

Fill out this form if you’re interested in being featured in one of our next volumes.

🎨 Design Twitter roundup

See you soon,
Brandon + Ilyssa :)

📸 Snapshots of past events

SF Intern Mixer at Figma HQ

📅 What’s coming up

We say this every time, but we have even more exciting events coming up beyond what’s below, so make sure you’re subscribed to our Luma calendar to be the first to know of them.

1. [NYC] DESIGNERS WALK - Design Humans x Design Meetup (July 18): We’ll walk a set route, stop for photos, and mix up who you’re walking with throughout so you meet more than the one or two people you showed up with. A few conversational prompts and games along the way to get past the small talk! RSVP at luma.com/cdgflzte.

2. [SF] SCRAPPY HOURS - Notion x Design Meetup (July 23): ​Building and tinkering on personal projects? Everyone will be paired into small groups based on interests and share their personal projects and bounce ideas in a mini “studio” session. Then, we’ll invite a select a few demos to present in front of the whole group! RSVP at luma.com/obo6607q.

3. [SF] DEV NIGHT - Figma x Notion x Design Meetup (July 29): Speakers will walk through real projects and share how the things they make, collect, and care about outside of work shape how they design and build. Stick around after the talks for dinner, open mingling, and a chance to win exclusive Figma plushies! RSVP at luma.com/2929v81u.

4. [NYC] 🤫 - Spotify x Design Meetup (August 7): A curated panel and networking event to learn what it’s like to design for the global leader in music streaming. Luma TBA.

🦄 Opportunities

These jobs were posted in the past 2 days, so they’re still fresh!

Internships

• [Fall 2026] Vineyard Vines Creative/Graphic Design Internship

• [Fall 2026] MATTE Projects Graphic Design Internship

• [Fall 2026] rag & bone Outlet Design Internship

• [Fall 2026] NYC MTA Architectural, Emerging Talent Intern

• The Monument Design Intern

• Claim Health (YC) Visual Design Intern

New grad roles

• Rogo Product Designer

• Google Interaction Designer, Google Maps

• Gensler Product Designer - Junior

• Ramp Product Designer

• Google Interaction Designer, Vertical Ads

• Clarion (YC) Founding Product Designer
  

📝 The Art of Arriving and Becoming

By Anonymous, Product Designer, 22

There’s a version of starting over that everyone talks you through before it happens. The new city, the new badge, the apartment with boxes still along one wall. Someone hands you a laptop and a login and says welcome, and for a few weeks everything is text you’re reading for the first time, every hallway a decision. Then one Tuesday you notice you’re not reading anymore. You’re just walking to the same desk you walked to yesterday, and some part of you sits with that and wonders, quietly, if this was supposed to feel different by now.

I’ve been reading a lot of reflections on postgrad, and one by Halo Flip titled “We’re Always Arriving” really hit home. She wrote about her commencement speaker, a line from Noah Baumbach:

When I left college, I had a notion that there was a destination, a destination followed by an arrival, and there were proper paths to get there. And as I stand here, twenty-five years, which is really thirty-five years, since I was sitting where you are, representing somebody of accomplishment who has arrived, who is here to tell you what it’s like to get there, I realize that I’m still arriving just as you are today. We’re always arriving, which is another way of saying we never arrive.

I used to think my arrival was somewhere past my design job entirely, past any job. To build an agency or product of my own—get it to a scale where it stops feeling like a side project and starts feeling like the Real thing. And somehow that would finally be the moment I could stop asking whether I’d made it.

What I’m continuously learning is that the leveling up doesn’t stop once you get there either. Even as an in-house designer, after striving towards Staff Designer, Principal, and whatever comes after that, there’s always another rung once you’re standing on the one you wanted. My takeaway is that being principled about that, why you design, who it’s for, what you’re actually trying to build, is what lets you feel good about the direction—even without knowing the exact destination.

You, reading this right now, are somewhere between one job and the next thing you’re building toward. Doesn’t matter what rung you’re on. You’re asking some version of the same question I am. Be honest with yourself, every once in a while, about the answer of why you are becoming instead of focusing on the arrival.

🔍 Designer spotlight: Sam Gorman

Sam Gorman | Founder of Rivet | Based in SF

Favorite design tool right now?

Rivet :)

Where do you draw your inspiration from as a designer?

Both my parents are artists and I grew up in Los Angeles. They took me to art museums and shows whether I liked it or not. So their influence and the creative fabric of LA was a big part in developing my love for design. What I learned early was that the best art had an opinion. It provoked a reaction. It stood for something!

When I got to college at Stanford, I learned about design from a graduate class I snuck into as a freshman at our design school. What great design shared with great art was that it also had an opinion on how the world might be a better place. It just recognized the real world constraints of the present in a way that art often sidestepped to bring something tangible into the world.

So I loved it. And over time I started pulling more inspiration from the past. I got in the habit of learning about the greats of design - like Charles and Ray Eames, and then the greats from adjacent disciplines - like Issey Miyake in fashion, or Luis Barrigan in architecture. And I tried to find what inspired them and what I often found was that inspiration just led back to the natural world in some sense.

Finding that inspiration and then curating and remixing references to them is such a big part of design. I think the next AI design tool should be built on top of this. And it's become a large part of what I spend my time thinking about with Rivet.

What advice to early career designers do you have?

I think authenticity to the medium is important in design. When you can understand and harness the medium you're working in, you can shape it. More creatively and more expressively. And I think for the longest time, designers were held at arms length of the true medium of the tools they built for - code.

It's becoming a false tradeoff between design and code now. It's probably the best time to be designing early in your career. You don't need to unlearn old ways - you're already curious and earnest when it comes to exploring how to own the medium.Fill out this form if you’re interested in being featured in one of our next volumes.

