Three views of the Brooklyn Bridge—sunrise from the East River, the tower from below, and the span lit up at night.
https://solomon.io/three-looks-at-the-brooklyn-bridge/
https://solomon.io/feed
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A free YouTube course on AI agents, the long-awaited move from WordPress to Astro and a weekend of photography in Lower Manhattan.
https://solomon.io/new-course-new-site-new-york/
https://solomon.io/repeating-patterns/
A free video course on Claude Code, Codex CLI and OpenCode for designers, PMs and engineers starting from zero. No prior coding experience needed.
https://solomon.io/getting-started-with-agents/
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A quiet morning along the Hudson at Battery Park City.
https://solomon.io/calm-morning-waters/
Bridges, fire escapes, and street corners across Chinatown and SoHo.
https://solomon.io/chinatown-and-soho/
An interactive flow field of glowing particles that drift through shifting noise. Click to regenerate; press ? for shortcuts.
https://solomon.io/flow-field/
A single photograph of an atrium skylight.
https://solomon.io/terminal-light-and-lines/
Bridges, overpasses, and the streets they cast in shadow.
https://solomon.io/under-the-brooklyn-bridge/
Statues, columns, and an empty Wall Street.
https://solomon.io/fearless-girl-at-nyse/
The tower from a few angles around lower Manhattan.
https://solomon.io/one-world-trade-center/
Tall ships and a lightship on Pier 16.
https://solomon.io/south-street-seaport/
A short set of downtown facade and street views.
https://solomon.io/the-continental-hotel/
Bunting, hand-painted signs, and a closed door.
https://solomon.io/sorry-were-closed/
I took theater as my art elective when I was in college at Auburn. That wasn’t by choice. I had hoped to take Intro to Architecture.
https://solomon.io/three-questions/
A vintage Ford Bronco parked on a quiet block.
https://solomon.io/96-rock/
I have been spending a lot of time lately tinkering with native Mac app development, and I’m releasing my first one—a small utility called Garbage Truck.
https://solomon.io/garbage-truck/
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Cable cars, atriums, and a wolfman with a coffee.
https://solomon.io/sfo/
Thoughts on where product design is headed.
https://solomon.io/product-design-2026/
An MCP server that gives AI tools to directly assess what's happening in your browser.
https://solomon.io/relay-inspect-mcp/
HHacker News is probably my favorite place on the internet.
https://solomon.io/zen-hacker-news/
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A canvas of particles that scatters under your cursor and explodes on click.
https://solomon.io/particle-smiley/
Agents are about to change how we build software. A look at vibe coding, Gas Town, and the emergence of the product engineer.
https://solomon.io/agents-are-about-to-change-software/
In early October, I gave a presentation on platform thinking at an onsite for Salesloft’s product experience team—what it is and what it enables.
https://solomon.io/fast/
October is one of is one of my favorite months, and recently we’ve had some perfect porch-sitting weather here in Atlanta.
https://solomon.io/derby-days/
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For years I used email drafts as quick ways to gather notes. I’d hit compose, start writing notes and leave them as a draft until I needed them later.
https://solomon.io/richard-pop-sullivan/
10 years ago Adam Wexler, Tareq Dowla and Sam Solomon founded SidePrize, the fantasy sports company that most know today as PrizePicks.
https://solomon.io/prizepicks-early-days/
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Holly and I didn’t decide where to go on our honeymoon until after our wedding.
https://solomon.io/costa-rica-honeymoon/
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We’ve been traveling constantly since our wedding. Our first stop on that tour was a last-minute trip to Jekyll Island, GA for my birthday.
https://solomon.io/jekyll-island-2024/
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From time to time the design team puts together short talks on various things.
https://solomon.io/designing-command-palettes/
When I began sending email newsletters for Signal Tower in 2013, I turned to a hometown business with a peculiar name and loveable mascot—Mailchimp.
https://solomon.io/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-hi-fives/
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Designer News is dead. Designer News was an online community for product designers. For years it was the best forum to discuss designing software.
https://solomon.io/designer-news-is-dead/
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Should we hide or disable a specific element? This is a topic that comes up frequently.
https://solomon.io/hide-or-disable/
Back in 2014 I published my first Year in Review. That makes this the 10th entry and marks a decade of these reviews. First, I am grateful to all of you.
https://solomon.io/2023-year-in-review/
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A road trip through the South Carolina lowcountry.
https://solomon.io/daufuskie-hunting-island-2023/
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For Holly’s birthday this year we chartered a Pooch Pontoon on Lake Lanier for an afternoon.
https://solomon.io/the-pooch-pontoon/
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I have been to Yosemite a couple dozen times over the years. The park has many spectacular sights, spots and trails.
https://solomon.io/yosemite-august-2023/
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I recently gave a talk about generative AI at AWS. I’m heading to Yosemite next week and made a few nightmarish creations with emojis in Midjourney.
https://solomon.io/giant-face-houses/
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An appeal to designers and product people. Overdesign adds unnecessary complexity. This complexity causes compounding downstream issues for all involved.
