What Derek Briggs thinks about design
Designer and developer. Principal designer at Shopify; before that head of design at Hypermode (with Kevin Van Gundy, acquired) and, in 2024, Director of Design at Clerk.
Derek Briggs did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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11 dated positions, 2024 to 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Derek Briggs has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsVisually, it's 200 milliseconds, but it reserves 200 milliseconds for that last ending bit of delight that just makes it so gentle and much more natural movement.
↗Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopifyyoutube.com 1st of 13 in this recording
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Their wordsif it's going up against something hard, I like to just have it come in soft and just stop. If it's coming into free air, I'll let it bounce.
↗Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopifyyoutube.com 2nd of 13 in this recording
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Their wordsI think it's incredibly critically important to deploy taste and craft and quality and knowledge around what tools we need to use and what strategies we need to use to achieve the level of quality we're looking for. We need to document those in just simple markdown files of how I'm approaching this, what I'm doing, and here's the outcome. So that those skills can then just be deployed through our skill packages throughout our designers and our engineers to where greatness accidentally happens.
↗Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopifyyoutube.com 4th of 13 in this recording
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Their wordsI think that designers need to spend some more time on the artboard at times. I think that there's a lot of prompting happening that just results in what an agent will do for you.
↗Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopifyyoutube.com 5th of 13 in this recording
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Their wordsAgents are capable of doing what they've learned to do, and innovation happens in what has never happened before. So it's very difficult, and my personal opinion is it's very difficult to innovate in design with AI, being that it's only ever going to present what has happened before when we're trying to figure out what's going to happen in the future.
↗Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopifyyoutube.com 6th of 13 in this recording
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Our readingDesigners should own the quality of the output rather than rely on their agents to determine it.
Their wordsBut right now in this era, I think designers even more should really own what the quality of output is rather than relying on their agents to, to determine what the quality is.
↗Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopifyyoutube.com 7th of 13 in this recording
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Their wordsI think that that role is still maybe the most important role out there right now. Somebody who can truly bring the vision to life from a code perspective
↗Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopifyyoutube.com 11th of 13 in this recording
- 3 years earlier
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Their wordsI say all the time that the users never see the Figma files. Like, your design quality and your design capabilities of your team is only as good as the UI engineers that are implementing it.
↗Derek Briggs - Creating a design culture of craft (Dive Club Ep. 34)youtube.com 1st of 7 in this recording
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Their wordsYou might not be able to say what looks different, but you can see that it looks different. And I think the key factor is what makes a good designer a great designer is being able to tell you what the difference is.
↗Derek Briggs - Creating a design culture of craft (Dive Club Ep. 34)youtube.com 2nd of 7 in this recording
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Their wordsI think teams can invest too quickly in design systems, both in Figma and in code. There are a lot of early decisions that get made that are easy to either overthink or over-optimize. And the way that we have approached it is kind of designing for what we need at that time. Reusing that design or component a few times before codifying it, especially in code.
↗Derek Briggs - Creating a design culture of craft (Dive Club Ep. 34)youtube.com 3rd of 7 in this recording
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Their wordsIf you are a designer that is building web applications, learn a little bit of HTML, learn a bit, a little bit of CSS. If you are a mobile designer working on just iOS apps, write a little bit of Swift code, learn a little bit of Swift.
↗Derek Briggs - Creating a design culture of craft (Dive Club Ep. 34)youtube.com 7th of 7 in this recording