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David Cole
David Cole
I’m a designer living in my native Bay Area. I'm currently working on Castle, an app for making interactive art and games on your phone.
Before that, I was the VP of Design at Quora where I worked for seven years. I've also been a freelancer and in-house designer for a wide variety of companies including Sleepover, Disqus, The Colbert Report, Sandwich Video, EtherPad, Earwolf, Viacom, The City of New York, McSweeney’s, and Mission Pie.
Selected writing
- Why Mechanics Design I describe a new type of work that sets product design apart from UI design, and forms the basis for the design role at Quora.
- Mechanics Case Study: Twitter I apply concepts from mechanics design to look at the extreme trade-offs Twitter makes in its product.
- Atoms vs. Sessions Analyzing the structure of satisfying experiences with foundational game design concepts.
- Where the Floor is Really Lava A personal essay for The Cut where I share my experiences being a father in the age of Minecraft.
- Design Conflicts in Messenger Day Looking for harmony between the distinct layers of a product's design and implementation.
- Why are so many product design teams releasing design systems these days? I argue that the flourishing of design systems reflects a pursuit of leverage in an era of commodity UI practices.
- Made to Measure My piece for Issue 4 of The Manual. A destructive model positions data and design in opposition, but redefining and embracing data opens up deeper understanding and greater ability to design for reality.
- What can software product designers learn from game designers? Game design is ahead of product design in a number of areas, which I detail here.
- Does the Apple logo really adhere to the golden ratio? I investigate and hopefully debunk the widely-believed myth that Apple’s logo is derived from the Fibonacci sequence.
- Applied Discovery The materials from the talk I gave at Build 2013, in which I ask designers to reconsider their identity and broaden their impact.
- Metagames and Containers Playing with the effects of structure on the reading experience. I promise I wrote this before “gamification” was a thing.
- The Momentary Compression of Design I speculate that we’re in the middle of a confusing, temporary phase in design that will soon end with a rapid expansion of the field.
- The Myth of the Myth of the Unicorn Designer I argue that so-called “unicorn” designers are very real, and that the generalist approach has underappreciated benefits.