12-14-25
I recently sat down with Ridd on the Dive Club Podcast to walk through the creative journey behind the new Shift Nudge website.
Fig. 1
We covered everything. The messy exploration phase. The many random directions I tried. The tools I built to test ideas. My complete process.
I walked through how I started by going as wide as I could. Pixelated icons. Animated gradients. Monospace type experiments. Mobile-first layouts with floating CTAs. So many different directions, but that's how exploration works.
There's gonna be some chaos before you can get to clarity.
Fig. 2
We talked about how through all that iteration, I kept coming back to one thing.
Timeless over trendy.
That became my filter. Swiss grid structure. Sharp geometric shapes. Pure typography and layout. Something that wouldn't feel dated in two years. I even codified my design philosophy further during this process into 16 distinct principles called IIDS.
With that vision in place, I showed how I use AI to create custom tools as part of my design process. A pixel icon builder, hover effect generator, and a Mosaic component that went through 135+ iterations, then ultimately made it to production.
Fig. 3
Custom sliders and dropdowns for animation variants. I even used Cursor to build the entire new website in React (without knowing React syntax). I went ridiculously deep this year into AI in general, so it was fun to share some of what I've learned.
Fig. 4
I really enjoyed walking through my full creative process. Thanks for having me on the show, Ridd!
Practical design wisdom delivered weekly.