Hey, I'm Tom Johnson, welcome to my corner of the interwebs. I’m a designer who's worked in print, promotional, experience, digital, web, and app design.
Currently I work at Asurion in Nashville, where I design experiences for desktop, web, and mobile applications by day, but I consult and design for clients by night. What type of work do I do? Keep scrolling and I'll give you the details and a little bit of explanation into my thought process and the value that I can bring to your projects.
This is a tough one to talk about, folks. This is not an aspirational post, or even one that will give advice on how to avoid my mistakes. I don’t think I can show exactly where I went wrong, or how I could have changed anything. There is no happy ending. Abandon hope all ye who scroll here.
I built an agency website in Webflow. I used minimal classes, flexbox, the CMS, and the API to create it. In this four-part series, I’ll give you tips about using each, and how to get started.
If you’re a designer/car enthusiast this post is for you. I’ve broken down the details of the dashboard controls and interface of the Tesla Model 3, the first mass-market, touchscreen only electric car. The car’s UI design tells us a great deal about Tesla’s long term strategy, and their eyes toward a driverless future.
If you’re a designer/car enthusiast this post is for you. I’ve broken down the details of the dashboard controls and interface of the Tesla Model 3, the first mass-market, touchscreen only electric car. The car’s UI design tells us a great deal about Tesla’s long term strategy, and their eyes toward a driverless future.
I’ve read a lot of comparison articles about the two, but I don’t think they really do Figma justice. Some of them briefly mention the team features, the browserness, the components, and constraints, but they don’t really focus on how they’re better than versions in Sketch. At best, they make it seem like both are about the same. The reason I’m writing this is because they’re not.
All of my ideas are bad. Every. Single. One. And yet, I still keep having them.My brain is chalked full of inconsistencies, inaccuracies, & incomprehensible iterations of interactions. I stonewall good decisions and necessary processes, spout nonsensical thoughts while opining about the obscure, and pontificate...
Recently I downloaded Goldstar on my iPad. It’s a ticket buying app, similar to stubhub or ticketmaster. This is the first screen I saw:I looked for a ‘skip’ button or some other way that I could use the app without actually having to create an account. Maybe there was a subtle arrow or a ‘no thanks’, ‘remind me later’, or a ‘show me the tix’ button?
I worked on this app as a proof of concept while studying UX at General Assembly ATL in 2015. My original concept was to redesign a mobile banking application, but I quickly realized that there was a disparity among my interviewees when it came to the problems they had with mobile banking. Many issues were systemic of banking as a whole, and could not be resolved by a simple app redesign.
“We need to make it more intuitive”“That’s not intuitive”“Our primary goal is that it be intuitive”…stop. Please. Almost every design discussion I’ve had lately has had one of these quotes. I hear it from clients, large corporations, key stakeholders, developers, other designers, managers, interns, and ESPECIALLY entrepreneurs.
About a month ago, I was at a Wendy’s while on vacation in Wisconsin. Work could not be further from my mind, as all my attention was on the tower of beef-n-cheese melty goodness that I had just sat down to eat. I was all-consumed in my beefy effort when, planning and debating on the next bite, when, to my great distress, I noticed a little drama going on in the corner of my eye. A little old lady was trying to get a coke.
A fake design agency and website for use in a collaborative article with Webflow.
A website designed on a system built for fast page load times and reusability of components.
Recreation and prototype of the Tesla Model 3 using Figma.
An app designed to solve the problem of being on hold and customer support.