Season 1
|
Episode 3
The Framer story and AI's impact on design
Jorn van Dijk
CEO @ Framer
Apr 13, 2023
Apr 13, 2023
|
54 min
54 min
music by Dennis
About this Episode
In this episode, Jorn shares the full Framer story starting with his journey as an early designer at Facebook. He also provides insights into Framer’s 9-year overnight success story and a sneak peek of their plans moving forward. We also jam on the potential impact of AI on design—just wait until you hear Jorn's take on the future of design systems ✌️.
Deep Dives
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Fonz Morris
Lead monetization designer @ Netflix
Mia Blume
Past leader @ Pinterest, Square
Femke
Design lead @ Gusto
Kenny Chen
UX lead @ Google
Jorn van Dijk
CEO @ Framer
Join 6K+ designers
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Deep Dives
Get Season 1
10 episodes featuring:
Fonz Morris
Lead designer @ Netflix
Mia Blume
Past leader @ Pinterest, Square
Femke
Design lead @ Gusto
Kenny Chen
UX lead @ Google
Join 6K+ designers
HC
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Transcript chapters
Exiting his first company to FB
[00:00:00] Ridd: So I want to kind of start by going all the way to the beginning a little bit, because a lot of people, in fact, I would assume most people don't realize that your journey actually started by exiting your first company to Facebook. And so I'd love to hear a little bit more about your personal journey, like leading up to Framer and what that was like?
[00:00:23] Jorn: For sure, so me and my co-founder, Kun, we started working together in 2006 at a company called Sofa in 2006, long, long time ago, so no, iPhones in 2006. So it was about basically just a bunch of folks in a studio in Amsterdam trying to build Mac apps (that was our thing). And a few of those Mac apps led to Apple Design Awards, which was a huge deal for us. I was 20 something in 2006 but outside of a very small ecosystem of sort of Mac indie people, Mac, apple [00:01:00] design awards were not that cool.
[00:01:01] It, it's mostly for nerds that were really deep into playing with software. And in 2011 we got an email from Zuck at fb.com asking if we would be interested to come to Palo Alto and chat with them. So we got on the plane, went to Palo Alto, met with a team, and, they had very interesting proposition.
[00:01:24] They basically had a massively understaffed design team of five to 10 people and a giant engineering org of almost like 800. So Zuck and co., were basically trying to figure out like, how do we get as much, interface design or product design talent, at Facebook, in a short amount of time.
[00:01:44] So they acquired our company Sofa but in that year they acquired, Push Pop Press, a company from Mike Mattis, got Nicholas Felton a very good information architecture designer, there were other people, Rasmus Anderson, one of the earlier designers [00:02:00] at Spotify, Lee Byron. ..got Wilson Miner one of the earlier designers at Apple..if you, if you were my age, these names will tell you something.
If you're like minus a decade, then they're old people like me. It's previous generation of, product designers that were all concentrated at Facebook. It was a really cool time to be at. Facebook and what most, product designers at Facebook were doing at the time was prototyping.
[00:02:23] It was the easiest way to, to get an idea across, to this massive org because like remember let's say 20 to 40 designers and then all these engineers that needed some direction on the mobile apps on, I worked on, photos, which was an experience by itself, or, Kun worked on Messenger, which was a whole product by itself.
[00:02:46] And prototyping was just a really fast way to get an idea across that was better than a picture that was better than a bunch of markups.
Exiting his first company to FB
[00:00:00] Ridd: So I want to kind of start by going all the way to the beginning a little bit, because a lot of people, in fact, I would assume most people don't realize that your journey actually started by exiting your first company to Facebook. And so I'd love to hear a little bit more about your personal journey, like leading up to Framer and what that was like?
[00:00:23] Jorn: For sure, so me and my co-founder, Kun, we started working together in 2006 at a company called Sofa in 2006, long, long time ago, so no, iPhones in 2006. So it was about basically just a bunch of folks in a studio in Amsterdam trying to build Mac apps (that was our thing). And a few of those Mac apps led to Apple Design Awards, which was a huge deal for us. I was 20 something in 2006 but outside of a very small ecosystem of sort of Mac indie people, Mac, apple [00:01:00] design awards were not that cool.
[00:01:01] It, it's mostly for nerds that were really deep into playing with software. And in 2011 we got an email from Zuck at fb.com asking if we would be interested to come to Palo Alto and chat with them. So we got on the plane, went to Palo Alto, met with a team, and, they had very interesting proposition.
[00:01:24] They basically had a massively understaffed design team of five to 10 people and a giant engineering org of almost like 800. So Zuck and co., were basically trying to figure out like, how do we get as much, interface design or product design talent, at Facebook, in a short amount of time.
[00:01:44] So they acquired our company Sofa but in that year they acquired, Push Pop Press, a company from Mike Mattis, got Nicholas Felton a very good information architecture designer, there were other people, Rasmus Anderson, one of the earlier designers [00:02:00] at Spotify, Lee Byron. ..got Wilson Miner one of the earlier designers at Apple..if you, if you were my age, these names will tell you something.
If you're like minus a decade, then they're old people like me. It's previous generation of, product designers that were all concentrated at Facebook. It was a really cool time to be at. Facebook and what most, product designers at Facebook were doing at the time was prototyping.
[00:02:23] It was the easiest way to, to get an idea across, to this massive org because like remember let's say 20 to 40 designers and then all these engineers that needed some direction on the mobile apps on, I worked on, photos, which was an experience by itself, or, Kun worked on Messenger, which was a whole product by itself.
[00:02:46] And prototyping was just a really fast way to get an idea across that was better than a picture that was better than a bunch of markups.
Starting Framer
[00:02:54] Jorn: And so after Facebook, Kun and I left end of 2013, [00:03:00] because we knew we wanna do another startup and we knew, we're gonna need to take some time to figure out like, what's a problem that Kun and I wanna work on for a long time?
[00:03:09] And this is like some startup advice that I have for other founders. If you're serious about a startup, then you need to find something that you wanna work on for 10 to 20 years at least to have a shot at making it a really big success. So we ended up, picking sort of like design tools, design tooling and prototyping as a problem to work on.
[00:03:31] And we build a very small MVP for framer around that in like three or four months. And honestly, we put it out on the internet. We started selling it for $40, with a lifetime license, which is a mistake. Should not sell software with a lifetime license. I now know. And from there very quickly it became pretty popular.
Like there was a product designers at companies that were similar to Facebook that had a use for software like this. So folks at Dropbox started using it. People at
[00:04:00] Twitter started using it. People at Microsoft started using it at Amazon, like all these bigger tech companies where there was a similar division between product designers having to figure out product direction and product engineers having to implement, those, prototypes. And so we had a really good first two years, there was, like two releases from in the prototyping era.
The, the first one we now referred to as Framer Classic, and then was another release called Framer X.
[00:04:24] And then was another release called Framer web, which was bringing framer to the web
Starting Framer
[00:02:54] Jorn: And so after Facebook, Kun and I left end of 2013, [00:03:00] because we knew we wanna do another startup and we knew, we're gonna need to take some time to figure out like, what's a problem that Kun and I wanna work on for a long time?
[00:03:09] And this is like some startup advice that I have for other founders. If you're serious about a startup, then you need to find something that you wanna work on for 10 to 20 years at least to have a shot at making it a really big success. So we ended up, picking sort of like design tools, design tooling and prototyping as a problem to work on.
[00:03:31] And we build a very small MVP for framer around that in like three or four months. And honestly, we put it out on the internet. We started selling it for $40, with a lifetime license, which is a mistake. Should not sell software with a lifetime license. I now know. And from there very quickly it became pretty popular.
Like there was a product designers at companies that were similar to Facebook that had a use for software like this. So folks at Dropbox started using it. People at
[00:04:00] Twitter started using it. People at Microsoft started using it at Amazon, like all these bigger tech companies where there was a similar division between product designers having to figure out product direction and product engineers having to implement, those, prototypes. And so we had a really good first two years, there was, like two releases from in the prototyping era.
The, the first one we now referred to as Framer Classic, and then was another release called Framer X.
[00:04:24] And then was another release called Framer web, which was bringing framer to the web
A shift in how designers prototype
[00:04:29] Jorn: and to now sort of like explain the pivot into, into websites. What was happening I think was, you know, prototyping is, is optional for a lot of designers, it's like, it's part, it can be part of your work, but it's not necessarily like integral to 99% of product designers out there.
[00:04:49] And so if I ask you, Ridd, do you prototype?
[00:04:53] Ridd: And the answer is, Yes, but not as much as I used to. And not only that, but it's the tooling has kind of
[00:05:00] changed too because there was a period in my career where I was frequently putting things into proto pie or principle, and now more and more of that gets swallowed into Figma, which is in many ways great. It allows me to stay a little bit more focused.
There's less transition work that I'm doing. But, the fidelity definitely has decreased as a result.
[00:05:23] Jorn: Yeah, and I don't really know why that is, to be honest, because with Framer early on, we bet it on high fidelity that that is going to be the most important thing to deliver for product designers.
[00:05:34] The closer you can get to, you know, what the end result will look like, that will be the best for getting your work across. But the opposite was true. Like I think we underestimated speed to get an idea across is, is way more important than the highest fidelity it seems. Right? Maybe, yeah. High Fidelity makes a return in two years, like skeumorphism is doing right now.
[00:05:59] I don't really
[00:06:00] know, like maybe that happens and people realize like, oh, maybe there is something there. But for now it seems that what Figma did very smartly is they implemented, you know, the most popular prototyping features from Invision, and they have a few of the animation, prototyping functionality from products like, framer or like a Protopie. And that seems to be good enough.
It's like most designers can tell a good story with those features. And so that is what sort of started happening two years ago. And Kun and I, had to figure out like, okay, so we wanna build a company in this space that, is gonna impact a lot of people that is gonna be very successful. What do we do now? Right?
Like prototyping, it was good, it was a good business, but wasn't a startup and we wanted to build something that was, explosive and prototyping was definitely not getting us there.
A shift in how designers prototype
[00:04:29] Jorn: and to now sort of like explain the pivot into, into websites. What was happening I think was, you know, prototyping is, is optional for a lot of designers, it's like, it's part, it can be part of your work, but it's not necessarily like integral to 99% of product designers out there.
[00:04:49] And so if I ask you, Ridd, do you prototype?
[00:04:53] Ridd: And the answer is, Yes, but not as much as I used to. And not only that, but it's the tooling has kind of
[00:05:00] changed too because there was a period in my career where I was frequently putting things into proto pie or principle, and now more and more of that gets swallowed into Figma, which is in many ways great. It allows me to stay a little bit more focused.
There's less transition work that I'm doing. But, the fidelity definitely has decreased as a result.
[00:05:23] Jorn: Yeah, and I don't really know why that is, to be honest, because with Framer early on, we bet it on high fidelity that that is going to be the most important thing to deliver for product designers.
[00:05:34] The closer you can get to, you know, what the end result will look like, that will be the best for getting your work across. But the opposite was true. Like I think we underestimated speed to get an idea across is, is way more important than the highest fidelity it seems. Right? Maybe, yeah. High Fidelity makes a return in two years, like skeumorphism is doing right now.
