Marvin Schwaibold
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Episodes
Notes
Y Combinator · The New Full-Stack Designer
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Why Are Designers Becoming Full-stack?
Marvin Schwaibold says designers are becoming more full-stack, and he puts engineers and product managers on the same shift. The wind he had just pushed on a grass scene is the kind of fun project he says he could not have done before AI. He might have had the ideas, and he still was not allowed, or able, to execute them.
He calls this the change in the design role. The work runs in every direction, and there is no limitation now on who can carry an idea through.
Aaron Epstein follows with a pattern he sees on the prototypes: small widgets that control the variables, so the feel can be tested. Previously that was not worth anybody's time. A person might tweak values in code until they were
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Why Are Prototypes More Useful Than a Product Requirements Document?
Marvin Schwaibold says a working prototype is a million times more useful than any product requirements document, because it spreads through the company and a prototype someone likes gets built. Designers on his Shopify team still rebuild parts of the admin interface in Figma. AI then ports that layout into a tangible prototype extremely quickly. Ideas that used to stay in someone's head can be simulated with the tools they have now.
At Molly, the studio he ran before Shopify, the sheets were designed by hand and developers made the animations. Art direction could be his idea, and the work still meant a thousand counterparts. He now sees one-off armies, or teams of two, doing the work of ma
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What Is Blossom Carousel?
Marvin Schwaibold points founders to Blossom Carousel, a carousel kit Jasper Voss has been building. Blossom Carousel swipes and scrolls, comes in a multitude of variations, and stacks on mobile. The kit is free to use on GitHub.
A carousel on screen does not drag and does not swipe with the track pad. The whole carousel only works when someone interacts with the buttons, and button-only controls are the wrong way to build the component. Blossom Carousel is the kit already underway. The carousel swipes and scrolls, it comes in a multitude of different variations and versions, and it comes as stacks on mobile.
Founders and entrepreneurs watching the show can use it. Carousels get way better
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Why Is Smooth Scrolling Bad for Websites?
Marvin Schwaibold says smooth scrolling on websites is a disaster in the industry. Use native scroll and do not hinder the speed at which a user wants to interact with the content.
Apple has pioneered interruptible interfaces for decades, and the software and hardware are proof. Thought patterns are interruptible: someone might think one thing and click on something else. Putting a user where they have to smooth scroll or scroll jack through the content, because that is how a designer thinks they will perceive or digest it, is almost an arrogant way of going about it. He wants to stay as unobtrusive as possible and as polite as when entering a room. Dieter Rams would always say, enter polit
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Why Do Two Changing Headline Words Confuse Visitors?
Marvin Schwaibold says two placeholder elements changing at once inside a headline disorient a visitor. One changing phrase still gives an anchor, because a reader can follow the offer from one type of person to the next. Two elements moving together, the user and the docs or manuals, leave no fixed point, and the words never come across as a video.
He reads the message as people skipping documents and PDFs, with video as the way they pay attention. The headline should say the positive instead: they make videos that convert better.
A clip from the team's own studio, on the website where a visitor watches it first, would prove the point. People will not read the copy, so the work itself sho
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Why Put Important Content High on a Homepage?
Marvin Schwaibold puts important content at the top of a homepage because people drop off as they scroll. Each section of the homepage is the first chapter of the child pages, and each one should lead into the matching page.
When designing for clients, products, solutions, resources, and pricing became the four main parts of the homepage when the team treated them as the most important parts. The product features, the solutions, the resources, and the pricing then show up in exactly that order, from most important to least important, because of scroll depth. A whole product section belongs on the homepage, and from there a visitor can click into products. With so many products, products sho
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What Is a Website's One Primary Goal?
Marvin Schwaibold says a website should have one specific primary goal, the main thing a user should do on arrival, and the whole narrative should be built around that one thing. On Nstack, he is not sure what the primary goal is. The options he floats are get started or talk to the agent, yet buttons for general engineering, marketing, and get started share the same color, so nothing shows which one to focus on first. Plenty of other elements pull attention away from the main goal.
On Collins, the book stack was the heart of the website and the visual work the team wanted to show off. It was an easy way to navigate into the page, and visitors can spend a lot of time there because it is eas
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What Is the Design Tool Dialkit?
Marvin Schwaibold plugs Dialkit into a project so variables can be created and then tweaked in place. A prompt on the maker's website is what gets Dialkit into the work.
One version drives a carousel inspired by a design lead at Love From. Drag an artifact down and let go, and energy ripples out from the artifact and triggers a collision with the artifacts on the left and right. Pull-pull boost means a faster drag produces a stronger boost. The boost cannot feel too intimidating or too strong, or the whole system feels off. Going back and forth in chat does not settle the feel, so the values have to stay exposed. A side panel looks under the hood of a Frankenstein built with 91 prompts and
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How Does Figma Help Codex Build Motion?
Marvin Schwaibold uses Figma as a scratch pad so a broad sketch can carry motion he cannot put into words, then he gives the idea to Codex. He thinks Codex interprets the image the way he interpreted it. Codex understood what he was doing and how he was thinking about the motion.
On a side project over a weekend, he wanted a two by three overview of grass studies and videos he took. Opening any video and dragging down closes it, and the interaction works the same in the simulator. He described it to AI while working in Codex, and Codex built it, but the close was not interruptible. Every time he clicked an asset and pulled it down, he had to wait until the asset was all the way back in posi
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Does AI Know What Looks Good?
Marvin Schwaibold says AI does not know what looks good and what looks bad. He decides and steers it. AI has raised the ceiling, and it is not a crafter. It can execute complexity and write code he was not able to hand-write.
His own design process has not really changed. It is still extremely iterative and sequenced, with many variations. The tooling has shifted from Figma and aesthetic layouts into an AI-driven workflow. Figma stays a scratch pad for early ideas, then the work moves quickly into real demos he can test on a phone or computer. He goes back into Figma only to lay something out or explain something to AI. The day-to-day work now runs through Codex and the terminal, away from