🎨 Design Twitter roundup

See you soon,
Brandon + Ilyssa

📸 Snapshots of past events

NYC Demo Night with Figma

NYC Maker Night with Figma

NYC Craft Cafe with Figma

Design Meetup x Cursor x Entrepreneurs First

📅 What’s coming up

1. Design Meetup x Google Sunnyvale, CA (luma TBD): A night of connection and inspiration for early career designers as we kick things off with food and drinks before diving into a series of interactive lightning talks and an exclusive AMA with senior designers.

2. Design Meetup x Figma Summer Series in SF: 4 down, 3 left…. Design Meetup and Figma are bringing designers together for intern mixers, demo nights, maker nights, artist talks, and more. You don’t want to miss our upcoming ones. RSVP at luma.com/figmaforedu.

🦄 Opportunities

These jobs were posted in the past 2 days, so they’re still fresh!

Internships

• [Fall 2026] Corgan Brand + Graphics Internship

• [Fall 2026] Altar’d State Textile Design Internship

• [Fall 2026] SAP Concur iXp Intern - Integrated Marketing Graphic Design

• Magnet Media Design Internship

• Iris USA Design Summer Internship

• RWS Global Creative Internship

New grad roles

• Forbes Designer

• Rockstar Design Engineer

• TikTok Design Content Ecosystem & Integrity

• Accenture Designer

• Vellox Product Designer

• Leon Max Assistant Design/Product Development
  

📝 Some of my thoughts as someone who designs for hardware

By Chi Quach

I recently read Erika Hall’s Conversational Design, and I was fascinated by the way she defines the term “interface”: a middleman between interacting systems. Think man-to-man, man-to-machine, or machine-to-machine.

For those of us with backgrounds in software design, we have a long history of building interfaces that bridge the gap between analog and digital experiences. We relied heavily on metaphors. Classic examples include the early iPhone’s wooden bookshelf or the flipping pages of a Kindle. The best experiences always belong to those who master the art of making pixels feel familiar.

This principle has always been my favorite. Before starting any project, I always ask myself: what story am I telling today?

This mindset follows me into my current work with wearables. Software is a limitless canvas. In hardware, on the other hand, physics always pushes back. As designers, we strive to create the most ideal experiences.

We ask, “What is the most seamless way to interact with this device?” Yet, a lot of the time, these proposals get taken a different path. The components required will make the device too heavy, run too hot and melt the casing, or completely exhaust the battery life.

This is where I learned the hard way that form doesn’t just follow function—function dictates the form. It is a constant negotiation of trade-offs. To achieve the right aesthetic and comfort, we might have to remove a feature. To prioritize an extra function, we have to bulk up the size, which eats away at the wearability.

For anyone interested in transitioning into this space, I can share what worked for me: I took some classes in Arduino and did a few design projects focused on physical devices. One exercise I highly recommend is redesigning an existing device’s experience. Reaching out to help startups and small teams also helps.

If you are interested, I highly recommend exploring this field; you will definitely learn a lot just from observing how people use everyday objects.

🔍 Designer spotlight: Chi Quach

Chi Quach | Product Designer at Meta | Based in SF

Favorite design tool right now?

Cursor, Framer, and Figma!

Where do you draw your inspiration from as a designer?

A huge geek for Pinterest, Cosmos, X, YouTube, and design Substacks. Also, I love interior and fashion design, so a lot of my inspiration comes from there.

What advice to early career designers do you have?

My philosophy when it comes to design is to tell a good story. No good story comes from sitting at a desk. So, have fun, do something with your hands, explore a new creative medium, and absorb all of life's experiences. These are the best materials for your design work!

Fill out this form if you’re interested in being featured in one of our next volumes.

🎨 Design Twitter roundup

See you soon,
Ilyssa + Brandon

📸 Snapshots of past events

Design Meetup x Reve

SF Intern Picnic Figma

(NYC Figma photos coming soon!)

📅 What’s coming up

1. Design Meetup x Figma Summer Series in SF: 3 down, 4 to go…. Design Meetup and Figma are bringing designers together for intern mixers, demo nights, maker nights, artist talks, and more. You don’t want to miss this one. RSVP at luma.com/figmaforedu.

2. Design Meetup x Cursor x Entrepreneurs First Config After : ​Join us for an evening bringing together the next generation of designers, founders, and creative technologists fresh off Config. We’ll gather for food, drinks, and a series of fast-paced lightning demos where leading designers share the projects they’ve built, the tools changing their workflow, and how they’re adapting their craft. RSVP at luma.com/5wsl3qtq.

🦄 Opportunities

These jobs were posted in the past 2 days, so they’re still fresh!

Internships

• Global Payments Associate Internship

• AirFlow Dynamics UI/UX Designer Intern

• [Fall 2026] 1Password Product Design Intern, EPM End-User

• [Fall 2026] Neon Design Intern

New grad roles

• Datadog Associate Product Designer

• Google UX Designer, Retail Ads

• Ashby Junior Design Engineer

• Lumion Product Designer

• Conduct Product Designer

• Droyd UI/UX Designer

📝 Note to corporate self

From an Anonymous New Grad + Product Designer @ Tech Company

I officially graduated college a month ago. Right now, I am physically and mentally stuck in the “in-between”—hanging onto the tail end of finishing school while waiting for the start date of my new job to trickle in. And with that come some thoughts and reflections.

