Today I’m bringing you Tristan L’Abbé, a product designer and head of design at Glide. We talk about design tools, paradigms, the evolution of web & native, Tristan’s background in design & engineering, the role of constraint in creativity, the way your tools impact your work and thinking process, and a look at the process and craft of product design.
Please reach out on X if you have comments, questions or feedback. And as always, thanks for listening.
We talked about:
- Figma and its impact on the way it has changed Tristan's work and thought process
- How tools, particularly design tools, impact the way we design and think
- Spatial computing and the different paradigms for designers - web, native, mobile, desktop, and VR
- The evolution of designing apps for the web and the gap between designing native and web apps
- Tristan's entry into product design — balance of design and engineering in software development
- The role of constraints in creativity — not just from the design tool but also how you build constraint into a product to empower and guide a user
- Design aesthetics and building trust into a design system
- The process of product design and distilling everything down into what actually gets built
- Tristan's skillset and approach to his own development
- And much more.
I admire Tristan a lot, particularly his mindset. He’s very calm, humble and confident. Relaxed and impactful. I’m very grateful to have had this conversation and share it with you.