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Oh man, you have no idea…

I fear every project I start working on. My wife hears me saying every single week how lucky I've been so far but how I'm sure this one won't work. Patrick (Stripe's CEO) hears me saying every other month how I'm sure I'll be fired in the short term. You'd think I'd gain some confidence over time but it's pretty much the opposite.

I realize it might sound like false modesty, but I swear it's true.

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Pretty much nothing, actually. While some inspiration is important, practicing is crucial. Designers (me included) are often lazy or too attached to the first versions of their designs. In my experience, the following iterations are always better. I'm convinced you grow more as a designer by doing more than seeing more.

That's very interesting, in fact, as we've recently had a lot of discussions about our inconsistencies. I think it's very telling that we're worried about that while external people seem to highlight consistency as one of our strengths.

I think consistency is inherently hard, and I'm afraid there's no good answer. We all love when every page from a site feels like it's part of the same thing, yet I'm convinced it's essential to break consistency in order to explore new visual treatments. A page like Bitcoin is "inconsistent" with something like Subscriptions but I feel like it'd have been unfortunate if some rigid guidelines would have prevented me from doing it.

I don't often build prototypes. Simple ugly wireframes are usually enough for me. When I need to test some animation or behavior though, I just do it using vanilla html, css and javascript.

Thanks Philip, means a lot!

I wrote about my experience at Stripe after the first year and things are pretty much the same today :) Let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to know!

Ryan,

Unless you really want to join a big company for personal reasons, I'd highly recommend joining a small startup instead. Startups are usually messy as they still don't have the structure and resources to let you focus on just one thing. As a result, you do a lot of different stuff. That might look suboptimal at first sight, but it's a great way to get your hands dirty!

I currently work at an early stage startup. I ended up doing UI design, web development, and branding. It's great to be able to do a wide variety of things as a junior designer and high school student.

Daniel,

My dad was an architect, which, in hindsight, wasn't that far away from what I'm doing as a "hybrid" designer/developer. It combines "art" and technical skills, which is exactly what I love about my job.

I went to the CAD in Brussels. It's a good school, and I definitely learned a lot about typography, branding etc. but I learned most of web stuff by myself.

Hey Kelly,

I have many designer friends who don’t code. They’re great at what they do, but code (or at least JavaScript) isn’t something they’re excited about.

I find it extremely frustrating that the tools won’t let designers express themselves. As far as I can tell, they’d love and they’d great at crafting nice behaviours because they usually care about this stuff much more than developers do.

So I created uilang as an attempt to get them started. I don’t care if they stop using it after just a few hours. My goal is just to help them take the plunge into programming. uilang is “an appetizer for JavaScript”. It’s something developers have a hard time to understand, but many designers told me how uilang really helped them to get started.

You can read more about the philosophy behind uilang in this article on Medium.

Howdy, David!

Working on the site would definitely be a priority. We’ve been growing fast, and it’s been hard to keep up with product releases and page updates. There are quite a few pages that are now really old (eg: https://stripe.com/about) and that’d greatly benefit from some love. We’re currently 4 designers and a 5th one is joining us next month. We’d be more than happy to welcome a few more friends though :)

Steal! Joking aside, you learn so much by copying existing stuff. Believe it or not, I used to be the worst icon designer in history. But by trying to copy the amazing icons I was seeing on Dribbble, I learned some techniques. I noticed where they usually place lights and shadows. I discovered new ways to draw vector shapes. And eventually, I could develop my own style.

Creativity and technical skills are two very hard separate things. Try to separate them to make the learning process easier!

Jeff,

I'd leave immediately if Stripe would prevent me from being a "hybrid". I code probably less than 20% of my time, but I absolutely need these 20% to be happy, not only because I love front-end development, but also because I often need an "artistic break". I admire people who can design 100% of their time, but I can't.

It's great to be a "hybrid" at Stripe because Stripe will let you do whatever you want. When I can do the whole thing by myself, I definitely do it. But that's obviously rarely the case as developing stuff for a payments company is usually not trivial, to say the least :p

Hey Rafael,

I answered a few other questions about visual consistency but, in short, we don't have any tools or documents to ensure we're doing the right thing. Part of it is because we're still a small team and consistency just happens naturally (most of the time :D). As I previously mentioned, I like the have to freedom to explore new visual styles as it helps me to keep improving and refreshing the site.

Nico,

I design everything in Sketch. Heck, I don't even have any Adobe software installed! Sketch had a rocky start and, to be fair, there are still some annoying bugs here and there but overall, it's pretty much the perfect UI design tool for me.

As for front-end development, I use Vim as my text editor and nothing but vanilla html, css and javascript. I don't use preprocessors, libraries and frameworks. I love to learn how to do things by myself, and I encourage other people to do the same :)

Hey Danny -- great question!

I'm still living in Belgium and, yes, the big timezone difference is definitely challenging. I travel to SF fairly often in order to mitigate that issue.

That being said, I love being remote. I work in a very quiet environment, which is essential for me. I just can't focus and be productive in a noisy office.

It's been working pretty well so far. Stripe's extremely open about pretty much everything, so it's not hard to find the info you're looking for. And since designers have a lot to say at Stripe, you can imagine a lot about the products we'll be doing without having to require some kind of validation.

I started working for them a long time ago (about 4 years ago if my memory serves) as a part-time contractor. They acquired Kickoff about 2 years ago and I joined them full-time since then.

Thanks Raven!

That's a very good question actually, and it's something we're often discussing.

We tend to hire designers who have similar visual taste in order to keep things consistent naturally. We don't have a style guide, we just force ourselves to stay fairly consistent with the global identity. It's been working pretty well so far but I'm not sure it's gonna scale forever. Time will tell!

Hey Daniel,

I’m super excited about it, and it's a step forward imho. While I do have some reservations about some visual choices, I’m glad Google is now taking design seriously. Heck, I’m even tempted to say they’ve actually taken the lead with this flat design style that Apple seems to struggle with… Exciting times!

Thanks Daniel!

I think you’re doing it right: Framer is a fantastic tool and while the coding part might be scary at first sight, it’s in fact a big win in the long term. If Framer was a purely visual tool, the gap from Framer to CSS/JS would be much harder.

As for the resources, I’m not aware of great tutorials/books but I’d recommend learning by yourself. The technical side shouldn’t be a blocker, especially if you come from Framer. The hardest part is definitely in the “artistic” approach: finding a good rhythm, the proper easing, the appropriate effects. Keep practicing, it’s the best advice I could give :)