[00:05:59] I don't really
[00:06:00] know, like maybe that happens and people realize like, oh, maybe there is something there. But for now it seems that what Figma did very smartly is they implemented, you know, the most popular prototyping features from Invision, and they have a few of the animation, prototyping functionality from products like, framer or like a Protopie. And that seems to be good enough.
It's like most designers can tell a good story with those features. And so that is what sort of started happening two years ago. And Kun and I, had to figure out like, okay, so we wanna build a company in this space that, is gonna impact a lot of people that is gonna be very successful. What do we do now? Right?
Like prototyping, it was good, it was a good business, but wasn't a startup and we wanted to build something that was, explosive and prototyping was definitely not getting us there.
Framer's pivot to web
[00:06:49] Jorn: So from here the story's more about how did we figure out how to pivot to web?
[00:06:54] And I think there were like a few indicators that in hindsight always sound very [00:07:00] obvious. In the moment, itself, it is extremely messy and hard to figure out. But after the fact, uh, in five years, I'll write a blog post that this was all part of a plan, but it that this is never true, right?
[00:07:10] Everybody that says it's part of a plan, it's only in hindsight. So the first, insight was, it was actually a surprising amount of people prototyping websites. Sounds very obvious, that was a piece of the puzzle. Like, all right, people are already prototyping websites. Could we make them real?
[00:07:27] The second part was that we internally were always dissatisfied at some level with a really great prototype. Because you would have to throw it away, right? You make a prototype, you throw it away, make another one. And it's, it felt like there's something here, right? But we didn't really know where to start.
[00:07:45] Was it web apps? Was it native apps? Was it websites? It seemed too simple to start with websites maybe. you Need a big, big problem that you can actually solve for a large enough group of people to build a startup around, right? And
[00:08:00] that, as everybody says this, but it's really hard to find a really big problem that many people have. But we found one, and the one that we found was, if you park framer for a second and what people were ma building in our, our product, the way that people make websites, And I could probably ask you this as well.
[00:08:19] How did you make a website a year ago?
[00:08:22] Ridd: I would design it in Figma and then basically redo all of it in Webflow.
[00:08:27] Jorn: Exactly. And that is not efficient, right? It's just a massive inefficiency. You need to spend all this time drawing a picture of a website in Figma, which is great. But now you have a set of pictures and what you want is a real website.
[00:08:40] So now you need to rebuild the thing and basically learn two tools, right? As a designer, you might be comfortable in Figma, but not so comfortable in Webflow. So now there's a learning curve that you have to overcome to make your website real. And so the more we spoke to designers, the more we uncovered, like, but everybody has accepted that this is
[00:09:00] fine. While everybody hates this process, right? Everyone's like, I don't like how this works. And sure, I love Figma and, and Webflow. But it is kind of like a waste of time. And so we thought we had a pretty good shot at solving that. Also because most of our tech is built on web technologies, the rendering engine, the canvas is written in React.
[00:09:21] If you publish, we publish those react components. So it made a lot of sense from a technical point of view as well. So all of those things combined were good indicators. And again, like after the fact, right? Like this is more like we uncovered some of those things in, let's say a span of maybe three to four months.
[00:09:40] Just like trying to put the puzzle pieces together. Then we had to figure out how to, to navigate the pivot, because we did have an existing customer base that was all in on prototyping that we sort of like successfully had to help transition into. Now they're building websites with the products.
[00:09:57] You can still prototype really well with framer. There's no real [00:10:00] lost functionality there, but we are all about making websites now. And so navigating that was, was not that easy.
[00:10:07] Ridd: Was sites on the map of possibilities at all when you raised, a series B?
[00:10:14] Jorn: No. No. So we raised our series B in 2018. And in 2018 things for framer with prototyping were doing phenomenal. the VC that invested us Atomico that did not make a mistake, our growth was real, the acceleration was real. And six to nine months later it started to like, uh, do that. So instead of, instead of this and going up, it went, it went sort of like up and, and then it sort of like flatlined and then from there, having to draw conclusions from that is hard because you know, you never really know if you've tried everything that you can to get it to work. Like maybe it's a trend, but maybe you can reverse a
[00:11:00] trend you don't really know. Right. yeah. It's surprising to me how hard that it still is to figure out, like, now that everything with Framer is working, it's also hard to articulate why is it working in such a big way? It's like, well, you know, we build a product that people like.
[00:11:15] It's like, yes, that's one component. Getting ideas out on the internet seems to be a theme that is playing in our favor. Going really fast and figuring things out seems to be a bit in our favor. People can make money off a framer, but there's like a variety of reasons that hopefully in a year I'll be able to articulate in a really great way.
[00:11:35] For now, that's still kind of messy. It's like you can look at the data and the numbers go up. Okay, great, your company's working because the numbers go up. it's hard to pinpoint that in the moment itself, if that makes sense.
Framer's pivot to web
[00:06:49] Jorn: So from here the story's more about how did we figure out how to pivot to web?
[00:06:54] And I think there were like a few indicators that in hindsight always sound very [00:07:00] obvious. In the moment, itself, it is extremely messy and hard to figure out. But after the fact, uh, in five years, I'll write a blog post that this was all part of a plan, but it that this is never true, right?
[00:07:10] Everybody that says it's part of a plan, it's only in hindsight. So the first, insight was, it was actually a surprising amount of people prototyping websites. Sounds very obvious, that was a piece of the puzzle. Like, all right, people are already prototyping websites. Could we make them real?
[00:07:27] The second part was that we internally were always dissatisfied at some level with a really great prototype. Because you would have to throw it away, right? You make a prototype, you throw it away, make another one. And it's, it felt like there's something here, right? But we didn't really know where to start.
[00:07:45] Was it web apps? Was it native apps? Was it websites? It seemed too simple to start with websites maybe. you Need a big, big problem that you can actually solve for a large enough group of people to build a startup around, right? And
[00:08:00] that, as everybody says this, but it's really hard to find a really big problem that many people have. But we found one, and the one that we found was, if you park framer for a second and what people were ma building in our, our product, the way that people make websites, And I could probably ask you this as well.
[00:08:19] How did you make a website a year ago?
[00:08:22] Ridd: I would design it in Figma and then basically redo all of it in Webflow.
[00:08:27] Jorn: Exactly. And that is not efficient, right? It's just a massive inefficiency. You need to spend all this time drawing a picture of a website in Figma, which is great. But now you have a set of pictures and what you want is a real website.
[00:08:40] So now you need to rebuild the thing and basically learn two tools, right? As a designer, you might be comfortable in Figma, but not so comfortable in Webflow. So now there's a learning curve that you have to overcome to make your website real. And so the more we spoke to designers, the more we uncovered, like, but everybody has accepted that this is
[00:09:00] fine. While everybody hates this process, right? Everyone's like, I don't like how this works. And sure, I love Figma and, and Webflow. But it is kind of like a waste of time. And so we thought we had a pretty good shot at solving that. Also because most of our tech is built on web technologies, the rendering engine, the canvas is written in React.
[00:09:21] If you publish, we publish those react components. So it made a lot of sense from a technical point of view as well. So all of those things combined were good indicators. And again, like after the fact, right? Like this is more like we uncovered some of those things in, let's say a span of maybe three to four months.
[00:09:40] Just like trying to put the puzzle pieces together. Then we had to figure out how to, to navigate the pivot, because we did have an existing customer base that was all in on prototyping that we sort of like successfully had to help transition into. Now they're building websites with the products.
[00:09:57] You can still prototype really well with framer. There's no real [00:10:00] lost functionality there, but we are all about making websites now. And so navigating that was, was not that easy.
[00:10:07] Ridd: Was sites on the map of possibilities at all when you raised, a series B?
[00:10:14] Jorn: No. No. So we raised our series B in 2018. And in 2018 things for framer with prototyping were doing phenomenal. the VC that invested us Atomico that did not make a mistake, our growth was real, the acceleration was real. And six to nine months later it started to like, uh, do that. So instead of, instead of this and going up, it went, it went sort of like up and, and then it sort of like flatlined and then from there, having to draw conclusions from that is hard because you know, you never really know if you've tried everything that you can to get it to work. Like maybe it's a trend, but maybe you can reverse a
[00:11:00] trend you don't really know. Right. yeah. It's surprising to me how hard that it still is to figure out, like, now that everything with Framer is working, it's also hard to articulate why is it working in such a big way? It's like, well, you know, we build a product that people like.
[00:11:15] It's like, yes, that's one component. Getting ideas out on the internet seems to be a theme that is playing in our favor. Going really fast and figuring things out seems to be a bit in our favor. People can make money off a framer, but there's like a variety of reasons that hopefully in a year I'll be able to articulate in a really great way.
[00:11:35] For now, that's still kind of messy. It's like you can look at the data and the numbers go up. Okay, great, your company's working because the numbers go up. it's hard to pinpoint that in the moment itself, if that makes sense.
Post-launch success
[00:11:47] Ridd: Was there a moment where you knew that the pivot was a success, though? Can you trace back this feeling the security, of just knowing like, wow, it worked.
[00:11:55] Jorn: So we launched last May. And, uh, I think the reception was
[00:12:00] overwhelmingly positive. And a lot of people were very excited to go play with it from there on out so the company's really good at shipping software, because it's a small team that has been working together for quite some time.
[00:12:11] So after the initial release, we got back into so what are we building next to build this product into everything that our customers wanted to be because it didn't have a few things in May that it now has.
So, you know, getting the product, release cycle, that is a big component of, our success.
[00:12:30] Just people being very engaged with the products, asking for things, and then also getting them in a reasonable amount of time. It's the, the bigger companies get, the harder it is to actually do that, but we're very, we're very small and lean company, so if enough people point at a feature, then we're gonna build it.
[00:12:47] It's pretty simple. So that was, that's a big part of like getting the company to success. And there were a few other ingredients. At some point we're just trying to figure out like, okay, how do we get the word out about framer? And, you know,
[00:13:00] you get the word out by getting other people to talk about the product.
[00:13:03] So sort of like problem solving. How do you get other people to talk about the product? You can ask them. It's one thing can ask you, Ridd, like, Hey, do you wanna tweet about framer? You'll say Yes one time. After one time. Typically it's like, yeah, I'm not gonna shop it around for free. So we came up with a program to incentivize people to go and do that.
The partner program where we share a bit of revenue, if you go to framer.com/partners, you can read all about it. I think that has been a big driver of, of getting the word out on the internet that you can design and, and publish beautiful websites, with Framer.
I think like the nature of the product is, is pretty different. Websites aren't really optional and websites are pretty key to almost everyone on the internet. Everyone on the internet that is trying to make a living has a website in some shape or form. And I think a lot of folks, you know, regardless of the Figma and Webflow workflow, If you put that [00:14:00] aside, there's so many other different ways to make a website that all seem pretty complicated.