Recently, I’ve been hit with a brutal reminder that life moves unforgivingly fast. Heavy, unexpected family crises hit out of nowhere, and the administrative tasks of adulthood don’t pause for your grief. There’s always a numbing, endless list of mundane logistics waiting for you. Recently, my days have been consumed with a weird blur of packing and unpacking my things, sorting through paperwork, figuring out what pharmacies my health insurance takes and scheduling hospital visits. As I’m figuring out life for the first time, I am taken aback by how easily the billions of admin tasks can eat your entire day, leaving no room to actually process what is happening. And the scariest part? I haven’t even started my full-time job yet, and I know this is only the start.

I can’t help but be terrified at how easy it is to just get swept up in the flow of life, putting my head down and just quietly handling things. As I join Corporate America, I don’t want my adaptability to turn into passive compliance. I worry that as I get busier, and the rigid routine of a corporate schedule settles in, I’ll forget how to find time to check in on myself.

So, I’m writing this down now before I get swept away by the current of work and life. Whether you are navigating this exact liminal space or are already years into the corporate grind, take a second to ask yourself these questions:

• Are you proud of your life portfolio? My good friend and mentor, Jason, recently introduced me to this concept, and it helped remind me that you possess ultimate authority over your own life. While we are trained to look at a portfolio as a career term, it actually applies to the energy you invest in everything: your health, your relationships, and your peace. Is the broader life you are curating something you are proud to own?

• Are you making room to just mess around? At a recent design event, the artist Akakya mentioned that the beauty of teaching younger folks was their ability to think more freely—they don’t overthink things, they are more explorative, and they are okay with making “bad” work. As adulthood settles in, give yourself permission to be terrible at a new hobby, sketch something ugly, or just mess around. It’s a necessary choice to keep your mind from getting rigid.

• Have you touched grass lately? Don’t let your world shrink down to the size of a monitor. When was the last time you walked outside and took a full, deep breath? When was the last time you called a friend just to talk, or sat down to eat a proper, unhurried meal? Survival takes maintenance!

Life waits for no one, and there will always be another task, crisis, or deadline asking for your time. But at the end of the day, it is entirely up to you to lift your head up once in a while and make sure it’s a ride you actually want to be on.

🔍 Designer spotlight: Sophia Delrosario

Sophia Delrosario | Product Designer at Phia | Based in NYC

Favorite design tool right now?

I’ve been playing around with design platforms where everything you create in the canvas is already a code component. Wonder and Subframe are my current favorites!

Where do you draw your inspiration from as a designer?

When I need to get creatively unblocked, I look at side projects that other designers have made in their free time. I’ll scroll through Twitter and Instagram, and get so inspired by how their imagination runs and their minds work. Yes, looking at industry examples is super important - but so much unseen creativity lives in the indie sites and passion projects that our community makes <3

Additionally, I also love gallery sites like Spotted in Product and 60fps.design for cool microinteraction inspo!

What advice to early career designers do you have?

If I were to start over, I’d remind myself to have a "figure it out" mindset above all. It's so easy to get overwhelmed and discouraged when you enter the world of design, with all the tools, the vocabulary, the endless Figma shortcuts.... but you have to be a little delusional and genuinely believe you can figure pretty much anything out.

I didn’t know Figma going into my first designathon, I had no idea how to create animations when it was assigned as my first task at my job. But I said yes anyway, and after a few sleepless nights, research into different tools and strategies, and a lot of trial and error… I ended up figuring it out, and picked up some new skills along the way!

(Oh and also! Build in public, post your designs - you never know who's watching in the infinite, vast space that is the Internet!)

Fill out this form if you’re interested in being featured in one of our next volumes.

🎨 Design Twitter roundup

See you soon,
Brandon + Ilyssa

We've had a few people ask about a more tight-knit version of Design Meetup: something for the most active builders in our community, not just event attendees.

We're curious if there's interest. If you’re curious, fill out this 5-question form. It takes 2 minutes.

https://tally.so/r/eqzl60

Brandon & Ilyssa
Design Meetup

Welcome to our Vol 6 of Design Meetup’s Newsletter! We’re so excited that you’re back :)

📸 Snapshots of past events

Design Meetup x Ramp

Design Meetup x Notion

📅 What’s coming up

1. Design Meetup x Figma Summer Series: Seven events, two cities, all summer. Design Meetup and Figma are bringing designers together for intern mixers, demo nights, maker nights, artist talks, and more. You don’t want to miss this one. RSVP at luma.com/figmaforedu.

🦄 Opportunities

These jobs were posted in the past 2 days, so they’re still fresh!

Internships

• Pebl Product Design Intern

• SAP iXp Intern - User Experience Researcher

• ByteDance UX Researcher Intern

• Intel Consumer AI UX Internship

• Pocket Prep Product Design Intern

New grad roles

• DataAnnotation Product Designer

• Blitzy Product Designer

• Google Interaction Designer, Search UX

• Lassie Product Design

• IBM Product Designer

🎨 What we learned from doing real client work in college, and how to build it yourself

From Brandon and Ilyssa

For a long time, most of us assumed a career started with someone else opening a door. You applied, waited, got in or didn’t. Yet there’s another hidden secret to accelerating career growth: other side entrances many don’t know exist.

At Cornell, we worked with clients ranging from early-stage startups to teams at Google and Microsoft through a student design organization. We had real project briefs, deadlines, and stakeholders (who sometimes didn’t even know what they wanted themselves). Having a client come back and say they wanted designs to just look more “delightful” was a different kind of feedback than anything you get in school. It closes the gap between what the typical design curriculum is and how non-designers actually perceive the work.

