zain
Draft: Zain's voice pass pending. Adapted from a LinkedIn post; he reviews before this publishes.
A small detour from my DesignUp write-ups. I attended a Figma event, and first: genuinely excited that Figma is opening a Bangalore office. The sessions all pointed at one shift: we're moving from being designers to being makers.
Abhishek Mathur made the case that AI has made it easy for anyone to produce a design or ship something, which makes good design more important, not less. It's the difference between a product that ships and one that actually works. The classic PM–designer–engineer boundaries are fading; the future belongs to makers who move across them. It echoed Dan Mall's "designer who ships": someone fluent in AI tools, frontend, product thinking, visual design, even a bit of marketing and SEO. Used to sound impossible. The tools got easier; a bit of curiosity gets you most of the way now.
Debabrata Nayak gave a rare look inside how government apps like DigiLocker and CoWIN get designed: real constraints, real complexity, and real consequences when something isn't simple enough. His advice: make it simple, do one thing well before you add more.
A fireside chat (Meghna Kumar, Anuj Rathi, Rahul Gonsalves, Bindya S Raj) landed on the same point from different backgrounds: taste matters more than we think, caring about the details isn't old-school, and the maker mindset is becoming the default, not the exception.
Nandita Sinha on building for India at scale, from Myntra's vantage: different cities behave differently, and good design removes friction rather than adding features to cover every case.
One line for the day
We're moving from being "designers" to being "makers." Exciting, and a little grounding.