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.
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Each column is a stretch of time in which the same views came up; a new column starts when one appears or goes quiet. Quiet means nothing on it in our sources for that stretch, which is not the same as a change of mind; Dropped means they said they no longer hold it; tap the card for which claim and when. Revised means the view carries on but one of its claims was dropped. Each row is one view, in the same place all the way along. The number is how many claims in that stretch; we hold 7 in 2024, 0 in 2025, 13 in 2026.
Designers, not their agents, should own the quality of the work, and AI should make them better rather than busier
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.
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.
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.
Their wordsIt's really important to me that folks are not using AI to do 10 times more work. It's important to me that it's making them 10 times better.
Derek BriggsDesigner and developerI 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 · 3 Nov 2026 · 26:32 into the videoAll korrents from this video
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.
Their wordsI think companies are wasting their time if they're trying to hire tons of these people to be responsible for all these areas when you can very horizontally deploy them through Markdown files.
Their wordsBecause I am a big believer that, like, the most important piece of context that you have is your codebase. And if you just let it continue to evolve itself and sling things in there from various different models doing various different things, I think that you're going to get into a world of hurt eventually.
Their wordsAnd I think from a leadership perspective that there's just less and less leadership needed these days, being that with all of our LLMs and AI tooling that we have, there are so many answers to get instantly.
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.
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.
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
Their wordsI have a big issue with deadlines. Setting a deadline is going to either allow the person to stretch out that amount of work over that period of time or have to eventually de-scope the project to be able to meet that arbitrary deadline.
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.
Their wordsI just really don't want to build a new dashboard behind a feature flag and one day flip it over. I'd much rather give users that value now and those improvements now and deal with the inconsistencies
Their wordsI think people need to be ruthless around knowing and being confident that the solutions that they're designing and shipping are meeting the goals that they set out to achieve. If you're shipping something without any sort of data around its success, I don't understand how you'll be able to know if what you did was the right thing for the company or not.