Why it actually matters

Working across different industries early on helped us figure out what we actually liked. You pick up a branding project, a product problem, a scrappy startup brief, and you start to learn what kind of work gets you going and what drains you. Some other pros:

1. Learning how to manage yourself when no one is telling you what to do, and dealing with ambiguity.

2. Figuring out how to give feedback to a peer without it getting uncomfortable.

3. Getting a client to say yes to a direction you believed in.

4. Build leverage, as every project is a portfolio piece or new connection.

How to start one at your school (or just in your life)

1. Find 3 to 5 people, not a perfect team. You don’t need full coverage across every skill. You need people who show up. Post in a design class group chat, your school’s Slack, or a local Discord. Three people who are genuinely interested will go further than eight who are semi-committed.

2. Land a client before you formalize anything. Cold-email 50-100 local startups or small businesses. Offer one specific deliverable, like a landing page redesign or a user flow audit, at a reduced rate or free. One yes is enough to start. A warm intro from a professor or alumni works even better.

3. Get the business basics sorted early. Two paths: fiscal sponsorship through your school’s student orgs office (they handle taxes, you get a bank account, pretty easy) or form an LLC yourself ($50 to $150 in most states, about 20 minutes on your state’s Secretary of State website). Use Stripe to invoice clients.

4. Write a one-page statement of work for every project. Scope, timeline, deliverables, and one round of revisions. It protects you and trains you to scope properly (Google Docs is fine).

5. Do a retro after every project. 30 minutes: what did the client actually want vs. what we delivered, where did we lose time, what would we do differently. Write it down. This is how the org gets better instead of just busier.

Not in school? Same playbook. Find a co-working space, a Slack community, or a local meetup. Offer a free audit to a nonprofit or a friend’s business. Post your work publicly. The scaffolding of a student org is nice but it’s not required. What matters is accountability to doing good work for a real client.

🔍 Designer spotlight: Megan Yap

Favorite design tool right now?

Claude Code! It’s amazing for brainstorming and iterating on design ideas, as well as adding little touches of delight. I find that I tend to be more creative when working with Claude rather than Figma, since I can experiment and see my changes pretty much instantaneously.

Where do you draw your inspiration from as a designer?

Definitely Design Twitter (I’m chronically online oops). There are so many inspiring projects that people are working on — seeing all of these designs and products always makes me feel really motivated and excited to create and learn more.

What advice to early career designers do you have?

Don’t be afraid to try building and shipping your designs! Agentic coding assistants can seem intimidating at first, especially if you don’t have technical experience, but you can honestly even just prompt the LLM itself for help — it’s pretty easy to get in the swing of things after that. I strongly believe that having real users brings so much more weight to your designs and teaches you a ton about problem-solving and creating things people want instead of just pixel pushing.

Fill out this form if you’re interested in being featured in one of our next volumes.

🎨 Design Twitter roundup

-Ilyssa and Brandon

Welcome to our Vol 5 of Design Meetup’s Newsletter! We’re so excited that you’re back :)

📸 Snapshots of past events

Design Meetup x Tiktok LA

Shoutout Michelle Liu and the UCLA Figma Campus Leaders for kicking off our LA events and hosting such a fun event!

📅 What’s coming up

1. Design Meetup x Ramp NYC (May 27, Luma)

   We’re hosting our 3rd meetup at Ramp’s NYC office. Whether you’re a student or an early-to-mid career designer, this event is designed to help you navigate the distinct paths of the design world—In-House, Agency, and Independent.

   ​Through a series of lightning presentations and an open panel, we will move beyond the portfolio to unpack the personal resilience, hard truths, and identity shifts required to sustain a long-term creative career.

2. Design Meetup x Notion NYC (May 29, Luma)

   Join us for an inside look at how designers at Notion actually work behind the scenes. In this panel, Notion designers will share the tools they rely on day to day, how their process have evolved over time, and how designers can approach new challenges in their work. After the panel, we’ll open the room for a live Q&A, followed by informal chatting with fellow designers and attendees.

3. Reve, Figma, Google, and more…

🦄 Opportunities

These jobs were posted in the past 2 days, so they’re still fresh!

Internships

• Aither Product Design Intern

• Niural AI Product Design Intern

• Gulfstream Aerospace Fall 2026 UX Designer Collegiate Associate Intern

• Accrete Design Intern (Summer 2026)

• Pave Finance Product Design Intern

• Honda Creative Design and Research Co-op/Intern - Spring 2027

New grad roles

• Fidelity Investments Associate User Experience Designer

• Everforth ECS Junior UX Designer

• Miles Partnership Associate Digital Product Designer

• Betterment Product Designer, B2B Growth

• Zero Homes Product Designer

🎨 Takes on Design Trends

From Brandon and Ilyssa

Lately we’ve been keeping a running list of design trends we notice cycling back into the feed. In an AI-slop world, we find these styles are each pulling from somewhere old, which is what makes them alluring. These are the three we’ve been thinking about:

1. Interface Nostalgia / Desktop Core

Source: https://ryo.lu/

Frutiger Aero is everywhere again. The frosted glass, the aqua gradients, the dew on the leaves, and Windows Vista in all its translucence. It had a four-year run before flat design buried it, and now, fifteen years later, it’s back again. What’s more interesting than the nostalgia though is the path it took to get here.

Another trend is what’s happening with Desktop Core, which is when designers use interface elements (windows, cursors, file folder structures) as actual compositional material. The metaphor is that an interface was always organizing thought in the first place, so why not use those elements to do that explicitly. It’s everywhere: on zine covers, in book design, in exhibition graphics, and portfolio’s like Ryo Lu’s. It’s a different use of the visual vocabulary of nostalgia, which is more about returning to a moment.

2. ASCII as Visual Texture (｡◕‿‿◕｡)

The ASCII trend has been fun to experiment with. The literal definition of ASCII is pictures made of letters. We see it more as a type and delightful texture. It creates tension and dimension: overlaying photography, underneath a layout as a textural field, as an interactive element like in Emmi Wu’s portfolio. It breaks things up similarly to how a halftone breaks up a printed photo.