[00:14:06] It's not not easy to make a website in 2023 that is fast and performant and loads globally, and it is great for seo. Like you need to learn a lot about a lot of topics before you can make a great website. And so, I do think that, our product market fit is the fact that all of those things are solved in one product.
[00:14:26] You learn how to draw a website, click published, we take care of the rest, which is a very appealing proposition for freelancers, for agencies, for marketing teams, for startups, for scale up. We're now closing our first enterprises that have a need for a lot of micro landing pages. So there's like a huge range of potential customers on the internet.
[00:14:49] Ridd: The value proposition is clear to me. I remember the moment where I was even sitting in this chair thinking about, man, what am I gonna do for the dive website? What
[00:15:00] is it gonna look like? I think there's gonna be this big cms, and I could identify some of the limitations, you know, four or five months ago with framer. Cause we were still super early in the life cycle of framer sites. And yet still the value proposition was so clear that I was like, you know what? I'm gonna make the jump even though I would consider myself a webflow expert. It just makes sense to do it that way. And so I made the decision without even really having used the product.
[00:15:24] I'd seen a little bit about it on Twitter and, and how positive the initial reception was from people. But from a, just a pure value proposition standpoint, it, it really does make so much sense that I shouldn't be drawing a picture of this website and then throwing it away.
[00:15:40] Jorn: There Was an interesting moment you know, at the end of the year, so end of December, Uh, typically, like, you know, everybody goes on holiday, people on the internet go on a holiday, you know, you have Christmas break and, and with prototyping, we always saw our, our usage numbers drop off a cliff, right?
Because everybody stops working. So no one is prototyping something for
[00:16:00] fun December the 28th. But in January, you came back and our numbers are through the roof, so we're like, what, what, what's going on? We're like, what's happening?
[00:16:09] Turns out that there's a lot of people that wanna make a website in their spare time. And so we saw like big usage increase in the time where previously we saw like a big, big drop of the cliff.
Yeah,it's been, it's been really exciting. I think, you know, now if, if you look at the, the growth and the acceleration of the company where it's getting into, like, overdrive, the last four months we've doubled revenue from the launch until, I don't know, like November.
So it is definitely now picking up steam, which is, uh, which is awesome.
Post-launch success
[00:11:47] Ridd: Was there a moment where you knew that the pivot was a success, though? Can you trace back this feeling the security, of just knowing like, wow, it worked.
[00:11:55] Jorn: So we launched last May. And, uh, I think the reception was
[00:12:00] overwhelmingly positive. And a lot of people were very excited to go play with it from there on out so the company's really good at shipping software, because it's a small team that has been working together for quite some time.
[00:12:11] So after the initial release, we got back into so what are we building next to build this product into everything that our customers wanted to be because it didn't have a few things in May that it now has.
So, you know, getting the product, release cycle, that is a big component of, our success.
[00:12:30] Just people being very engaged with the products, asking for things, and then also getting them in a reasonable amount of time. It's the, the bigger companies get, the harder it is to actually do that, but we're very, we're very small and lean company, so if enough people point at a feature, then we're gonna build it.
[00:12:47] It's pretty simple. So that was, that's a big part of like getting the company to success. And there were a few other ingredients. At some point we're just trying to figure out like, okay, how do we get the word out about framer? And, you know,
[00:13:00] you get the word out by getting other people to talk about the product.
[00:13:03] So sort of like problem solving. How do you get other people to talk about the product? You can ask them. It's one thing can ask you, Ridd, like, Hey, do you wanna tweet about framer? You'll say Yes one time. After one time. Typically it's like, yeah, I'm not gonna shop it around for free. So we came up with a program to incentivize people to go and do that.
The partner program where we share a bit of revenue, if you go to framer.com/partners, you can read all about it. I think that has been a big driver of, of getting the word out on the internet that you can design and, and publish beautiful websites, with Framer.
I think like the nature of the product is, is pretty different. Websites aren't really optional and websites are pretty key to almost everyone on the internet. Everyone on the internet that is trying to make a living has a website in some shape or form. And I think a lot of folks, you know, regardless of the Figma and Webflow workflow, If you put that [00:14:00] aside, there's so many other different ways to make a website that all seem pretty complicated.
[00:14:06] It's not not easy to make a website in 2023 that is fast and performant and loads globally, and it is great for seo. Like you need to learn a lot about a lot of topics before you can make a great website. And so, I do think that, our product market fit is the fact that all of those things are solved in one product.
[00:14:26] You learn how to draw a website, click published, we take care of the rest, which is a very appealing proposition for freelancers, for agencies, for marketing teams, for startups, for scale up. We're now closing our first enterprises that have a need for a lot of micro landing pages. So there's like a huge range of potential customers on the internet.
[00:14:49] Ridd: The value proposition is clear to me. I remember the moment where I was even sitting in this chair thinking about, man, what am I gonna do for the dive website? What
[00:15:00] is it gonna look like? I think there's gonna be this big cms, and I could identify some of the limitations, you know, four or five months ago with framer. Cause we were still super early in the life cycle of framer sites. And yet still the value proposition was so clear that I was like, you know what? I'm gonna make the jump even though I would consider myself a webflow expert. It just makes sense to do it that way. And so I made the decision without even really having used the product.
[00:15:24] I'd seen a little bit about it on Twitter and, and how positive the initial reception was from people. But from a, just a pure value proposition standpoint, it, it really does make so much sense that I shouldn't be drawing a picture of this website and then throwing it away.
[00:15:40] Jorn: There Was an interesting moment you know, at the end of the year, so end of December, Uh, typically, like, you know, everybody goes on holiday, people on the internet go on a holiday, you know, you have Christmas break and, and with prototyping, we always saw our, our usage numbers drop off a cliff, right?
Because everybody stops working. So no one is prototyping something for
[00:16:00] fun December the 28th. But in January, you came back and our numbers are through the roof, so we're like, what, what, what's going on? We're like, what's happening?
[00:16:09] Turns out that there's a lot of people that wanna make a website in their spare time. And so we saw like big usage increase in the time where previously we saw like a big, big drop of the cliff.
Yeah,it's been, it's been really exciting. I think, you know, now if, if you look at the, the growth and the acceleration of the company where it's getting into, like, overdrive, the last four months we've doubled revenue from the launch until, I don't know, like November.
So it is definitely now picking up steam, which is, uh, which is awesome.
How Framer builds product
[00:16:39] Ridd: That's, that's so cool. Congrats. It's interesting too, it's like, obviously you can tell from the outside that the business is working, but I think. I speak for all of the, the design community on Twitter where I, I think people are really just enamored at the speed and quality that you are shipping as well. And you mentioned the small team size, but can you share a little bit more [00:17:00] about how Framer builds product, how you operate as a team, how decisions get made?
[00:17:05] Because I think a lot of people are very impressed from just the output that you put out the last six months.
[00:17:11] Jorn: Yeah, for sure. I think we build a really good core group of folks, over the years, which is not easy, and put a lot of focus on, I mean, we've shipped in public maybe, maybe a little bit too much. There's two ways you can approach shipping. And on one end there's a company maybe like, um, I don't know maybe Figma, Figma I think worked for, what was it, like, three or four years in, in stealth? Yeah. On, on the Figma launch. Right. To get everything right. We kind of like ship everything and then like try to see how to improve the product from there.
[00:17:46] So it's maybe more organic or built in public, which isn't always easy because you can always miss and then now you're failing in public a little bit. Um, but yeah, we put a lot of emphasis on shipping fast [00:18:00] and our product team, let's see, is, yeah, product team is around 25.
[00:18:04] Um, we have 1, 2, 3, 3 product teams, uh, working on the ga. Like one, one is working on the canvas, one's working on delivery, one's, working on, uh billing. And yeah, getting good community input on what to focus on next is a big part of what makes us effective and then there's always like a back and forth, like, what can we build in a short amount of time that will solve this problem?
[00:18:33] And being very cautious of, you know, making projects. Just a four month project is like, that requires a ridiculous amount of planning and looking ahead which is risky, right? So you can have a vision about the future and, and tell a story around it. Our future plants tend to be more like 30, 60, 90 days.
[00:18:56] You know, you can do a lot in 60 days [00:19:00] with three people if you go in a certain mode and sort of like immediately start to, okay, what are we building? What can we do here that is meaningful for the end user? How can we execute something? How can we prototype fast? How can we execute fast? How do we keep, um, Sort of like the nice to have set a minimum.
[00:19:20] Um, and I think, you know, there, there's, there's a lot of learnings between Kun me, but also from, you know, building products for, for 15, 20 years that are now ingrained in the, also in the company culture. There's no silver bullet I think for, for answering that question where you can say, oh, you know, you ship fast because, and now there's a great answer.
[00:19:40] It's more like, bigger companies tend to ship slower because there's many people involved and a lot of it is driven, a lot of decision making is driven by process. We both have sort of like a cultural thing around shipping fast, but also we're very small we're a 45 people company. We're not 500, we're not a thousand.
[00:19:59] [00:20:00] So comparing our shipping speeds to much larger companies is, I don't feel bad for large companies, but it's unfair to the large company, right? Like a smaller team will always be able to move much faster than a bigger team.
How Framer builds product
[00:16:39] Ridd: That's, that's so cool. Congrats. It's interesting too, it's like, obviously you can tell from the outside that the business is working, but I think. I speak for all of the, the design community on Twitter where I, I think people are really just enamored at the speed and quality that you are shipping as well. And you mentioned the small team size, but can you share a little bit more [00:17:00] about how Framer builds product, how you operate as a team, how decisions get made?
[00:17:05] Because I think a lot of people are very impressed from just the output that you put out the last six months.
[00:17:11] Jorn: Yeah, for sure. I think we build a really good core group of folks, over the years, which is not easy, and put a lot of focus on, I mean, we've shipped in public maybe, maybe a little bit too much. There's two ways you can approach shipping. And on one end there's a company maybe like, um, I don't know maybe Figma, Figma I think worked for, what was it, like, three or four years in, in stealth? Yeah. On, on the Figma launch. Right. To get everything right. We kind of like ship everything and then like try to see how to improve the product from there.
[00:17:46] So it's maybe more organic or built in public, which isn't always easy because you can always miss and then now you're failing in public a little bit. Um, but yeah, we put a lot of emphasis on shipping fast [00:18:00] and our product team, let's see, is, yeah, product team is around 25.
[00:18:04] Um, we have 1, 2, 3, 3 product teams, uh, working on the ga. Like one, one is working on the canvas, one's working on delivery, one's, working on, uh billing. And yeah, getting good community input on what to focus on next is a big part of what makes us effective and then there's always like a back and forth, like, what can we build in a short amount of time that will solve this problem?
[00:18:33] And being very cautious of, you know, making projects. Just a four month project is like, that requires a ridiculous amount of planning and looking ahead which is risky, right? So you can have a vision about the future and, and tell a story around it. Our future plants tend to be more like 30, 60, 90 days.
[00:18:56] You know, you can do a lot in 60 days [00:19:00] with three people if you go in a certain mode and sort of like immediately start to, okay, what are we building? What can we do here that is meaningful for the end user? How can we execute something? How can we prototype fast? How can we execute fast? How do we keep, um, Sort of like the nice to have set a minimum.
