Josh Brewer
Designer, founder, investor, advisor, and occasional startup therapist – Josh is a design technologist turned entrepreneur and investor. He is an active Advisor and angel investor, working with companies like Highnote.fm, RunwayML, Flow Engineering, Balsa, and more. He was the cofounder and CEO of Abstract, the Executive Chairman of Awesome.ai, founder of the incubator Habitat Technologies, and Principal Designer at Twitter from 2010-2013. As well as co-authoring 52weeksofux.com with Joshua Porter, Josh Brewer has been a vocal advocate for Design Leadership, speaking about the challenges of building Design-led companies and products at scale.
Talk: Photoshop lies! And other sobering truths about Product Design
Marshall McLuhan once said, "We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us." The tools we use to design digital experiences have a profound affect on our approach and our process. Photoshop (and tools like it) were originally used to make photos look better, more vibrant, and evoke an emotional response. Years later our tools have shaped us into midnight-oil burning pixel-tweakers, striving to produce a beautiful, static rendering that will ultimately be anything but static. Painfully, the most stunning comp is nothing more than a theory until you push real data through it.
Markup, presentation, and behavior are the foundational layers of digital design. Our tools have allowed us to play safely in the "presentation" layer for far too long. Designers need to learn code. Some need to learn the fundamentals of programming. And others still, would be wise to push the boundaries of what it means to express their designs in code.
This talk will dig into the sobering truths that come from working on products that millions of people use everyday and leave you embracing the fluidity of the medium we know and love.