There’s also something interesting happening where ASCII art and risograph printing are starting to feel like the same thing, even though they look totally different. Both of them work inside really strict rules. Risograph printers can only use certain colors and print in a certain way. ASCII art can only use keyboard characters on a grid. But instead of fighting those limits, artists are finding what looks cool because of them.

Some design studios are treating the character grid not as a throwback to old computers, but just as the rules of the game. A chessboard is an 8x8 grid. Nobody looks at chess and thinks "wow, retro." The grid is just... how chess works. These designers are treating ASCII the same way, the grid isn't a costume or a style choice, it's just the material they're working with.

A lot of design tries to hide its process. But here, the fact that it was made on a grid, with constraints, is totally visible. The limitation isn't something to be embarrassed about, it's basically the whole point.

3. Imagery From Nature

Source: https://adityad.as/

For most of its history, technology has looked deliberately sterile. Think clean lines, cold surfaces — as if the natural world had been intentionally removed from the equation.

Including imagery from nature today is a pushback against that. The trend integrates botanical illustrations into circuit-board geometry, adds breath and human warmth to plain machines and robots. Soft Baroque has been working in this space for years, creating objects that feel like they evolved rather than were engineered. But the trend has spread well beyond any single studio. You see it in interfaces using plants, sun, foods, and scenery as motifs, and in portfolios using photography and video of natural scapes as focal points, like Aditya Das’s portfolio.

The deeper question this trend is asking is: as humans, what do we actually want technology to feel like? Something tangled up in nature, rather than separate from it? Or, something that’s taken over us? We don’t want a tool that’s a tyrant against us, but one that understands us. If it looks like it grew, if it breathes, and carries the imperfection of the natural world inside it, maybe we can trust it a little more.

Design trends sometimes resurface because they’re saying something the present doesn’t yet have words for. The visuals, color palettes, and fonts are all interesting. But the argument underneath, about control, intimacy, what we want from the systems we build, is the part most worth paying attention to.

🔍 Designer spotlight: Bao To

Favorite design tool right now?

Superset.sh and Conductor.build

Where do you draw your inspiration from as a designer?

Mass consumption of media and culture aka being terminally online (tiktok, reels, x, pinterest, facebook).

What advice to early career designers do you have?

Trust your instincts and do what you think is right! you don’t need to have a linear path for your career, and always chase asymmetric upsides!

Fill out this form if you’re interested in being featured in one of our next volumes.

🎨 Design Twitter roundup

See you soon,
Ilyssa + Brandon

📸 Snapshots of past events

Design Meetup x Phia Design-a-thon

We had a great time at Phia—the energy of so many talented designers was infectious! Check out the projects from the weekend.

📅 What’s coming up

1. Bay Area: Design Meetup x Reve Make-a-thon (June 6)

On June 6, Design Meetup is teaming up with Reve for a Make-athon at Reve’s Palo Alto office. A prompt drops day-of, and you’ll have three hours to make something with Reve: a new creative suite powered by in-house foundation models. Top three projects take home cash prizes plus a year of Reve Pro, and every participant gets a free month. Subscribe to our Luma, and be on the lookout to RSVP.

🦄 Opportunities

These jobs were posted in the past 2 days, so they’re still fresh!

Internships

• O.C. Tanner Product Design (UX) Intern

• Exact Sciences UX Design Intern - Summer 2026

• DoubleVerify Product Design Intern

• Temenos Product Design UX/UI Intern

• arrivia Marketing & UX Intern

New grad roles

• Mitre Early Career UX/UI Engineer

• Future Secure AI Associate Product Designer

• depthfirst Product Designer

• Granola Design Engineer

• Cosmos Product Designer

🚨 What it’s like to design inside extremely AI-accelerated product teams

🎨 Perspective 1: Reflections on my first year as a full time designer

From an Anonymous New Grad + Product Designer @ Tech Company

Read the full piece here

"I was really struggling to cope with the fact that I am never and will likely never be the most talented or knowledgeable person in the room — in fact, I might be the least, practically speaking, when the rest of my coworkers are people who have been working at the company or in the industry for 5, 10, 20, or even 35 years. But to me, I’ve learned to see that the gaps in domain knowledge and organizational awareness are, at least in theory, learnable. I’m admittedly not too concerned about that. I’m sure almost every other new grad working in corporate, across industries, experiences some version of this, and it improves with time and exposure. What I am more concerned about, however, is the development of my own design skills as a junior designer.

We have entered the tech industry during one of the most significant paradigm shifts in the design. Historically, the junior role has been the chance to perfect your visual and interaction craft, and as you become more senior, you begin taking on more complex and strategic responsibilities. But AI is rapidly taking on these execution-level tasks. We all know that one PM who’s scarily good at creating their own prototypes (although for every one of those PMs, there are about 10 others churning out what could be considered, somewhat harshly, design-slop) — and senior leadership is beginning to require all designers to lean more into higher-level product thinking to justify the role of designers in the product development process (and rightfully so! I strongly believe that thoughtful UX is essential, and any oversight will lead to very poor user experiences and eventually backfire). But the main point is: the space where juniors used to grow is shrinking, while the expectations placed on them are expanding.”

🔍 Designer spotlight: Tise Alatise

Favorite design tool right now?

Cursor for building, Claude Cowork for first drafts.

Where do you draw your inspiration from as a designer?

Movies, mostly. I’m at AMC at least once a week. I’m a creator obsessed with stories (big and small, film, print and digital).

What advice to early career designers do you have?