[00:19:20] Um, and I think, you know, there, there's, there's a lot of learnings between Kun me, but also from, you know, building products for, for 15, 20 years that are now ingrained in the, also in the company culture. There's no silver bullet I think for, for answering that question where you can say, oh, you know, you ship fast because, and now there's a great answer.
[00:19:40] It's more like, bigger companies tend to ship slower because there's many people involved and a lot of it is driven, a lot of decision making is driven by process. We both have sort of like a cultural thing around shipping fast, but also we're very small we're a 45 people company. We're not 500, we're not a thousand.
[00:19:59] [00:20:00] So comparing our shipping speeds to much larger companies is, I don't feel bad for large companies, but it's unfair to the large company, right? Like a smaller team will always be able to move much faster than a bigger team.
Framer's plans for AI
[00:20:11] Framer's plans for AI
[00:20:11] Ridd: You mentioned this idea of shipping in public, and one of my favorite things that, that you all do is you kind of tease some of the upcoming features that you're working on, whether it is you know, light mode, dark mode, or most recently we've seen some of the AI icons floating around.
[00:20:30] Jorn: Yes.
[00:20:30] Ridd: And some, some funny, funny memes here and there. So I'm wondering if you can give us a little glimpse into what you all are cooking up behind the scenes and kind of what the plan is for this year.
[00:20:40] Jorn: For sure. Yeah. I'm happy to share everything with you. I can't really show you what it is yet, but, uh, I think you can imagine a little bit.
[00:20:47] It's not, it's not rocket science, but you know, I think we're all pretty excited about how AI can, there's like two things that I see in AI right now. Like one is like very flashy demos of something magically [00:21:00] happen. And then the other is like, oh, there's actually like real practical use here to speed up people's workflows.
[00:21:08] And I think, you know, chat G P T, what a wonderful, what a what an amazing product, right? To this just enabling our team, our entire company, me to write better copy to get better answers out of the internet. To like, it's helping in really practical ways, mid journey or dolly are phenomenal.
[00:21:28] I'm having so much fun, just like playing with what can AI, how, how can it be helpful? I'm getting a lot of ideas by just playing with AI. And so when we started looking at you know how can we integrate some of those tools into Framer? I think there's a few areas that are pretty straightforward.
[00:21:49] You know, for generating different texts, for generating different imagery, you know, we can offer that in the ui. We can, you know, we control the canvas on which people draw a website. [00:22:00] So if they're writing some texts, there can be a button that says, give me five variations, make it more fun, make it less strict... that type of functionality that will be sort of like in every product there will be a commodity, um, sort of implementation for every product that that works with text from. Probably Grammarly is working on something like that you see it everywhere. Right?
[00:22:20] And so I don't think that is by itself that powerful or useful... not what I think will really unlock something for people working with Framer Daily. So the thing that we're working on that we're pretty close to launching is a way to generate an entire webpage.
[00:22:36] And today putting a webpage together in framer is not at hard because if you use our sections, you can very quickly compose a page with a few different sections. So let's say you have a header section, you have some feature cards, you have maybe a quote, from someone that says, I love dive.club. And then you have a footer, right? Like typical landing page.
[00:23:00] What those sections lack is customization. Now you need to go in and you need to customize every part of those sections. So you need to customize the text, all the imagery and the style. And so we're putting an AI together that's based on the prompt that does all that work for you in less than a minute? So you give it sort of like a good input, "I'm making a page for Ridd at dive club legendary product designer and design education enthusiast".
And you hit enter now the AI is going to take that prompt and pick from the sections that we have in the product, which is like close to a hundred.
[00:23:36] So it can pick really relevant sections based on your prompt, and then it's gonna fill out initial passes of the copy and the images and also the style. And so really exciting. And I think empowering a lot of people to come up with something to riff off on.
That's what, to me is really exciting. Like the AI is not gonna put most people out of a job it's gonna
[00:24:00] create a really great tailored starting point for you, but to make it yours or to add something extra to it needs a human to amplify that…I'm excited for it.
[00:24:10] I think, you know, it's gonna speed up people getting an idea out. It's gonna speed up validating ideas. It's going to enable a lot more people to play with framer, which I'm always excited about. What I really like is that even if you are the best framer designer in the world today, which you can be, Then you're not gonna out, out outperform the AI and drawing a website like the AI is just gonna do it in 60 seconds.
[00:24:39] And the best designers from some of the pages that I've now seen, it will still take like 30 to 60 minutes to draw everything from hat. And now you've done the same sort of like grunt work as the AI, but it just took you an hour. Why why is it taking you an hour? That time can be a minute and now you have starting points to get going.
[00:24:57] So those are sort of like the [00:25:00] features that we're actively working on. Then the stuff that comes after that I think is also really interesting. So we're working on localization, which a pretty hard problem to solve well because it has to do with you know, you want to have a dive.club/em, for English language es for Spanish.
[00:25:19] Maybe you want to reroute some of the URLs. Maybe you want like ideally want auto translations. So we're working on that feature, makes a lot of sense to potentially have AI once we have that feature to add AI on top.
So now you can like automatically translate pages um, working on search as a feature, s o very simple way to add search functionality to your website, makes a lot of sense to offer AI functionality in search as well. Right? Yeah, it's amazing that we're working towards a version where search just works, but what if AI can actually compile better answers than the things that you have on your website?
[00:25:57] Pretty amazing.
[00:25:58] Ridd: Yeah. That's very exciting,
Jorn: [00:26:00] right? It's pretty dope. So there's so many cool areas where because everything is unified in the framer experience, we control where you draw the website and we control where you publish it. Now we get you drag a search box onto the, or a search component onto your website and then we can enhance all of those things with AI.
So I think we have a work cut out for ourselves for this year. There's a lot of like exciting stuff to explore image generations, is another, like really big one and styles no one's working on this but I think it'd be amazing if you can talk to the AI and describe what type of style you want on the page. Same for images.
I see a lot of sites where a designer, it's very easy for you to pick four pictures that go well together but what if you could say, "Hey, I actually want this in a different style", and it gives you options for the entire page.
[00:26:49] So you don't have to go to Unsplash, you don't have to select all the pictures yourself. You don't have to make your own pictures. You can just describe this is the sort of style that I'm after. Let's say you're making a site for your wedding or
[00:27:00] something. Right now, you can tell AI, I am getting married on an island. Great. Render some cool pictures of the island, render some pictures of the ceremony with the sun going down and have that all being rendered in one style, I think would be huge. Right? It is amazing for, for people to just be creative and play around with until you land on something that you, that you think is, is cool for what you're trying to do.
[00:27:23] Ridd: It's amazing. There's so many things that you just said that are quite exciting to me. I'm trying to focus on this interview and not have my brain just run off on a tangent of all the things I could do with a AI enabled search that's available directly on the canvas. I think one of the things, and we're..
[00:27:37] Jorn: This is future stuff, right? I'm just spitballing some ideas that we've had internally. I'm sharing with you.
[00:27:42] Ridd: You heard it here first late June, AI Empowered Search.
[00:27:49] I'm starting to get really excited about just the amount of time that I'm gonna be able to save as a designer, even just sourcing inspiration. All that happens externally right [00:28:00] now. I put so much work into categorizing different visual inspiration in Notion so that when I'm ready to approach a blank canvas, I can kind of spark a lot of those creative juices and realizing that in the future, and maybe not the so distant future, I'm just gonna be able to do a lot of that initial ideation directly on the canvas and not have to redraw something that I like, but actually use it, like you said, like as a starting point.
[00:28:28] The future feels very bright and, and I'm definitely excited about a lot of that.
[00:28:33] Jorn: Yeah. Likewise. I think AI is as a category is maybe very clear to me that there are a couple of companies that are gonna do extremely well because they're like AI companies, right? Open AI, mid journey uh, there's like, what's the new video AI thing? I haven't
[00:28:48] Ridd: runway
[00:28:48] Jorn: worked with it yet. Yeah, runway, right? Like all of the, there's gonna be an AI version of like all the media types I think. There's one where audio or voice saw something about like, you know, you can now [00:29:00] rap in Kanye's West voice last week.
[00:29:02] Ridd: Yeah, I watched that video.
[00:29:03] Jorn: You see that?
[00:29:04] Ridd: Yeah. Oh yeah.
[00:29:04] Jorn: It's cool. Right?
[00:29:05] Ridd: Yeah, it's very cool.
[00:29:06] Jorn: So there, there's gonna be companies that are only going to be focused on AI. I think for all the normal companies, there's just massive opportunity to incorporate AI into the workflow. Has to make sense for your company, I think for our company makes a lot of sense.
[00:29:21] Ridd: Outside of just the Framer canvas and the different things that you think will be possible because of AI, what are some of the ways that you see AI impacting the broader design industry?
[00:29:33] Jorn: Yeah, good question. I think AI is going to be able to do a lot of the sort of like getting started. The getting an idea on a canvas. Let's compare it to like mid journey, right? So mid journey can create any picture that I want, but maybe it's not exactly what I want. So if I want exactly what I want, mm, kind of need to work with someone but if I'm looking for a, [00:30:00] you know a generic use case, cool picture now I can get that outta mid journey, which is amazing.
[00:30:07] So I think a job of, a designer might be more about connecting the right sort of tools, but always be driving outputs towards a solution for a problem that you're trying to solve. And some of the design work that we have been doing as a community and over the last few years, like, maybe drawing wire frames, yeah, I think that is something that AI is going to do an okay job at, like the execution of the first 80%, but then validating that the wire frames are goods, maybe adding something to it and removing some other things and then actually testing it on humans. It is still is a lot of work that AI can't do.
[00:30:45] Right. So I'm excited for it because I think it will speed up like manual work. And it will help people drive real results a little bit faster. You know, first 10 years of my career was all about [00:31:00] drawing interfaces and, and icons and I was drawing an icon the other day in Figma, for Discords because I didn't like their app icon.
[00:31:08] I'm like, I'm gonna fire up Figma, like draw, a replacement icon. And while I'm doing it in the background, I also have mid journey rendering pictures for me. I'm like looking at these two workflows. I go like, well, I don't like this Discord icon. I can't ask Mid Journey to render it because it's not gonna give me something that fits in my dock.
[00:31:26] It's not gonna be what I want. Right? I want it to be aesthetically pleasing, right? Border radius. But you can see these workflows being, so one is ridiculously manual. It takes like half an hour to set up and get an IC and s file out of Figma and a plugin. And like, I manually have to like set everything and the property panel's a lot.
[00:31:46] It's a lot of work. . And then the other one's like utter magic where you punch in two words and it spits out a picture at like two, 2000 by 2000. But they still have a place in the world today. Like both of them I see
[00:32:00] have a place in the world today and maybe in a year or maybe in two years or three years.
[00:32:05] I don't know. AI is so good that you can tell, it render me a discord replacement I icon or build a better discord and it will spit out a better discord. But I, I don't think so.
[00:32:16] Ridd: Yeah. The ladder is where it starts to get very scary to imagine.
