Hello, World
A first post in over a decade, and other acts of hubris.
James LaCroix
Director of Product Design at Braze
Blogs are back. Well, I'm not sure about that, but here I am coding my first blog and writing my first post in over a decade. It's a bit like dusting off an old guitar you haven't played in years, except this time you're not sure if anyone's listening.
It takes me back to how I got into this career. I built WordPress sites for myself and clients long before I knew what I was doing, and somehow that turned into a job. There was something satisfying about shipping something to the internet that felt like yours. That feeling never totally went away. It just got easier to ship things than to write about them.
So why start writing again?
Partly, I've been wanting to share more comprehensive ideas with the designers I work with. The things that are hard to fit into a Slack post or a 30-minute design review. The "why" behind the thinking, not just the output.
Partly, it's a useful exercise for me. There's no faster way to find out you don't actually have a point than to try to write one down.
And partly, it just seemed like fun. I genuinely miss the 2000s-era blog format — people writing at length about things they cared about, without an algorithm deciding if it deserved to exist. So here's my small, probably quixotic contribution to bringing that back.
What you can expect here: writing about product design leadership, craft, creative process, and the industry broadly. No fixed schedule. No content calendar. Just posts when I have something worth saying, which, depending on who you ask, may be more or less often than you'd like.
— James
James is a Director of Product Design at Braze who previously led design teams at Twitter. He's been designing digital products since founding his own studio in 2005, and he's still convinced that the best interfaces feel like someone actually thought about you while building them. Chicago-based, Nottingham Forest supporter, recovering rock musician.