Build dumb things: A working prototype of an idea you actually care about will teach you more than a dozen design classes. Looking back, the side projects I made about my interests taught me the most and quietly led to my favorite opportunities/mentors.

Fill out this form if you’re interested in being featured in one of our next volumes.

🎨 Design Twitter roundup

See you soon,
Ilyssa + Brandon

Perspectives is our space for honest, first-person writing from designers in our community. The views shared are the author's, not Design Meetup's.

Want to write the next one? Submit your idea here.

From an Anonymous New Grad + Product Designer @ Tech Company

Up until last year, I had successfully evaded imposter syndrome — or more accurately, convinced myself it wasn’t something that applied to me — to the point of near ignorance. A combination of hard work, a handful of smart decisions, and a butt load of privilege and fortunate circumstances had insulated me from it for most of my life. Having grown up in an affluent area, my well-resourced, mildly competitive middle school experience prepared me for high school, which in turn prepared me for a top-ranked university. Aside from the occasional difficult math class (pre-calc, for some reason, absolutely kicked my ass!), I moved through “academically rigorous” schools with relatively little friction, and came to believe that my decent grades and successful outcomes were the result of being, frankly, a bit better than the people around me. The fundamentals of product design came relatively naturally to me, and when I landed my full-time corporate job offer at the beginning of my senior year of college, while I had some anxieties about entering the real world, I was also confident that I’d be able to handle it easily, like I always had.

What I’m about to write won’t be anything profound or life-changing. It’s merely an honest account of my first sustained experience with being out of my depth, and perhaps other junior designers will recognize themselves in it. I currently work at a large tech company on a team in a complex domain that uses terms like “Kubernetes clusters” and “container orchestration”, phrases that were notably absent from my CS-adjacent-but-not-CS degree.

Within my first week, I knew I was in over my head. As the only new-grad (or even junior) designer on a team of senior designers with years (sometimes decades) of experience, comparison is inevitable but completely unproductive. Their understanding of the space goes beyond design craft and into product domain, the historical context behind design decisions, the company’s business goals at multiple levels of the organization, the politics between teams, and the invisible network of who to talk to in order to get anything done. Saying I was overwhelmed would be an understatement.

I was really struggling to cope with the fact that I am never and will likely never be the most talented or knowledgeable person in the room — in fact, I might be the least, practically speaking, when the rest of my coworkers are people who have been working at the company or in the industry for 5, 10, 20, or even 35 years. But to me, I’ve learned to see that the gaps in domain knowledge and organizational awareness are, at least in theory, learnable. I’m admittedly not too concerned about that. I’m sure almost every other new grad working in corporate, across industries, experiences some version of this, and it improves with time and exposure. What I am more concerned about, however, is the development of my own design skills as a junior designer.

We have entered the tech industry during one of the most significant paradigm shifts in the design. Historically, the junior role has been the chance to perfect your visual and interaction craft, and as you become more senior, you begin taking on more complex and strategic responsibilities. But AI is rapidly taking on these execution-level tasks. We all know that one PM who’s scarily good at creating their own prototypes (although for every one of those PMs, there are about 10 others churning out what could be considered, somewhat harshly, design-slop) — and senior leadership is beginning to require all designers to lean more into higher-level product thinking to justify the role of designers in the product development process (and rightfully so! I strongly believe that thoughtful UX is essential, and any oversight will lead to very poor user experiences and eventually backfire). But the main point is: the space where juniors used to grow is shrinking, while the expectations placed on them are expanding.

And this is where my newly acquired imposter syndrome comes into play. Now, I won’t go so far as to say that AI is creating prettier user interfaces than I am (I’d like to believe I still have the upper hand there… for now). What’s really terrifying to me is the reasoning. When I ask very targeted design decision questions — or even broader more contextual ones — especially when I provide full context and go back and forth with it, the responses are scarily impressive. Sometimes I find myself wondering if it might actually be better than what I would’ve come up with on my own. I mean, how can any human who just joined a team compete with a system that can pull from patterns across the industry and internal documentation, and synthesize it all instantly — let alone a fresh new grad who spent much of their college years learning auto-layout and prototyping in Figma?

My imposter syndrome is no longer just feeling less adequate than my senior teammates. It has started to surface in my relationship with the AI chatbot that aids me in my workflows, that helps me make more decisions than I’m proud of admitting, that I’ve found myself increasingly over-reliant on. Who am I to provide my own opinion, expertise, or design decisions to stakeholders when I don’t have the most subject-matter expertise compared to my human teammates, and I’m not even fully confident I could outperform my AI counterpart on certain tasks? And it feels like companies are thinking along similar lines, which maybe explains the lack of new-grad roles and the general unwillingness to train juniors right now. I feel lucky to be employed, but I also live in a somewhat constant, low-grade fear that my role (or roles like mine) will eventually be seen as expendable in the next round of layoffs.

The field of product design is evolving daily (I think I’m the first person to say that, ever), and it’s arguably never been harder to be a junior designer trying to break into or simply grow within the industry. Overreliance on AI and the potential erosion of critical thinking skills development (along with the undermining of design as a discipline) is arguably one of the largest issues we junior designers will face, and that humanity in general will face in the coming generations. But it is also impossible to meaningfully “fight back” against AI; anyone who refuses to engage with these tools will eventually be left behind.

But while I can’t control the direction of the tech industry, the job market, or the field of product design, I can take small steps in my day-to-day work to become better, or at the very least, more intentional:

1. AI is the path of least resistance, so I’ve been trying to add friction back in myself when I can. I try not to just accept the UI or proposals it generates: I critique it, ask questions, doubt it.

