Matt D. Smith

We've done a major home renovation since then, and during that time we built a separate studio space on behind our home. It's now a dedicated, permanent space for me to work from, instead of the converted bedroom from the 2021 feature. The studio has skylights, lots of natural light, and big open vaulted ceilings. I built a custom black paneling structure that runs across the ceiling to hide my mini split, with acoustic panels on the back. I record tons of design tutorials in here so gotta have good acoustics. Design material, Figma videos, Claude Code videos, and live design critiques that I run each week.

Also, all of my plants are fake because every time I buy real ones they end up dying.

My notebook. I write in it every single day. All of my to-dos, my goals, and some of my daily non-negotiables, to make sure the things I'm working on are in alignment with the things I want to achieve. I'll also write down notes about how a day went, or if I was too ambitious with what I was trying to get done. I don't do it every single day without fail, but pretty regularly I get in there and write down as much as I can. Any gridded notebook works, like Field Notes. Right now I'm using a Rollbahn notebook and a Sharpie gel pen.

I'm thinking about it a lot because I'm using AI every day. Building new features for Shift Nudge. Working on an MCP server that generates AI design critiques based on all of my Shift Nudge curriculum, judged against a 16-principle framework with 90 different categories. I've used it to build custom Final Cut XML files that sync with sound effects, custom email applications and internal tools for our company, and lots of automations that sync with our Zoom calls and pull design decisions into notes and into our Shift Nudge community space. I've also built a bunch of skills to help me build out robust curriculum.

And I keep a Mac mini running my OpenClaw assistant, which I use pretty much exclusively through Telegram and Slack.

But anytime I've used AI for design specifically, it’s never something I’m satisfied with, especially if I'm just asking it to generate something randomly. The more specific you can get with your language, the better it creates.

I still design better than AI, so I do most of my design manually in the Figma canvas and have AI help me in the build process, or to iterate through ideas and interactions. I use Claude Code and the Figma MCP server to go back and forth between the browser, my builds, and my designs. I view AI very much as a tool that helps me become more efficient, and my design skill is still what drives the work.

It's still a specialty. Anyone can put together some sort of hacky animation, but you definitely have to polish it. You have to tweak easing settings, work on timing, and be aware of whether animation is even necessary. How much is too much? How much is not enough? When do you use it? When do you skip it? It's very much a skill. Just because it's easier to animate doesn't mean animation itself is an easier thing to accomplish. Figma motion is a massive step forward making this more accessible to more people, but the skill of animation remains necessary.

Taste and judgment are abstract terms, and abstract things are very difficult to teach. But if you break them into smaller pieces that are more concrete, you end up with questions like how do you teach someone typography? And typography itself is still somewhat abstract. So you go smaller. How do you teach someone to choose a nice font? How do you teach line height, letter spacing, paragraph widths, font weight pairing, font style pairing, or even font size? All of these are concrete building blocks that elevate someone's taste by equipping them with better skills.

You can break down grids and color the same way. That's how I teach all of the building blocks inside Shift Nudge, from a principle perspective, usually right in the Figma canvas. Then you ask questions. What do you see? What do you notice first? Where does your eye go? Do you think that's a good thing or a bad thing? A lot of these things are objective. And once there's a firm foundation of objectivity built, then subjectivity for branding and style and feel comes into play. I believe there are a lot of objective skills you can learn that ultimately make you more skilled in your subjective taste.

So the best way I know how to teach taste and judgment is through concrete, smaller skills that are acquirable. Through exposure and repetition.