[00:32:20] Jorn: But I'm not deep enough into AI to predict what that's, actually going to look like.
[00:32:25] Ridd: Yeah. It's interesting to think about, like you, you described AI assistance already becoming close to a commodity in so many of the tools that I use, it's in threads, it's in notion, it's in reflect, it's everywhere. And yeah, thinking about how that impacts UX design even.
And a lot of the problems and opportunities that we're gonna be working on are gonna be helping users to better interact with AI, which opens up so many different possibilities and what that looks like and just how
[00:33:00] big something like a saved prompt becomes as like a core use case in the product that we're designing. And I don't know what that's gonna look like either, but it definitely feels like we are in the very, very first inning right now.
[00:33:14] Jorn: For sure. Yeah. I'm excited for the sort of the explorations we're seeing around like the UI paradigms for many of these tools because it's so interesting that the one that is the most popular is a chat interface, right?
[00:33:29] Yeah. You're just chatting with chat G P T, you're chatting with Mid Journey or you're giving it a prompt. I don't know if you, do you know Raycast
[00:33:36] Ridd: I use it every day.
[00:33:37] Jorn: Oh yeah. Okay. So me too. They have like, interesting beta around ai, because they can interact with everything on the operating system.
[00:33:44] So you select a piece of text, you pull up Raycast, it's sort of like an integrated, but it's also a chat-based interface. For framer we're exploring a way to guide users to give us more information around the [00:34:00] original prompt. So, you know the prompt that we just came up with is, something for you Ridd and, uh, genius product designer, blah, blah, blah.
[00:34:07] But it doesn't typically include the style and it doesn't really typically include also what type of page. The same is true for mid journey. For mid journey. You have to learn how to write the prompt with commas and different topics, different lighting, different resolutions, different styles. Um, if you get good at prompting, now you get good outputs and I'm excited for d UI explorations because there's gonna be some UX work that, that someone is doing that is gonna make it less, learn the prompts to get something from the machine, more operates, you know, this UI and now you're getting really great results.
[00:34:48] And I don't know what those things will look like yet, but that to me is always, that's pretty interesting to, to, to witness, um, new, new way of, of interacting with, uh, machines. [00:35:00] What would you say to a designer who's maybe one to two years in their career and they see all of these AI advancements and.
[00:35:09] Ridd: Maybe they're a little bit intimidated by the rate of technological process,
[00:35:15] Jorn: yeah, it's, it's a good question. Pretty good advice. I think early on is, is follow what you, what interesting to you? And I wouldn't be too worried about, you know, trends in the market. I think later, it starts to be more about like, can you, can you, can you solve problems? Right. Can you, can you produce something, that is driving value to other people?
[00:35:37] I started framing when I was 30, so it's like 10 years ago. And as a founder that is most of my job is to, to figure out, you know, everything that we spoke about today. It's like, how do you figure out product market fit? How do you sell a product? How do you build features that customers want?
[00:35:53] I bring a design background to solving those problems, and that is something that product designers can be good at [00:36:00] but that is a journey. I work in a field that I picked, that I build a career in, and that a lot of that passion is driving the, the resistance to like not give up and like continue to do it.
[00:36:11] So, Yeah, that'd be probably my number one advice is pick an area that you really like. If you, if you can work on, I, someone famous probably said this, I don't know who, I can't quote it, but like, if you can pick a, you know, problem that you really like, you, it's never really gonna feel like work. Right? Yeah.
[00:36:33] And that to me still feels true. I work pretty hard, I would say, but it never really feels like work cause it's something that I'm really excited about. And then like, very practical for, for most people getting started, it's like tr try to get good at something and that means like you gotta put in hours to, to get good.
[00:36:53] So my advice would be, all right, so if you wanna be in, in web design, make a lot of websites, remake websites [00:37:00] from other people would be like, if you're really starting out. All right, you li you love apple.com. Build, rebuild it, build build apple.com in framer, build apple.com from scratch.
[00:37:09] You still win. If you, I, I don't, it doesn't matter, but try to rebuild something that you think, like, that's, that's what I want to learn. That's what I want to become good at. That'd be like a very practical piece of advice that, um, uh, that I would, yeah, that, that gave me something. I started redrawing other people's icons when I was 20.
[00:37:30] Um, just a practice, like, how is this lighting working? How are they doing? How are they doing? Shadows? I didn't get it. Like, how do you get shadows out of a computer? I did not understand, like, how do you get inner shadow? How do you get this gradient? Like, I, I could only see like the picture and then not figure out like, but I, I don't know how to make this.
[00:37:48] And so by going online, talking to people, oh, it's Photoshop. Oh, it's this trick. Oh, it's that, like, that, that is a way to learn, right? Learn by doing. [00:38:00]
[00:38:00] You talked a little bit about the shift in the industry from very high fidelity prototyping, where that all of a sudden became less of a desired skill and maybe, uh, employers and different companies were placing value in different parts of the design's skill set.
[00:38:17] Do you see a similar shift happening with this like post AI era when you think about the, the skills that a designer brings to the table and, and how they can set these targets to make sure that they're really valuable five years from now in their career? I'm wondering if you have any insider predictions for that.
[00:38:37] My prediction would be that AI's really going to speed up the initial creation. Which I think is very helpful for most people. I think it's going to, , enable a lot more people to get an idea out, but it's not necessarily going to create, let's say, companies magically right?
[00:38:59] For [00:39:00] that. You still need people that can solve problems, that can figure out how to package your products, how to make a good product that works well together. There's so many areas that need to be connected to, to work and become valuable. , and maybe AI replaces all of it in the next five years but I really don't know, what do you think?
Framer's plans for AI
[00:20:11] Framer's plans for AI
[00:20:11] Ridd: You mentioned this idea of shipping in public, and one of my favorite things that, that you all do is you kind of tease some of the upcoming features that you're working on, whether it is you know, light mode, dark mode, or most recently we've seen some of the AI icons floating around.
[00:20:30] Jorn: Yes.
[00:20:30] Ridd: And some, some funny, funny memes here and there. So I'm wondering if you can give us a little glimpse into what you all are cooking up behind the scenes and kind of what the plan is for this year.
[00:20:40] Jorn: For sure. Yeah. I'm happy to share everything with you. I can't really show you what it is yet, but, uh, I think you can imagine a little bit.
[00:20:47] It's not, it's not rocket science, but you know, I think we're all pretty excited about how AI can, there's like two things that I see in AI right now. Like one is like very flashy demos of something magically [00:21:00] happen. And then the other is like, oh, there's actually like real practical use here to speed up people's workflows.
[00:21:08] And I think, you know, chat G P T, what a wonderful, what a what an amazing product, right? To this just enabling our team, our entire company, me to write better copy to get better answers out of the internet. To like, it's helping in really practical ways, mid journey or dolly are phenomenal.
[00:21:28] I'm having so much fun, just like playing with what can AI, how, how can it be helpful? I'm getting a lot of ideas by just playing with AI. And so when we started looking at you know how can we integrate some of those tools into Framer? I think there's a few areas that are pretty straightforward.
[00:21:49] You know, for generating different texts, for generating different imagery, you know, we can offer that in the ui. We can, you know, we control the canvas on which people draw a website. [00:22:00] So if they're writing some texts, there can be a button that says, give me five variations, make it more fun, make it less strict... that type of functionality that will be sort of like in every product there will be a commodity, um, sort of implementation for every product that that works with text from. Probably Grammarly is working on something like that you see it everywhere. Right?
[00:22:20] And so I don't think that is by itself that powerful or useful... not what I think will really unlock something for people working with Framer Daily. So the thing that we're working on that we're pretty close to launching is a way to generate an entire webpage.
[00:22:36] And today putting a webpage together in framer is not at hard because if you use our sections, you can very quickly compose a page with a few different sections. So let's say you have a header section, you have some feature cards, you have maybe a quote, from someone that says, I love dive.club. And then you have a footer, right? Like typical landing page.
[00:23:00] What those sections lack is customization. Now you need to go in and you need to customize every part of those sections. So you need to customize the text, all the imagery and the style. And so we're putting an AI together that's based on the prompt that does all that work for you in less than a minute? So you give it sort of like a good input, "I'm making a page for Ridd at dive club legendary product designer and design education enthusiast".
And you hit enter now the AI is going to take that prompt and pick from the sections that we have in the product, which is like close to a hundred.
[00:23:36] So it can pick really relevant sections based on your prompt, and then it's gonna fill out initial passes of the copy and the images and also the style. And so really exciting. And I think empowering a lot of people to come up with something to riff off on.
That's what, to me is really exciting. Like the AI is not gonna put most people out of a job it's gonna
[00:24:00] create a really great tailored starting point for you, but to make it yours or to add something extra to it needs a human to amplify that…I'm excited for it.
[00:24:10] I think, you know, it's gonna speed up people getting an idea out. It's gonna speed up validating ideas. It's going to enable a lot more people to play with framer, which I'm always excited about. What I really like is that even if you are the best framer designer in the world today, which you can be, Then you're not gonna out, out outperform the AI and drawing a website like the AI is just gonna do it in 60 seconds.
[00:24:39] And the best designers from some of the pages that I've now seen, it will still take like 30 to 60 minutes to draw everything from hat. And now you've done the same sort of like grunt work as the AI, but it just took you an hour. Why why is it taking you an hour? That time can be a minute and now you have starting points to get going.
[00:24:57] So those are sort of like the [00:25:00] features that we're actively working on. Then the stuff that comes after that I think is also really interesting. So we're working on localization, which a pretty hard problem to solve well because it has to do with you know, you want to have a dive.club/em, for English language es for Spanish.
[00:25:19] Maybe you want to reroute some of the URLs. Maybe you want like ideally want auto translations. So we're working on that feature, makes a lot of sense to potentially have AI once we have that feature to add AI on top.
So now you can like automatically translate pages um, working on search as a feature, s o very simple way to add search functionality to your website, makes a lot of sense to offer AI functionality in search as well. Right? Yeah, it's amazing that we're working towards a version where search just works, but what if AI can actually compile better answers than the things that you have on your website?
[00:25:57] Pretty amazing.
[00:25:58] Ridd: Yeah. That's very exciting,
Jorn: [00:26:00] right? It's pretty dope. So there's so many cool areas where because everything is unified in the framer experience, we control where you draw the website and we control where you publish it. Now we get you drag a search box onto the, or a search component onto your website and then we can enhance all of those things with AI.
So I think we have a work cut out for ourselves for this year. There's a lot of like exciting stuff to explore image generations, is another, like really big one and styles no one's working on this but I think it'd be amazing if you can talk to the AI and describe what type of style you want on the page. Same for images.
I see a lot of sites where a designer, it's very easy for you to pick four pictures that go well together but what if you could say, "Hey, I actually want this in a different style", and it gives you options for the entire page.