2. As the industry shifts toward product thinking, strategy and judgment feel less like senior tasks and more like skills I’m expected to start practicing now. I’ve been paying more attention to the specific nuances of my company’s users, business goals, and constraints.

3. I’ve also started documenting my reasoning more deliberately. I kept running into the problem of losing track of hundreds of AI chats — the helpful/useful information is often buried beneath heaps and heaps of repetition. Writing down what I decided, but more importantly how I got there, has helped build my confidence in my ideas and makes the thinking legible to both myself and others.

4. And I’m learning to accept that I won’t ever fully know what I’m doing (easier said than done). The role is changing faster than anyone can keep up with, which means ambiguity is here to stay. I’ve noticed senior designers are feeling many of the same things as juniors — anxiety about uncertainty and a lack of clear precedent. If anything, one of the few advantages of being a junior is that I haven’t been in the field long enough to be too attached to a “correct” way of doing things, which makes it easier to adapt when those expectations shift.

I don’t have much else to say or much advice to give. But I refuse to keep letting my inexperience make me feel helpless. I’m mostly just trying to get better at operating in uncertainty, and still making decisions anyway, even when I don’t always feel qualified to.

If this resonated, forward it to the junior designer in your life who needs to read it. And if you've got a perspective of your own, we're always reading pitches. Submit your idea here.

Welcome to our Vol 3 of Design Meetup’s Newsletter! We’re so excited that you’re back :)

📅 Coming up…

1. Design Meetup x Nexus x Tiktok x Figma LA (May 7)

Join us for an evening at TikTok bringing together student founders, creators, and designers from across LA for conversations on the creator economy, entrepreneurship, and building in tech. Hear from the TikTok team, meet students from UCLA, USC, and beyond, tour the office, and connect over sushi!

2. Design Meetup x Notion NYC (May 29)

Join us for an inside look at how designers at Notion actually work behind the scenes. In this panel, Notion designers will share the tools they rely on day to day, how their process have evolved over time, and how designers can approach new challenges in their work. After the panel, we’ll open the room for a live Q&A, followed by informal chatting with fellow designers and attendees.

🦄 Jobs

These jobs were posted in the past 2 days, so they’re still fresh!

Internships

• The Tech Interactive Exhibits internship

• NBC News Technology Internships – Academic Year

• Understood Product Design Intern

• Phygtl User Research | Intern Summer 2026

New grad roles

• CSU User Experience Analyst I

• Konrad Associate UI/UX Designer

• Microsoft Product Designer

• Tyler Technologies Product Analyst - User Experience

• Apex Systems User Experience (UX) Designer

🚨 Design news: Claude design launched last week

With all the noise of AI company Anthropic launching Claude Design last week, we wanted to showcase a snippet of a thought piece we found helpful:

🎨 What Cornell taught us about product design

From Brandon and Ilyssa

There’s no single path into product design. Some go to top art schools and have years to build their craft in a rigorous way. Others don’t go to school for design at all and build experience through internships, YouTube, and side projects. You feel those differences when people talk about their careers. Not in any good or bad way, just that your starting point can shape what you think design is, what parts of it come naturally to you, and what you end up wanting from it. For some, the dream is climbing to Senior Staff Designer or Chief Design Officer. For others, it’s becoming a Creative Director, starting an agency, or building products of their own. Those aspirations rarely come out of nowhere. They’re usually connected to the environment that first taught you what was possible.

Beginnings, strengths, and limitations

Today we’re sharing a bit about our experience learning product design at Cornell.

One thing that really stands out is how ambitious the design community is. On one hand, it’s energizing. You’re surrounded by people who care so much… maybe even too much at times. People are applying for hundreds of internships a week, coffee chatting and doing multiple round/superday interviews to get into prestigious clubs, talking nonstop about top designers’ portfolios. There is a contagious and obsessive energy to it.

Ambition also has this uneasy side to it, especially in school. It feels healthy and motivating until it’s taken it too far. You feel it in the comparisons, in who got what job/internship, in whose work gets talked about, in the subtle pressure to seem like you have it figured out already. And because everyone is still so young, forming their own sense of self, that competitiveness can sometimes turn toxic without anyone meaning it to. It can make a design career feel exciting, but also performative.

Another peculiarity of our education is that we learn a lot about UX process, product thinking, and business strategy before we really understand the formal basics of design. We learn how to speak the language of design in a rigid, academic way: how to talk about users, flows, research, stakeholders, and business. But many are still shaky on more foundational things you’d learn in art school, like typography, composition, hierarchy, rhythm, color, form.

Seeing those limitations is what lets us grow past them

After speaking with more designers from different schools and backgrounds, we realize this feeling is not unique. It takes different forms. The art-school graduate may have deep visual instincts but feel less fluent in product sense. The self-taught product designer may be strategic but feel they’re compensating for gaps in formal craft.

Understanding where you fall short gives direction to how you learn. Instead of passively consuming resources, you’re learning new ways to prototype, attending workshops, exercising your new skills.

For us, learning also comes from taking on work that forces us beyond the instincts we started with. Ilyssa designed for manufacturing and supply chain at Apple with no manufacturing experience at all, which pushed her to think about design on a global level, operational complexity, and the realities of shipping at scale. Brandon worked on design systems across various product suites, which taught him patience, precision, and the craft of maintaining a visual language. These filled in the parts of our education that had been missing and made us realize that growth happens when you step into work that feels daunting at first.

🔍 Designer spotlight: Ava Caroll

Ava Carroll | Design Recruiter | Atlanta, GA

What’s your favorite design tool right now?

Cosmos! It’s been my JAMMMM for years and still is!

Where do you draw your inspiration from as a designer?

