I usually stick to Dove brand shampoo and Suave conditioner. I'm trying their "Men+Care" shampoo/conditioner hybrid right now and I don't really like it as much as the normal white-bottled shampoo.

Honestly, I never really tried. Whenever its brought up in conversation, though, people (both men and women) get pretty excited.

Most people use Photoshop for design. There's a few Sketch outliers, but we're weeding that out because it isn't a viable tool for the work we do right now and it's more important that everyone be able to easily use anyone else's files. I've seen people use Balsalmiq and Illustrator for wireframes, but I don't wireframe often so I can't talk too much about that.

The organization uses Asana for tasks and bugs. It's not the best, but it works better than anything else out there.

The design org uses Basecamp to share progress and gather feedback. It sucks, and I'm looking for a replacement.

In a few release cycles, we're planning on trying to switch to Layervault for some of the collaboration and delivery stuff.

Many, but not all, of our designers code. Historically its been pretty difficult to develop on our platform if its not your full-time job, but its getting easier and as a result, more designers have been coding. I make a lot of prototypes, but I probably have one of the higher code competency levels on the team.

I have a LOT of opinions on design tools. I think Photoshop sucks, but its a lot more capable than Sketch. I don't think either is a viable long-term solution. Albeit new and unhindered by history like Photoshop, Sketch is not on trajectory to be the digital design tool of the next two decades as Photoshop has been.

In a nutshell, a modern design tool needs to have three things:

1. Advanced drawing and animation capabilities
2. The ability to import real data
3. The ability to define behaviors and information architecture

We have the first in tools like Photoshop, Sketch, After Effects, Flinto, Keynote, etc. But you have to jump between programs to access different parts. There are tools that let you do information architecture, but you can only get to real data and behaviors in code. We're good enough at this software thing that it doesn't have to be like that.

I have a whole essay on this waiting for me to have time to edit and design some stuff in Editorially. This isn't the last you'll hear from me about this.

I met Evan Sharp, one of our cofounders, the summer prior to graduating when I was interning at CMU. While we weren't ever on the same team, we bonded over our side projects—mine was a product called visually and his being, well, Pinterest.

A year later, I was in Palo Alto interviewing at Facebook again and he had just left to join Pinterest full-time right down the block. He invited me to "come check out the office," took me in the back room with Ben, and told me they wanted to hire me. I was like, "Oh... uh, okay." I was skeptical because coming out of CMU with all them loans, I wasn't sure a startup that might disappear in months-to-years was the right option for me. Regardless, a few weeks later, the deal was sealed.

I was the first product design hire, which is different from the first product designer, who would be Evan Sharp, our cofounder. He did all of the original design and systems work probably about a year or more before I joined. When I joined, he was working on a visual refresh of the website, which I helped out on. My first project was the mobile website (which sadly is still online).

I think that at least initially, Pinterest was considered unique because it was very, very visual and organic in a way that many other websites at the time were not. If you think about sites like Facebook and Twitter, those were text-heavy streams with the occasional photo. When you think about FFFound and Dropular, the former was just a bunch of images sequentially on a page. The latter is the closest thing you'd find to Pinterest. Both of those two were very designer-heavy and didn't have mass market appeal.

The early explorations that Evan had done make no assumptions though. There are explorations that are a list of images. There are some where the images are square. There are more where some things are just stripes on the page. He made hundreds of coded iterations before landing on the grid you know today. I think it was much more of an exercise in patience, exploration and iteration than some sort of magic insight.

See https://www.quora.com/Product-Design-physical-goods/What-is-the-difference-between-the-job-roles-of-Product-Designer-UI-Designer-Interaction-Designer-UX-person

I would be pretty excited.

Pinterest is a product with a lot of potential and a lot of really exciting work with no owner. Albeit small, we have a really great team of product designers working around-the-clock to make a great experience for pinners. I'm personally really inspired and excited about our mission as a company, which is to help connect people to the their interests and helping them do those things in real life.

