Linear launched a series of conversations with product leaders on how things of quality get built: ​“What is quality? It seems hard to describe and even harder to measure, but you can feel it when it’s there. You know it when you experience it.”

It was a great episode of the ​“In the File” series, where Luis Ouriach talks to the designer Yann-Edern Gillet and engineer Andreas Eldh from Linear about the recent update of their design system. I love their use of the LCH color space to generate a consistent palette and tight collaboration between design and engineering.

“How do Replit & Linear approach designer to developer collaboration? We’ll talk to two high-performing teams about streamlining design-to-code handoff for shipping better products. Learn insights on effective collaboration and ideal workflows with Figma’s Dev Mode, Linear, and Replit.”

“For the first installment in our series, we sat down with the Linear team who put forth a series of principles to guide their own work. Here, co-founder Jori Lallo and Chief Operating Officer Cristina Cordova share why opinionated software is core to Linear’s methodology, and how other teams can adopt it.”

My favorite part from Jori: ​“Many people try to adapt things from the industry that might not actually be applicable to them, or they might not know the potential downside. They were developed at places that are bigger and growing faster than most companies, so you need to try to understand what’s behind them and adapt pieces of them.”

What I like about Linear is how clearly they define principles and ideas that drive their product decisions. You can either love or hate how opinionated they are, but that clarity is admirable. ​“At Linear we believe software can feel magical. Quality of software is driven by both the talent of its creators and how they feel while they’re crafting it. To bring back the right focus, these are the foundational and evolving ideas Linear is built on.”

A talk from Stripe’s Sessions 2024 conference on why well-crafted products are expressions of care and dedication — and how that correlates to business success. Head of Design Katie Dill kicks it off by talking about the value of quality and dispelling some of the myths and common-held beliefs about craft and beauty — that it is ​“in the eye of the beholder,” purely cosmetic, and at odds with growth. In Stripe’s experience, beauty is objective, functional, and support growth.

Later, she invites the cofounder and CEO of Linear, Karri Saarinen, and the CPO of Figma, Yuhki Yamashita, to share their thoughts on craft and beauty. I like Karri’s separation of these concepts — ​“craft is the mindset and activity you do, and the quality and beauty are the output.” You can also read the recap of this talk on the Figma blog.

I loved this article by Karri Saarinen from Linear on why redesigns are important and its sequel, ​“How we redesigned the Linear UI,” on tackling that kind of project. ​“This incremental way of building the product is hugely beneficial, and often necessary — though it unbalances the overall design, and leads to design debt. Each new capability adds stress on the product’s existing surfaces for which it was initially designed. Functionality no longer fits in a coherent way. It needs to be rebalanced and rethought.”

On paying off the design debt: ​“While the design debt often happens in small increments, it’s best to be paid in larger sweeps. This goes against the common wisdom in engineering where complete code rewrites are avoided. The difference is that on the engineering side, a modular or incremental way of working can work as the technical implementation is not really visible. Whereas the product experience is holistic and visual.”

On exploring the next version without considering practicality: ​“A secret I’ve learned is that when you tell people a design is a ​“concept” or ​“conceptual” it makes it less likely that the idea is attacked from whatever perspective they hold or problems they see with it. The concept is not perceived as real, but something that can be entertained. By bringing leaders or even teams along with the concept iterations, it starts to solidify the new direction in their mind, eventually becoming more and more familiar. That’s the power of visual design.”

Karri Saarinen shares how their team is building one of the best-designed products out there: ​“The main point is that the design is only a reference, never any kind of deliverable itself, so the way it’s constructed doesn’t really matter.“ Don’t miss a follow-up on this approach and tech debt, as well as an older thread on their simple design system. Last but not least, his recent interview with Lenny Rachitsky on how Linear builds product was just fantastic (a good chunk is behind a paywall, but a podcast version is free.)

Linear wins the most over-the-top plugin page award. The new plugin enables designers and engineers to collaborate seamlessly without the need to switch tools or context by creating and linking to issues directly from Figma, navigating design tasks in context, and collaborating across teams and tools.

In this tutorial thread, Fons Mans walks through the steps of creating Linear-like gradients. The community file is available as well.

Back in October, Linear launched a new home page that went down under a DDoS attack. In a genius move to save the day, they’ve redirected their domain to the Figma file with a home page design and hosted a live Q&A right there. In this post, Figma and Linear discuss how it happened and what they learned.

Linear launched a new gorgeous home page and did a Q&A party in a Figma file while the website was under a DDoS attack. The file is read-only but still fun to explore and review the questions and answers from the team.

Karri Saarinen, cofounder and CEO of Linear: ​“Adobe missed the one of the largest transformations in the design industry and lost the product designers for over a decade. Spending $20B on Figma is their ticket back in and hopefully evolving their thinking from the ​“software in a box” model.” Also love his take on Sketch ​“building a tool for a designer vs. building a tool for teams”.