[00:26:49] So you don't have to go to Unsplash, you don't have to select all the pictures yourself. You don't have to make your own pictures. You can just describe this is the sort of style that I'm after. Let's say you're making a site for your wedding or
[00:27:00] something. Right now, you can tell AI, I am getting married on an island. Great. Render some cool pictures of the island, render some pictures of the ceremony with the sun going down and have that all being rendered in one style, I think would be huge. Right? It is amazing for, for people to just be creative and play around with until you land on something that you, that you think is, is cool for what you're trying to do.
[00:27:23] Ridd: It's amazing. There's so many things that you just said that are quite exciting to me. I'm trying to focus on this interview and not have my brain just run off on a tangent of all the things I could do with a AI enabled search that's available directly on the canvas. I think one of the things, and we're..
[00:27:37] Jorn: This is future stuff, right? I'm just spitballing some ideas that we've had internally. I'm sharing with you.
[00:27:42] Ridd: You heard it here first late June, AI Empowered Search.
[00:27:49] I'm starting to get really excited about just the amount of time that I'm gonna be able to save as a designer, even just sourcing inspiration. All that happens externally right [00:28:00] now. I put so much work into categorizing different visual inspiration in Notion so that when I'm ready to approach a blank canvas, I can kind of spark a lot of those creative juices and realizing that in the future, and maybe not the so distant future, I'm just gonna be able to do a lot of that initial ideation directly on the canvas and not have to redraw something that I like, but actually use it, like you said, like as a starting point.
[00:28:28] The future feels very bright and, and I'm definitely excited about a lot of that.
[00:28:33] Jorn: Yeah. Likewise. I think AI is as a category is maybe very clear to me that there are a couple of companies that are gonna do extremely well because they're like AI companies, right? Open AI, mid journey uh, there's like, what's the new video AI thing? I haven't
[00:28:48] Ridd: runway
[00:28:48] Jorn: worked with it yet. Yeah, runway, right? Like all of the, there's gonna be an AI version of like all the media types I think. There's one where audio or voice saw something about like, you know, you can now [00:29:00] rap in Kanye's West voice last week.
[00:29:02] Ridd: Yeah, I watched that video.
[00:29:03] Jorn: You see that?
[00:29:04] Ridd: Yeah. Oh yeah.
[00:29:04] Jorn: It's cool. Right?
[00:29:05] Ridd: Yeah, it's very cool.
[00:29:06] Jorn: So there, there's gonna be companies that are only going to be focused on AI. I think for all the normal companies, there's just massive opportunity to incorporate AI into the workflow. Has to make sense for your company, I think for our company makes a lot of sense.
[00:29:21] Ridd: Outside of just the Framer canvas and the different things that you think will be possible because of AI, what are some of the ways that you see AI impacting the broader design industry?
[00:29:33] Jorn: Yeah, good question. I think AI is going to be able to do a lot of the sort of like getting started. The getting an idea on a canvas. Let's compare it to like mid journey, right? So mid journey can create any picture that I want, but maybe it's not exactly what I want. So if I want exactly what I want, mm, kind of need to work with someone but if I'm looking for a, [00:30:00] you know a generic use case, cool picture now I can get that outta mid journey, which is amazing.
[00:30:07] So I think a job of, a designer might be more about connecting the right sort of tools, but always be driving outputs towards a solution for a problem that you're trying to solve. And some of the design work that we have been doing as a community and over the last few years, like, maybe drawing wire frames, yeah, I think that is something that AI is going to do an okay job at, like the execution of the first 80%, but then validating that the wire frames are goods, maybe adding something to it and removing some other things and then actually testing it on humans. It is still is a lot of work that AI can't do.
[00:30:45] Right. So I'm excited for it because I think it will speed up like manual work. And it will help people drive real results a little bit faster. You know, first 10 years of my career was all about [00:31:00] drawing interfaces and, and icons and I was drawing an icon the other day in Figma, for Discords because I didn't like their app icon.
[00:31:08] I'm like, I'm gonna fire up Figma, like draw, a replacement icon. And while I'm doing it in the background, I also have mid journey rendering pictures for me. I'm like looking at these two workflows. I go like, well, I don't like this Discord icon. I can't ask Mid Journey to render it because it's not gonna give me something that fits in my dock.
[00:31:26] It's not gonna be what I want. Right? I want it to be aesthetically pleasing, right? Border radius. But you can see these workflows being, so one is ridiculously manual. It takes like half an hour to set up and get an IC and s file out of Figma and a plugin. And like, I manually have to like set everything and the property panel's a lot.
[00:31:46] It's a lot of work. . And then the other one's like utter magic where you punch in two words and it spits out a picture at like two, 2000 by 2000. But they still have a place in the world today. Like both of them I see
[00:32:00] have a place in the world today and maybe in a year or maybe in two years or three years.
[00:32:05] I don't know. AI is so good that you can tell, it render me a discord replacement I icon or build a better discord and it will spit out a better discord. But I, I don't think so.
[00:32:16] Ridd: Yeah. The ladder is where it starts to get very scary to imagine.
[00:32:20] Jorn: But I'm not deep enough into AI to predict what that's, actually going to look like.
[00:32:25] Ridd: Yeah. It's interesting to think about, like you, you described AI assistance already becoming close to a commodity in so many of the tools that I use, it's in threads, it's in notion, it's in reflect, it's everywhere. And yeah, thinking about how that impacts UX design even.
And a lot of the problems and opportunities that we're gonna be working on are gonna be helping users to better interact with AI, which opens up so many different possibilities and what that looks like and just how
[00:33:00] big something like a saved prompt becomes as like a core use case in the product that we're designing. And I don't know what that's gonna look like either, but it definitely feels like we are in the very, very first inning right now.
[00:33:14] Jorn: For sure. Yeah. I'm excited for the sort of the explorations we're seeing around like the UI paradigms for many of these tools because it's so interesting that the one that is the most popular is a chat interface, right?
[00:33:29] Yeah. You're just chatting with chat G P T, you're chatting with Mid Journey or you're giving it a prompt. I don't know if you, do you know Raycast
[00:33:36] Ridd: I use it every day.
[00:33:37] Jorn: Oh yeah. Okay. So me too. They have like, interesting beta around ai, because they can interact with everything on the operating system.
[00:33:44] So you select a piece of text, you pull up Raycast, it's sort of like an integrated, but it's also a chat-based interface. For framer we're exploring a way to guide users to give us more information around the [00:34:00] original prompt. So, you know the prompt that we just came up with is, something for you Ridd and, uh, genius product designer, blah, blah, blah.
[00:34:07] But it doesn't typically include the style and it doesn't really typically include also what type of page. The same is true for mid journey. For mid journey. You have to learn how to write the prompt with commas and different topics, different lighting, different resolutions, different styles. Um, if you get good at prompting, now you get good outputs and I'm excited for d UI explorations because there's gonna be some UX work that, that someone is doing that is gonna make it less, learn the prompts to get something from the machine, more operates, you know, this UI and now you're getting really great results.
[00:34:48] And I don't know what those things will look like yet, but that to me is always, that's pretty interesting to, to, to witness, um, new, new way of, of interacting with, uh, machines. [00:35:00] What would you say to a designer who's maybe one to two years in their career and they see all of these AI advancements and.
[00:35:09] Ridd: Maybe they're a little bit intimidated by the rate of technological process,
[00:35:15] Jorn: yeah, it's, it's a good question. Pretty good advice. I think early on is, is follow what you, what interesting to you? And I wouldn't be too worried about, you know, trends in the market. I think later, it starts to be more about like, can you, can you, can you solve problems? Right. Can you, can you produce something, that is driving value to other people?
[00:35:37] I started framing when I was 30, so it's like 10 years ago. And as a founder that is most of my job is to, to figure out, you know, everything that we spoke about today. It's like, how do you figure out product market fit? How do you sell a product? How do you build features that customers want?
[00:35:53] I bring a design background to solving those problems, and that is something that product designers can be good at [00:36:00] but that is a journey. I work in a field that I picked, that I build a career in, and that a lot of that passion is driving the, the resistance to like not give up and like continue to do it.
[00:36:11] So, Yeah, that'd be probably my number one advice is pick an area that you really like. If you, if you can work on, I, someone famous probably said this, I don't know who, I can't quote it, but like, if you can pick a, you know, problem that you really like, you, it's never really gonna feel like work. Right? Yeah.
[00:36:33] And that to me still feels true. I work pretty hard, I would say, but it never really feels like work cause it's something that I'm really excited about. And then like, very practical for, for most people getting started, it's like tr try to get good at something and that means like you gotta put in hours to, to get good.
[00:36:53] So my advice would be, all right, so if you wanna be in, in web design, make a lot of websites, remake websites [00:37:00] from other people would be like, if you're really starting out. All right, you li you love apple.com. Build, rebuild it, build build apple.com in framer, build apple.com from scratch.
[00:37:09] You still win. If you, I, I don't, it doesn't matter, but try to rebuild something that you think, like, that's, that's what I want to learn. That's what I want to become good at. That'd be like a very practical piece of advice that, um, uh, that I would, yeah, that, that gave me something. I started redrawing other people's icons when I was 20.
[00:37:30] Um, just a practice, like, how is this lighting working? How are they doing? How are they doing? Shadows? I didn't get it. Like, how do you get shadows out of a computer? I did not understand, like, how do you get inner shadow? How do you get this gradient? Like, I, I could only see like the picture and then not figure out like, but I, I don't know how to make this.
[00:37:48] And so by going online, talking to people, oh, it's Photoshop. Oh, it's this trick. Oh, it's that, like, that, that is a way to learn, right? Learn by doing. [00:38:00]
[00:38:00] You talked a little bit about the shift in the industry from very high fidelity prototyping, where that all of a sudden became less of a desired skill and maybe, uh, employers and different companies were placing value in different parts of the design's skill set.
[00:38:17] Do you see a similar shift happening with this like post AI era when you think about the, the skills that a designer brings to the table and, and how they can set these targets to make sure that they're really valuable five years from now in their career? I'm wondering if you have any insider predictions for that.
[00:38:37] My prediction would be that AI's really going to speed up the initial creation. Which I think is very helpful for most people. I think it's going to, , enable a lot more people to get an idea out, but it's not necessarily going to create, let's say, companies magically right?
[00:38:59] For [00:39:00] that. You still need people that can solve problems, that can figure out how to package your products, how to make a good product that works well together. There's so many areas that need to be connected to, to work and become valuable. , and maybe AI replaces all of it in the next five years but I really don't know, what do you think?
The future career path of product designers
[00:39:22] Ridd: I guess I wonder if designers are gonna have to become more generalists. And broaden skillsets a little bit, whether that is becoming a little bit closer to production output. I think that having a, a technically savvy mindset and being able to work very, very, very closely with engineers and potentially soon even contribute directly to production code like we're obviously doing with framer and websites.
[00:39:48] I can see that kind of a jump happening more in traditional like products and maybe even mobile apps in the future. Um, and if you're not gonna go in that direction, maybe it's, Hey, we're, I'm gonna [00:40:00] invest a lot into strengthening my product strategy muscles and being able to contribute a little bit more to maybe what would be traditionally like a PM's role.