I'm peers with pretty much everyone. There's very little hierarchy at the company. I wouldn't say I'm anywhere near the top. I have the most experience designing Pinterest, but I'm nowhere near the best designer on the team. Probably closer to the bottom in that regard.

In the early days, we actually strived for perfection. There is a balance though: you'll never make something perfect so it's important to ship. The projects that we really worked for a long time on didn't always have the biggest returns.

Nowadays, we focus a lot more on progress. We believe that if we can ship small improvements to something every week, we'll learn from each of those releases and be at a better place in a month than if we had polished it internally for that long.

Naturally, from project-to-project, this will vary, but I do subscribe to the idea of shipping early and often, so long as you keep some sort of quality bar.

What books can you recommend, regarding design?

My absolute favorite technical design book is Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef-Müller Brockmann. On the more philosophical size, The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero is a must read.

You can also see all the books that the Product Design team at Pinterest loves on this board: Design Books.

What did you do at your internship @Facebook?

At the time, profile completion rates were down, so I was tasked with designing a system to bring them back up. It ended up being a kind of crowdsourced solution, where we would ask people you interacted with frequently if they worked with you, lived in the same city as you, etc, and then we'd ask you to confirm. It was a really low-level thing, but I still see bits and pieces of it in sidebars from time-to-time. I also worked on stuff like the now-defunct Facebook Questions and School Hubs.

Which websites do you visit on a daily basis?

Dare I name Pinterest?

In terms of services, Facebook and Twitter are usually open in a tab somewhere. Quora and Dribbble are both frequent visits, but probably every other day.

I make a habit of Designer News, The Verge, Polygon as well for design/tech news. Mangastream and Bandcamp are weekly visits for guilty pleasures.

I'm sure there's more that are more interesting, but I'm drawing a blank.

My favorite city is probably a small town in the south called Kanoya City. There's absolutely nothing to do there—it's probably more of a town than a city. When I homestayed there (something like eight years ago) it was pretty amazing to be somewhere with fresh air and a much slower pace. At the time, I had only lived in New York City, so it was a big, big change for me.

Favorite food—if you're ever in Tokyo, check out AFURI. It's about a 5 minute walk north of the JR Harajuku Station. So delicious.

You're talking super early days—I wasn't around then. When I was there, we were growing pretty rapidly, so much that the three engineers we had were up all night pretty much every night trying to keep the site online.

A few tips for new grad designers:

• Your fresh eyes are extremely valuable. Make use of the time you have with them.

• Even if you have a job, never stop updating your portfolio. You never know what is going to happen, and I've seen tons of people in shitty situations because they didn't update their portfolio for years and suddenly found themselves unemployed.

• Never let anyone tell you how to work. You know under which conditions you're the most productive and effective.

And San Francisco-specific things:

• There's nothing of value north of Market. Don't go there.

• You should live in the city, at least for a little while. Don't give into the housing prices: if you hunt for a bit you'll eventually find somewhere you really like. (I was homeless for 3 months!)

And about Foundation:

Oh boy, Foundation.

The web version kinda works. I'm working on an iPhone version. There will be more news soon. The main problem is both Foundation and Pinterest are full-time jobs, but only one of them is paying me $$$, so that's the one I focus on.

We've moved away from platform-specific designers to area-specific designers. There are designers on the Discovery team, the Pins team, and so forth.

The problem with platform-specific designers is that a lot of our work isn't platform specific, they go across everything. If a feature designer made something and someone didn't agree with it, it was easy for platforms to diverge based on opinion.

This year, we're going to try building full-stack teams. I'm a designer on the Pins team, which will have its own iOS engineers, Android engineers, backend engineers, etc. Hopefully, we can move much faster in this formation than we did in last year's.

Tell us about the early days at Pinterest. What were they like?

The early days were pretty crazy. When I joined, there were 8 of us in a living room in Palo Alto. From my opinion, it was the quintessential startup experience.