The people around me. Currently surrounded by the most talented friends and peers at SCAD, constantly pushing me to explore new tools, aesthetics, and industries I would never even consider. I also have a camera full of design IRL that I keep in my back pocket.

What advice to early career designers do you have?

SAY YES and don’t let a NO stop you. Apply to that role. Didn’t land it? Okay, onto the next. That dinner you got invited to or the random DM on Linkedin? Answer it. Go to the event. Don’t wait for the “perfect” moment to start, to go, to build, to do. It’s never going to be perfect unless you start.

Fill out this form if you’re interested in being featured in one of our next volumes.

📱Design twitter roundup

See you soon,
Ilyssa + Brandon

Welcome back! We had some great events so far and we’re excited to keep building this with all of you. Be on the lookout for some fun collaborations in LA and SF this summer too!

📸 Snapshots of past events

Design Meetup x Framer

Design Meetup x Clay

📅 What’s coming up

Design Meetup x Phia Design-a-thon (April 24)

Join us at Phia’s NYC HQ for a 24-hour design-a-thon where you’ll build, think, and ship alongside other ambitious designers for a chance to win $2,500, $1,000, or $500 and fast-track interviews. Phia, an AI commerce platform backed by top-tier investors and used by 1M+ users, is hosting the event April 25–26. Apply by April 12 (see details on Luma)!

Design Meetup x Ramp (May 27, Luma TBA)

We’re hosting our 3rd meetup at Ramp’s NYC office. Join us to hear personal stories from artists, creatives, and designers about how they practice, refine, and evolve their craft!

🦄 Opportunities

These jobs were posted in the past 2 days, so they’re still fresh!

Internships

• Delta Intern, Design and Research – Digital Experience (Summer 2026)

• BetterHelp Product Design Intern - Summer 2026

• PwC Tax Innovation User Experience - Intern Summer 2026

• Mirage Product Design Intern

• Center for Internet Security UX Intern - AI & Innovation (Remote)

New grad roles

• Business Insider Associate UX/UI Designer

• Cisco UI/UX Designer I

• Garmin Product Designer I

• Cognizant Entry-level Moment UI/UX Experience Designer

• Creatify AI Jr Product Designer

✍🏻 Takeaways from building a community

From Brandon & Ilyssa

After two months of pouring a lot of energy into Design Meetup, staying up late planning events and talking to hundreds of designers, this community is starting to feel like something we’re growing alongside! You all are building this community as much as us, and we couldn’t thank you enough for the high energy and thoughtful conversations.

We learned there’s a real appetite for spaces that feel more intentional, where conversations don’t stay surface-level. Instead of collecting twenty names and handles by the end of the night, it feels like people would rather find one person to really talk to, someone they linger with after, letting the conversation stretch beyond just the one event.

Takeaway #1: Gen-Z designers are parasocial

So apparently, the design world is pretty small, and many of you already know each other?! At our first kickoff event at Framer, we saw old design friends catch up, and new friendships form from remembering a portfolio or X post that caught their eye. We ourselves saw some of our design idols IRL and realized how normal (and funny) it is to put a face to a name you’ve known from the internet. Behind the flawless, pixel-perfect designer, is just a really down-to-earth, fun person… which makes the whole thing feel a lot more human than we expected. We really all are just two degrees away from everyone :)

Takeaway #2: We’re not just building a community, but also evolving with it

Every conversation, every event, every late night of planning has shaped not only what this becomes, but how we think about human connection. It’s made us realize that in a community, making sure everyone leaves feeling inspired makes it stronger for everyone. If you have an idea, feedback, or want to play a bigger part in it all, we’d love to hear it!

🔍 Designer spotlight: Michelle Liu

About the designer
Hi, I’m Michelle! With a fine arts background, I’m a product designer who also dabbles in creative, brand, and design engineering. I grew up the Bay Area (near San Jose), but I’m currently based in LA for school studying Art & Cognitive Science at UCLA.

What’s your favorite design tool?
Honestly still Figma! It just has such a level of polish that makes it very satisfying to use. I do find myself prototyping more and more in Cursor for faster designs though, especially when a full design system is already built out in the codebase.

Where do you draw your inspiration from as a designer?
Art, life, philosophy, books! I like viewing design as usable works of art. The best products (in my opinion) are not only functional but also beautiful. In fact, I think beauty can add to a product’s intended function by making it more delightful to use.

Advice to early career designers
Explore as much as you can at different intersections! I always find it quite surprising how a lot of top engineers approach their work with the same creative mindset and discipline as the top artists. Business, tech, creative, entertainment, and scientific fields all overlap in some way, sometimes unexpectedly. Finding the intersection that resonates with you can help you differentiate and discover the unique value you can bring to the industry.

Interested in being featured in one of our next spotlights? Fill out this form.

🎨 Design Twitter roundup

See you soon,
Ilyssa + Brandon

Philosophy

Design Meetup started with an observation of designers we knew and looked up to: the best designers learn from each other.

As tools evolve and the role of the designer expands across product, brand, and systems, the need for thoughtful conversation, taste, and real community matters more than ever.

This is a space for designers who care about their craft, and want to do it alongside people who are equally curious, ambitious, and generous.

How the community works

Design Meetup exists in a few forms:

(1) Events — speaker panels, demos, and casual meetups in person.
(2) Workshops — virtual sessions to upskill and explore what’s next.
(3) Slack — a small, curated community for feedback, opportunities, and conversations that lead to your new design BFFs.

We’re starting in NYC, and expanding to SF this summer.

🗓️ Here’s what’s coming up...

3/26 Design Meetup x Clay, with V0 credits

Collabs with Figma, V0, Ramp, Verci and Google…

Our Design Meetup Website launch.

- Ilyssa + Brandon

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