[00:40:11] Any, maybe even the design and PM would converge a little bit because all of a sudden that 80 20, you know, you could spit out an 80 20 version of a website. Well, a PM is just as qualified to do that as a designer. And so where do those lines. Where are they drawn? Like where, where is things feel like they start to blur a little bit?
[00:40:31] Jorn: Yeah,
[00:40:31] Ridd: it's interesting.
[00:40:32] Jorn: I don't know if I subscribe to the sort of like the isolated designer to, to begin with. I think it's maybe a mistake to, to only draw, you know, pictures of, of things that you want. I think like the best designers are also kind of like hackers that can at least like connect some tooling together to get a result that they want., like honestly, like design has never, it's always been about like it's problem solving.
[00:40:58] Can you, [00:41:00] can you come up with a solution and implement a solution that solves a problem for yourself, for your audience, for the company that you work with? I have a lot of exposure to sort of like product design and the product design community maybe less so on the very visual and, and brand, side of like design where it's maybe more so only about producing aesthetically pleasing, assets. I think for product designers focus on figuring real problems out, focus on driving real results for the business. That is a very hard thing to do, but that is a skill that I think will be useful for a very long time.
[00:41:40] Being able to drive a real solution for company is always going to be a valuable thing.
[00:41:48] Ridd: Solving problems kind of feels like the defensible moat against AI for a lot of designers.
[00:41:54] But I think you could argue that problem solving is a little bit more absent in [00:42:00] website design. And so I'm wondering if Framer gets really, really good and all of a sudden those 80 20 generated websites are like kind of crushing it.
[00:42:11] Do you see the potential where a lot of business owners would start to become okay with that 80 20 solution, and maybe they would, they would not hire that additional human iteration?
[00:42:22] Jorn: No, I'm not so worried about that. My personal mission and, and Kun's mission, a company's mission is to make the web more creative. I like weird stuff on the internet. I think like a, a more weird looking, Internet's actually going to help, , set companies and people apart.
[00:42:38] I actually think, like if all sites start to look the same that is bad for everyone. Like, okay, so now all of them follow the same rules because the AI dictated it. So we're all gonna behave the same on those websites. I think thinking outside the box, coming up with something unique that can be rendered in a browser, b[00:43:00] rowser's just a, a window right, in which you can, you can do whatever in a browser. That's like two things we internally just talk about is, is the browser is so incredibly powerful, but it's so hard for most people to leverage everything that the browser can do, right?
[00:43:16] You just said day and night mode. It's like, oh, it's cool that you released that! Day and night mode is not the most complicated c s s prop to set up, but to set it up to Google why it's not working in Firefox, to go over to Stack Overflow and copy paste some random answer. It will take you if everything around your website is set up and you have set nothing up for a supporting night modes, it can take you up from let's say an hour to maybe a full day of like, now you need to copy over all the CSS codes from Figma and like Right.
[00:43:56] This is is a ridiculous amount of time.
[00:43:58] Ridd: Now you gotta worry about Microsoft Edge too. [00:44:00]
[00:44:00] Jorn: Exactly. Exactly.
[00:44:01] Ridd: It's bad.
[00:44:01] Jorn: And so what we're excited about is like, okay, that's obviously functionality that a lot of people want on their websites. How do we make a solution for that in Framer where now it's just like a couple of clicks and you have a website that supports that.
[00:44:14] There's so much cool technology in the browser today that we can unlock by offering a solution in the product where now a lot of people have access to this functionality.
[00:44:24] And so I think that's like easily a year of work, maybe two years of work to keep the product, both simple, but leverage everything the browser can do, on the canvas.
[00:44:36] And so surely, yeah, there's a lot of websites that look the same and maybe AI can generate, let's say 80% of those types of websites in the future. I think we're gonna, continue and see if we can put features in the product that make it easier for people to differentiate themselves...with their web presence, with their company, with [00:45:00] their business, with their startup. On the web that is, you know, not the same SaaS startup model of like a NAF and a H1, uh, paragraph
[00:45:10] Ridd: three feature cards,
[00:45:11] Jorn: three feature cards. There's a place for that. There's a reason why those things are so popular because they work, right?
[00:45:16] Ridd: Yep.
[00:45:16] Jorn: But there are also formats that have been invented over the last couple of years, and now they're very effective, but there's new formats that can be invented and there's new technology that can be unlocked.
[00:45:26] I'm very excited about building those things into the platform and just get people more creative, more sort of like playing with what they wanna build on the internet.
[00:45:38] Ridd: Yeah, it's something that I think about is like different design trends that happen. Obviously the big ones, you have flat and more textured skeumorphism and things like that, but I'm really. Bullish on framer's ability to accelerate some of those design trends just based off of this remix culture that is really coming to life over the [00:46:00] last, like eight months since you've released this, where you can see an idea happen and then it just is in four other places and then 20 other places.
[00:46:09] And now there's, there's a whole other generation of the different derivatives and just seeing how quickly really, really compelling visual ideas spread because of framer is another reason why I'm really excited for the web
[00:46:23] Jorn: me as well. Yeah, remixing is awesome. It's, uh, it's just like you described.
[00:46:28] It's, you know, it's a lot of community I think is, is such a big part of what makes Framer, fun to play with and experiment with. , if you have not joined our community, go to framer.community and join the fun. And remixing is a really powerful way to, experiment with something, and share with others and see where they take it.
[00:46:48] You can remix everything. You can remix like an entire project. You can remix a piece of code, you can remix some visuals or something aesthetic. It's just a fun way to sort of like collaborate [00:47:00] in a, in a non-linear way. It's like you collaborate with or other people start to build on your work without me, you know, teaming up directly with you Ridd to, to make something.
The future career path of product designers
[00:39:22] Ridd: I guess I wonder if designers are gonna have to become more generalists. And broaden skillsets a little bit, whether that is becoming a little bit closer to production output. I think that having a, a technically savvy mindset and being able to work very, very, very closely with engineers and potentially soon even contribute directly to production code like we're obviously doing with framer and websites.
[00:39:48] I can see that kind of a jump happening more in traditional like products and maybe even mobile apps in the future. Um, and if you're not gonna go in that direction, maybe it's, Hey, we're, I'm gonna [00:40:00] invest a lot into strengthening my product strategy muscles and being able to contribute a little bit more to maybe what would be traditionally like a PM's role.
[00:40:11] Any, maybe even the design and PM would converge a little bit because all of a sudden that 80 20, you know, you could spit out an 80 20 version of a website. Well, a PM is just as qualified to do that as a designer. And so where do those lines. Where are they drawn? Like where, where is things feel like they start to blur a little bit?
[00:40:31] Jorn: Yeah,
[00:40:31] Ridd: it's interesting.
[00:40:32] Jorn: I don't know if I subscribe to the sort of like the isolated designer to, to begin with. I think it's maybe a mistake to, to only draw, you know, pictures of, of things that you want. I think like the best designers are also kind of like hackers that can at least like connect some tooling together to get a result that they want., like honestly, like design has never, it's always been about like it's problem solving.
[00:40:58] Can you, [00:41:00] can you come up with a solution and implement a solution that solves a problem for yourself, for your audience, for the company that you work with? I have a lot of exposure to sort of like product design and the product design community maybe less so on the very visual and, and brand, side of like design where it's maybe more so only about producing aesthetically pleasing, assets. I think for product designers focus on figuring real problems out, focus on driving real results for the business. That is a very hard thing to do, but that is a skill that I think will be useful for a very long time.
[00:41:40] Being able to drive a real solution for company is always going to be a valuable thing.
[00:41:48] Ridd: Solving problems kind of feels like the defensible moat against AI for a lot of designers.
[00:41:54] But I think you could argue that problem solving is a little bit more absent in [00:42:00] website design. And so I'm wondering if Framer gets really, really good and all of a sudden those 80 20 generated websites are like kind of crushing it.
[00:42:11] Do you see the potential where a lot of business owners would start to become okay with that 80 20 solution, and maybe they would, they would not hire that additional human iteration?
[00:42:22] Jorn: No, I'm not so worried about that. My personal mission and, and Kun's mission, a company's mission is to make the web more creative. I like weird stuff on the internet. I think like a, a more weird looking, Internet's actually going to help, , set companies and people apart.
[00:42:38] I actually think, like if all sites start to look the same that is bad for everyone. Like, okay, so now all of them follow the same rules because the AI dictated it. So we're all gonna behave the same on those websites. I think thinking outside the box, coming up with something unique that can be rendered in a browser, b[00:43:00] rowser's just a, a window right, in which you can, you can do whatever in a browser. That's like two things we internally just talk about is, is the browser is so incredibly powerful, but it's so hard for most people to leverage everything that the browser can do, right?
[00:43:16] You just said day and night mode. It's like, oh, it's cool that you released that! Day and night mode is not the most complicated c s s prop to set up, but to set it up to Google why it's not working in Firefox, to go over to Stack Overflow and copy paste some random answer. It will take you if everything around your website is set up and you have set nothing up for a supporting night modes, it can take you up from let's say an hour to maybe a full day of like, now you need to copy over all the CSS codes from Figma and like Right.
[00:43:56] This is is a ridiculous amount of time.
[00:43:58] Ridd: Now you gotta worry about Microsoft Edge too. [00:44:00]
[00:44:00] Jorn: Exactly. Exactly.
[00:44:01] Ridd: It's bad.
[00:44:01] Jorn: And so what we're excited about is like, okay, that's obviously functionality that a lot of people want on their websites. How do we make a solution for that in Framer where now it's just like a couple of clicks and you have a website that supports that.
[00:44:14] There's so much cool technology in the browser today that we can unlock by offering a solution in the product where now a lot of people have access to this functionality.
[00:44:24] And so I think that's like easily a year of work, maybe two years of work to keep the product, both simple, but leverage everything the browser can do, on the canvas.
[00:44:36] And so surely, yeah, there's a lot of websites that look the same and maybe AI can generate, let's say 80% of those types of websites in the future. I think we're gonna, continue and see if we can put features in the product that make it easier for people to differentiate themselves...with their web presence, with their company, with [00:45:00] their business, with their startup. On the web that is, you know, not the same SaaS startup model of like a NAF and a H1, uh, paragraph
[00:45:10] Ridd: three feature cards,
[00:45:11] Jorn: three feature cards. There's a place for that. There's a reason why those things are so popular because they work, right?
[00:45:16] Ridd: Yep.
[00:45:16] Jorn: But there are also formats that have been invented over the last couple of years, and now they're very effective, but there's new formats that can be invented and there's new technology that can be unlocked.
[00:45:26] I'm very excited about building those things into the platform and just get people more creative, more sort of like playing with what they wanna build on the internet.
[00:45:38] Ridd: Yeah, it's something that I think about is like different design trends that happen. Obviously the big ones, you have flat and more textured skeumorphism and things like that, but I'm really. Bullish on framer's ability to accelerate some of those design trends just based off of this remix culture that is really coming to life over the [00:46:00] last, like eight months since you've released this, where you can see an idea happen and then it just is in four other places and then 20 other places.