We were growing pretty rapidly, but no one in the tech world really knew we existed yet. I was working on a new project pretty much every week or two, doing both brand and product work. About 6-8 weeks after I started, we raised our round from Andreessen Horowitz, were featured on TechCrunch, moved into our (bigger) Palo Alto office, and everything kind of just continued to explode. Things still haven't stopped exploding.

How has the design process (and perhaps culture) over there changed?

There's a lot fewer gut calls now, and a lot more experimentation and learning. When I look at the work my peers are doing, I think that's par for the course for a growing technology company. If you make a change and metrics drop, you have to know why, because chances are something's either broken or people don't like what you made as much as you expected.

What's the design process over there now? What types of designers does Pinterest have and where do they fit in with the entire product process?

The design process can be pretty different for a few reasons. For starters, we don't really prescribe a specific process on designers—you're mostly free (and encouraged) to work in whatever way you're most productive. We also change our product development process as a company pretty frequently to try to be more efficient, effective and nimble than we were before.

In a nutshell, though, as product designers, we receive an idea, try to form a solid problem statement from that, figure out if its something pinners actually want or would benefit from, then iterate a LOT. That's obviously very abstract, but it probably gets to the core of it. Mapping Place Pins is probably a pretty good insight into how we build products here.

Right now, we have product designers and brand designers. We haven't really done any more classification than that.

I have a short attention span, but I'm also extremely irresponsible with time. Working on one project alone usually drives me to the point of insanity where I get in too deep, and that makes for a bad project because I get into echo chamber mode. At the same time, working on more than three or four things at once starts to take its toll on my attention. Two projects simultaneously is my sweet spot.

See https://www.quora.com/Pinterest/What-is-it-like-to-work-on-the-Product-Design-team-at-Pinterest

With the current design tools we have, I haven't found a way to systematically surface those kinds of edge cases. We just design them as quickly as we can. Ideally, you've built early enough that you can allot extra time "padding" to thoughtfully working through those last-minute cases.

I'd love to hang out! Bradford nags me about it all the time, but we're usually super busy (there's never a drought of things to design!) I'll try to make some time to bring some people over sometime soon :)

I detailed some of this in Jordan P's answer just a bit above this.

The relationship is pretty good, I think. Due to being a young organization with not a lot of processes, some things are a bit rockier than they could be, but I expect a lot of that to sort itself over time. A lot of it is just that there's not enough people to sort out internal tools, so we use whatever is easiest.

I personally build prototypes all the time. I've built a prototyping library called Pinkit that lets a designer easily iterate on Pin cells as well as easily use real Pinterest data in HTML/CSS/JS prototypes.

I'm currently learning iOS development (and later Android) so that I can do the same sorts of things on mobile platforms. My goal for the year is to code more and ship code.

I'm pretty experimental—design tools are a big passion of mine, so I use lots of budding tools to see how they work and whether they'll make the work of the whole time easier. Recently, I've been playing with Adobe Edge Reflow and Composite.

Mostly Evan on the original grid stuff, and Andreas Pihlström (http://suprb.com), who we hired, before him on things like Grid-a-licious and Reform Revolution.

It's entertaining to see, because a lot of the time it doesn't work. There's a lot of reasons why our content uses that design beyond aesthetic. And a lot of thought into things like spacing, flow, and density specifically for our pins. I think when we were redesigning pinterest.com, at least 2-4 weeks were spent just on revamping the spacing of the grid and the pin cells themselves.

When you port the grid to things like articles and whatnot, it breaks pretty badly if you don't pay attention to details. Many people do not pay attention to details.

That being said, it's definitely flattering.

I'm really into owls. Did you know that there's a cafe in Tokyo where you can get a good drink and hang out with owls? You can pet them. They'll perch on you. It's way cooler than cat cafes.

