I studied Art and Art History in college at a small liberal arts school. During my four years there, the art program encouraged a breadth of electives. My focus was Drawing and Painting, but took courses in sculpture, metal smithing, ceramics, photography, and computer art—the latter being an integral part of my career development. I found myself in the Computer Science building a lot—taking classes that seemed interesting to me. One of the courses was Flash, which became a key moment for my love for authoring tools and scripting. 

I planned to attend CCA to earn my Master of Fine Arts. Because of the cost and state of the market, I deferred a year and never pursued it. I took my digital artistic skills and started freelancing, primarily working on application software people were building for this platform called iOS. I never looked back, and since then have worked in software design.

A major lesson learned from art school was the importance of understanding the material you’re working with. For designers who work in tech, the medium is software, and code is the material. Whether it’s pouring bronze for a sculpture or Objective-C, design is understanding what the materials can do and pushing the bounds of it.

Designing for iOS was my core experience since the launch of the iPhone. As a freelancer, working at Black Pixel, and One Medical was going hard on native mobile experiences. When it was time for me to leave One Medical, I explored building a product; an iPad app that was a visual builder for Apple’s new SwiftUI framework. I did some early iterations of this concept, prototyped it in Xcode, but I ultimately joined Webflow.

Months later, a friend of mine shared Play, a product that let you build with native iOS components all on the phone. This was what I wanted to build, but better. I loved the product and team so much that I joined as an advisor earlier this year! In this issue, I’ll share why designing with software’s material is so important, how Play focuses on that paradigm, and how you can get started with their desktop app that just launched.

Designing with the material of software

Let’s be clear, drawing is an important part of the design process, and drawing tools are great. That said, there is an important discrepancy between sketching with vectors that at representational of software interfaces and using the interface primitives themselves. Drawing lacks the dynamism of how software behaves. Because of this, I’ve been a fan of sketching with code as a way to rough out functionality.

This allows me to not only see, but experience the UI flow and take note of edge cases and other key interaction decisions. This isn’t something only experienced designers should do. The sooner you start designing like this, you’ll accrue the knowledge year-over-year. The code barrier has been lowered through low-code tools and AI. I used the combination of the two early in my career with writing code or using a tool like Axure RP. When I studied art history, I learned that many of the great abstract artists were prolific in naturalistic painting. They knew what they wanted to remove, override, and subvert. This is true for software design as well. Knowing the material well isn’t a surrender to being stuck in an existing system. It’s about understanding the points where to push it.

A common language

One of the biggest friction points is when Design and Engineering have a different vocabulary of what they’re working on. What’s worse than a completely different vernacular is when it’s similar but slightly different. I’ve been in way too many conversations about if something is a modal or dialog. When the reference materials are identical, it makes the flow of work, communication, and collaboration more seamless.

A former coworker of mine at Black Pixel once said, “The number one way to be productive is to reduce the iteration cycle,” and I’ve taken this to heart everywhere I’ve worked.

Understanding feasibility and functionality

One of my favorite papers of all time is “What do Prototypes Prototype” by Stephanie Houde and Charles Hill. The paper by the two former Apple engineers covers the different uses of prototyping, referencing three core models: Role, Implementation, and Look and feel.

Feasibility and functionality is very much about Implementation. The primary responsibility of product design is to see work through from concept to production. Understanding the cost of your decisions and how to manufacture it is a key skill to have, and designing with software primitives and patterns can give you a real foundation to build from.

Benefits of using Play

Awareness of the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG)

Since Play uses UIKit and SwiftUI, you get the latest software patterns and best practices as you build. When I was at Webflow, I coined the term, “No-code, know code.” The spirit of it is as you use a tool, it teaches you the best practices along the way to level up your technical acumen. Play does this with the HIG and iOS design. In Play’s new macOS app, the team has combined a familiar, freeform canvas (like what we’re used to in tools like Figma) with the ability to design with Apple’s native iOS elements. These can be seemingly simple things like steppers and switches, all the way to things like maps, date pickers, charts and gauges…that are either very time consuming or just impossible to replicate in other design tools.

Making the hard things easy

One of the most nightmarish conversations as an iOS designer was the wretched UITabBarController. Everyone wanted to do a custom tab bar in the earlier days, and it was a pain in the ass to implement. Play makes this feel like table stakes to understand what is possible.

Play makes designing interactions a joy When trying to create a prototype for a mobile app using other tools that render the interactivity using web technology…it just doesn’t have that native feeling. Play uses Apple’s Core Animation and native gestures…so the interactions you design are rendered with the same technology as a finished mobile app. This makes things like buttery smooth pan gestures, scroll triggers, native sheets and modals, haptics, and access to the device hardware like the camera not only possible but super accessible. I also have seen their upcoming variables and conditions release…and it's going to be awesome!

Try Play

I am a proud advisor at Play and hope you give it a try! It’s the product I wish existed during my core days as a software designer. Linus Lee posted a German word. “Werkzeuggeschwindigkeitsfreude  𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘯.  The joy of using a tool that moves quickly and responsively enough to your thoughts that it doesn't break your creative flow.”¹ I think this perfectly describes Play and hope you give it a try.

Sign up for Play

Links to get started

• Play 101: https://community.createwithplay.com/c/play-101/

• How To Tutorials: https://community.createwithplay.com/c/how-tos/

• Video Tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/c/createwithplay

• For help: https://community.createwithplay.com/c/help/ or email support@createwithplay.com