[00:46:09] And now there's, there's a whole other generation of the different derivatives and just seeing how quickly really, really compelling visual ideas spread because of framer is another reason why I'm really excited for the web
[00:46:23] Jorn: me as well. Yeah, remixing is awesome. It's, uh, it's just like you described.
[00:46:28] It's, you know, it's a lot of community I think is, is such a big part of what makes Framer, fun to play with and experiment with. , if you have not joined our community, go to framer.community and join the fun. And remixing is a really powerful way to, experiment with something, and share with others and see where they take it.
[00:46:48] You can remix everything. You can remix like an entire project. You can remix a piece of code, you can remix some visuals or something aesthetic. It's just a fun way to sort of like collaborate [00:47:00] in a, in a non-linear way. It's like you collaborate with or other people start to build on your work without me, you know, teaming up directly with you Ridd to, to make something.
Hot takes on design
[00:47:11] Ridd: One last question for sure. What's something that you believe about design that others might disagree with?
[00:47:20] Jorn: All right. I'll give you, I'll give you two.
[00:47:23] Design systems are slowing us down.
[00:47:26] Ridd: That is a hot tip.
[00:47:27] Jorn: That'd be number one. I know.
[00:47:30] Ridd: Unpack that a little bit. You don't get to say that as a one-liner and then move on.
[00:47:33] Jorn: No, I know. When I was at Facebook, there was like, you know, design systems, I think stem from a time where it was challenging to make things consistent and cohesive on like, uh, you know, when you're looking at a large suite of, products, right?
[00:47:50] So Facebook had a massive suite of products, the facebook.com, the iPhone, the iOS app, the Android app, standalone apps. [00:48:00] And for a company of that size, it makes sense to go and figure out, like, okay, so how do we make this consistent? Right?
[00:48:09] Consistency in itself is more of a designer's itch than it is something that will drive a business result, right?
[00:48:20] If everything looks consistent, you can say, okay, good job. But does it move a business metric? Maybe a little bit, but it's hard. It's very hard to prove. And so I think, you know, we, when we were at Facebook, we were starting, uh, a few of us were working on the Facebook interface guidelines, right? And so come up with a design system, how did the buttons look, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:48:42] Eventually that moves all of that need need to be built. So the, the true design system always lives in codes. And there is a lot of like, time wasted. I feel very similar to like drawing, drawing pictures of website in Figma and now having to [00:49:00] rebuild it in, in Webflow. There's an equal path, like the design system lives in code.
[00:49:04] That's where it's useful. You should probably update it there first. There is a reference file that's out of date with the actual design system that lives in Figma. And now I see a lot of folks just spending a lot of time arguing about something in Figma for the design system that never makes it to production.
[00:49:25] And it's just like, why are we, how did we end? How did we sometimes end up in this place? And I can see all the good intentions around it, but you know, you want a hot take.
[00:49:35] Design systems are useful in production. What they enforce is some consistent brand language that's also sort of useful, but how that blew up and became such a big, sort of like everyone's talking about how to do that in a process that I, don't really know.
[00:49:56] Like I I never really understood like, how is that, how [00:50:00] is that so important to design?
[00:50:01] And we're trying to say the opposite with framer, you know, screw consistency, go creative on the internet. Make something that is different from everything else.
[00:50:09] You wanna know what AI is gonna be really optimized for design systems.
[00:50:13] It's gonna be all right. A system. Good time. Yep. I could copy that and, , make everything border radios of 10. No problem, my friends. I got you. And so, I don't know, like I, I, yeah, I, I never really understood that. And then, you know, the other. Maybe like an even harder take is that being good at design, you is about problem solving end of the day in my book.
[00:50:45] Right?
[00:50:46] And I feel that sometimes in the industry, people honestly just spend too much time talking about how everything looks and not really how it works. So, which is weird for me to say [00:51:00] because I built the first 10 years of my career exclusively on how shit looks, all aesthetics, all about, you know, how does the software look just honestly like not enough?
[00:51:13] Like how can we make this successful? How can we make it, how can we make it work? And I think also with ai, It's gonna put more pressure on people to figure out how to get things to work, which I'm excited for. I'm excited for more startups that can solve problems for, people.
[00:51:30] Right. It can be for technology sector, it can be for like, it can be in any type of sector. I think will, if we can enable designers to focus on why is this not working? How do I solve it? That to me is like true design, how it looks. Yeah. It's also important, right? There's a place for it. But the best place for how it looks to me is at the end.
[00:51:54] And you figured out how it works. Now we can add in something extra. Now [00:52:00] we can add in some, ooh, some nice, nice animations that are gonna make it like feel really good and now is the time to like make sure it's consistent with the rest of the system and make sure that we use the design tokens from the thing.
[00:52:13] But all of those things are more for there front end, right? They're the polish, they're cherry on top that make it feel really good. I think there's too much time being spent on that part and maybe less so on the part that is what I think the most important part.
[00:52:31] Ridd: Makes sense. Well, Jorn, thank you a ton for joining.
[00:52:35] This has been awesome. And for anyone listening that has not played with Framer, you gotta do it.
[00:52:40] It's pure magic. And I promise you'll have that aha moment in the first like 10 minutes. First time you hit publish, it's amazing.
[00:52:48] Jorn: Second time you hit Publish to me is always the most addictive.
[00:52:51] The first time you, you go like, oh yeah, because like the first time you go publish, oh wow, it's website. But then the second you go back, you make a change. Yeah. All you have to do is [00:53:00] click publish again. That to me is the where it gets really good. Amazing. Thanks, Ridd. Thanks for, for having me.
[00:53:06] I'm a big fan of what you do. Let's get that outta the way. I think you, I think you, I think Dive Club is dope. You picked one of my favorite designers in the framer ecosystem Traf, and you picked a few other folks that I really respect.
[00:53:20] I think you're putting something dope together. The site looks amazing. If you haven't seen it, go to dive.club. Uh, all right. So that's me plugging you.
[00:53:30] Ridd: I think it's supposed to go in the opposite direction
Hot takes on design
[00:47:11] Ridd: One last question for sure. What's something that you believe about design that others might disagree with?
[00:47:20] Jorn: All right. I'll give you, I'll give you two.
[00:47:23] Design systems are slowing us down.
[00:47:26] Ridd: That is a hot tip.
[00:47:27] Jorn: That'd be number one. I know.
[00:47:30] Ridd: Unpack that a little bit. You don't get to say that as a one-liner and then move on.
[00:47:33] Jorn: No, I know. When I was at Facebook, there was like, you know, design systems, I think stem from a time where it was challenging to make things consistent and cohesive on like, uh, you know, when you're looking at a large suite of, products, right?
[00:47:50] So Facebook had a massive suite of products, the facebook.com, the iPhone, the iOS app, the Android app, standalone apps. [00:48:00] And for a company of that size, it makes sense to go and figure out, like, okay, so how do we make this consistent? Right?
[00:48:09] Consistency in itself is more of a designer's itch than it is something that will drive a business result, right?
[00:48:20] If everything looks consistent, you can say, okay, good job. But does it move a business metric? Maybe a little bit, but it's hard. It's very hard to prove. And so I think, you know, we, when we were at Facebook, we were starting, uh, a few of us were working on the Facebook interface guidelines, right? And so come up with a design system, how did the buttons look, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:48:42] Eventually that moves all of that need need to be built. So the, the true design system always lives in codes. And there is a lot of like, time wasted. I feel very similar to like drawing, drawing pictures of website in Figma and now having to [00:49:00] rebuild it in, in Webflow. There's an equal path, like the design system lives in code.
[00:49:04] That's where it's useful. You should probably update it there first. There is a reference file that's out of date with the actual design system that lives in Figma. And now I see a lot of folks just spending a lot of time arguing about something in Figma for the design system that never makes it to production.
[00:49:25] And it's just like, why are we, how did we end? How did we sometimes end up in this place? And I can see all the good intentions around it, but you know, you want a hot take.
[00:49:35] Design systems are useful in production. What they enforce is some consistent brand language that's also sort of useful, but how that blew up and became such a big, sort of like everyone's talking about how to do that in a process that I, don't really know.
[00:49:56] Like I I never really understood like, how is that, how [00:50:00] is that so important to design?
[00:50:01] And we're trying to say the opposite with framer, you know, screw consistency, go creative on the internet. Make something that is different from everything else.
[00:50:09] You wanna know what AI is gonna be really optimized for design systems.
[00:50:13] It's gonna be all right. A system. Good time. Yep. I could copy that and, , make everything border radios of 10. No problem, my friends. I got you. And so, I don't know, like I, I, yeah, I, I never really understood that. And then, you know, the other. Maybe like an even harder take is that being good at design, you is about problem solving end of the day in my book.
[00:50:45] Right?
[00:50:46] And I feel that sometimes in the industry, people honestly just spend too much time talking about how everything looks and not really how it works. So, which is weird for me to say [00:51:00] because I built the first 10 years of my career exclusively on how shit looks, all aesthetics, all about, you know, how does the software look just honestly like not enough?
[00:51:13] Like how can we make this successful? How can we make it, how can we make it work? And I think also with ai, It's gonna put more pressure on people to figure out how to get things to work, which I'm excited for. I'm excited for more startups that can solve problems for, people.
[00:51:30] Right. It can be for technology sector, it can be for like, it can be in any type of sector. I think will, if we can enable designers to focus on why is this not working? How do I solve it? That to me is like true design, how it looks. Yeah. It's also important, right? There's a place for it. But the best place for how it looks to me is at the end.
[00:51:54] And you figured out how it works. Now we can add in something extra. Now [00:52:00] we can add in some, ooh, some nice, nice animations that are gonna make it like feel really good and now is the time to like make sure it's consistent with the rest of the system and make sure that we use the design tokens from the thing.
[00:52:13] But all of those things are more for there front end, right? They're the polish, they're cherry on top that make it feel really good. I think there's too much time being spent on that part and maybe less so on the part that is what I think the most important part.
[00:52:31] Ridd: Makes sense. Well, Jorn, thank you a ton for joining.
[00:52:35] This has been awesome. And for anyone listening that has not played with Framer, you gotta do it.
[00:52:40] It's pure magic. And I promise you'll have that aha moment in the first like 10 minutes. First time you hit publish, it's amazing.
[00:52:48] Jorn: Second time you hit Publish to me is always the most addictive.
[00:52:51] The first time you, you go like, oh yeah, because like the first time you go publish, oh wow, it's website. But then the second you go back, you make a change. Yeah. All you have to do is [00:53:00] click publish again. That to me is the where it gets really good. Amazing. Thanks, Ridd. Thanks for, for having me.
[00:53:06] I'm a big fan of what you do. Let's get that outta the way. I think you, I think you, I think Dive Club is dope. You picked one of my favorite designers in the framer ecosystem Traf, and you picked a few other folks that I really respect.
[00:53:20] I think you're putting something dope together. The site looks amazing. If you haven't seen it, go to dive.club. Uh, all right. So that's me plugging you.
[00:53:30] Ridd: I think it's supposed to go in the opposite direction
Deep Dives
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UX lead @ Google
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