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/117093659035452389/

We're lucky to have a really talented engineering team. It's incredible the stuff they get done in ridiculous deadlines.

Our engineers are pretty easy to work with, but not everyone has a design eye. Sometimes you have to be overly clear about how you want something to behave, which is something I personally struggle with.

Due to how our systems are engineered, getting an engineer to prototype rapidly in code can be difficult, not because they don't want to, but just because its a lot of work. As a consequence, designers spend a lot more time in Photoshop than I like. I spend part of my time building and finding tools to alleviate issues like this and make knitting (our fun word for collaboration) between design and engineering easier.

I did graduate.

I don't know exactly whether my degree helped me land my jobs, but it definitely helped expose me to them. I only considered being a product designer when I saw what fellow alum Lee Byron was doing after graduating at NYT and later Facebook. If I didn't go to Facebook, I wouldn't have met Evan Sharp, so I wouldn't be at Pinterest.

I think design degrees are more useful than people make them out to be. Of course, all design schools are not created equal, and many of the better ones will cost an arm and a leg, but I think that the salaries of the jobs that you can land as a consequence of having a good degree are proportional to tuition costs. This is especially true for product designers and engineers.

Carnegie Mellon taught me what Design is, with a capital "D," where previously I thought of it as little more than applied art. Granted, at the time, there was no iPhone and Facebook was a budding website on the internet, but Design has implications beyond posting status updates and designing lickable icons. Designers have the ability to solve problems that actually will change the world—its just that many of us either can't find those opportunities or choose to make photo apps instead. I think this is something that is very easily missed without having been in design "academia," if you will. My personal opinion is that letting those opportunities pass us by is worse for the profession as a whole.

There's lots of other little skills that I learned in school that I don't often see in self-taught designers, like learning how to work on teams, learning how to give and take feedback, how to work on a deadline, how to communicate effectively in low-fidelity, and so on. That being said, self-taught designers are usually better at execution because they dive straight into the work. It's a trade-off. Of course, those are all anecdotal observations.

I wouldn't trade my experience at CMU for the world. I don't think I would have been a designer, or nearly as good of one, without it.

How did you get plugged into the opportunity of being the first product design hire at Pinterest? What was the application/interview process like?

I answered a lot of this to Ryan L.'s question. (I can't link to comments though). Anything you would want me to elaborate on?

Since you were the first product design hire, early on, was there an unfair amount of pressure or demand on you and what you were designing?

You're implying that there's not a ton of pressure and demand on me (and the rest of the team) now!

Yes, I was responsible for everything from business cards to about pages to product work for at least 6 months, and it was both fun and stressful. The oddest request I got was a design for a surfboard for an investor. (I never actually did it)

At times, did you feel like you were in your own island? If so, share a story or an experience that reflects where the product design team is now compared to when it was essentially just you.

There were lots of times I felt like I was on an island, and actually it still happens now. I worked on Place Pins for 6 months as the only designer, and even though there's critique twice a week with the Product Design team, its very different than having another designer in the trenches with you. I do have time to breathe and do a few more things I want to do now though, which wasn't always the case.

A lot of this is just because we've got so much work to do and not enough designers to do it, sooooo.... http://about.pinterest.com/careers/

I think the most potent advice I could give is "Don't be afraid." I wrote about this before, but I feel like people often get really afraid of branching out and trying new things, or speaking up, or doing something absolutely insane. Those are the qualities that I respect the most in a person though.

Once you get over the fact that people are going to be judging you, watching you, and criticizing you, the sky is literally the limit. When you focus on doing the things that you think are right, you learn more and people will respect you for taking a risk.

Quick story: When I was looking for jobs out of school, a lot of top design consultancies gave me offers and I turned them all down. Every one of my peers and professors thought I was absolutely nuts. I knew what I wanted, and I took the risk. I think things worked out pretty okay for me IMO. I didn't know specifically that I wanted to work at Pinterest, but somehow I'm exactly where I wanted to be.