https://solomon.io/overdesign/
Recently, I spoke about generative AI to a group of designers and researchers at Amazon Web Services.
https://solomon.io/generative-ai-industrial-design/
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Midjourney can take single character prompts—letters, numbers, symbols and even emojis—and turn them into strange and surreal images.
https://solomon.io/emoji-prompts-midjourney/
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Hello! I hope you all had a great Fourth of July. I’ve had many projects over the last couple of months and thought I’d share some of the larger ones.
https://solomon.io/projects-projects-projects/
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Over the long weekend, I began redesigning MARTA’s iOS app. Since it’s release, I’ve wanted to try out Apple’s new iOS component library.
https://solomon.io/redesigning-martas-ios-app/
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Hey y’all, welcome to the first edition of the Solomon.io newsletter. Now, I know this newsletter isn’t exactly new to most of you.
https://solomon.io/new-year-new-newsletter/
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Hello from my parent’s kitchen table! It has been a chaotic couple of weeks. This is not how I expected to spend my time off, but here we are. It’s funny.
https://solomon.io/2022-year-in-review/
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I’ve never quite been happy with the personal logos I’ve designed. I’ve spent an enormous amount of time working on various options, but I’ve never been completely satisfied.
https://solomon.io/new-logo/
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This children’s story was generated in an afternoon with the help of AI. This post discusses the workflow for writing and illustrating the story with AI.
https://solomon.io/childrens-story-written-illustrated-ai/
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My first attempt at generating AI artwork and a walkthrough as I try and refine an idea a bit more. Lots of cool AI-generated images included.
https://solomon.io/experimenting-with-ai-artwork/
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Holly wanted to do something big for her 30th birthday—she just didn’t know what.
https://solomon.io/hollys-30th-birthday/
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It’s been almost exactly 10 years since I was one of the first participants in a new idea called code school. A decade later, I reflect on my experience.
https://solomon.io/code-school-10-years-later/
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We traveled a lot this summer. Some close friends got married in Asheville.
https://solomon.io/engaged/
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How to improve accessibility with design tokens. By using tokens to enable theming, we can begin to build themes for our colorblind customers.
https://solomon.io/improving-accessibility-with-design-tokens/
Holly and I recently returned from Washington. We took a trip out there to go visit my sister who was finishing her internship at Microsoft.
https://solomon.io/snoqualmie-july-2022/
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One of my favorite things when traveling is getting up early, walking around the city and taking pictures.
https://solomon.io/still-morning-in-new-orleans/
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Otto’s First Beach Trip
https://solomon.io/ottos-first-beach-trip/
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Two weeks ago I moved the very last interview from Signal Tower to this site. All of the interviews that have been published now exist here.
https://solomon.io/people-i-met-hosting-interviews/
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Signal Tower was the site where I hosted interviews from 2013-2016.
https://solomon.io/about-signal-tower/
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Goodbye 2021. Hello 2022. I thought this might be the year that things would start to go back to normal.
https://solomon.io/2021-year-in-review/
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Leadership Exploration, Application and Development—or LEAD as it’s known—is a 6-month leadership course offered by Salesloft.
https://solomon.io/lead-capstone/
We moved into our new house in late September. It felt enormous compared to the studio where Holly, Remi, and I spent most of the pandemic.
https://solomon.io/munchie-and-mangia/
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Cadences are at the core of what makes Salesloft such a fantastic tool. It is a workflow that groups like tasks together to reduce context switching.
https://solomon.io/pause-cadences/
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This presentation on icon fundamentals was given to Salesloft’s Product Design team on May 24, 2021. Shortly before the new icon set shipped.
https://solomon.io/salesloft-icon-fundamentals/
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What a wild year 2020 has been. Even those of us that were closely monitoring the pandemic had no idea how it would change things.
https://solomon.io/2020-year-in-review/
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As the New Year draws closer I like to reflect. Around this time I publish a few thoughts on what I made, what worked and what didn’t.
https://solomon.io/2019-year-in-review/
Extensions
This entire post was written using Markdown in Visual Studio Code. That may seem a bit ridiculous.
https://solomon.io/better-markdown-visual-studio-code/
Extensions
A handful of photos from our camping trip to Hunting Island State Park for Holly’s birthday.
https://solomon.io/hunting-island-state-park-2019/
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This talk about common Sketch shortcuts was originally given on August 19, 2018 at SalesLoft. This article is an adaptation of my presentation.
https://solomon.io/sketch-shortcuts/
Organizing colors in Sketch is a giant pain. Nothing lines up, everything overlaps.
https://solomon.io/organize-your-sketch-color-palette/
For the last couple of years I’ve used a custom tool to track cheap flights out of Atlanta. Today I’ve made that tool, Aerodero, available to everyone.
https://solomon.io/aerodero-a-tool-to-track-cheap-flights/
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Welcome to my 2018 annual review. This review is an opportunity to talk about what I made, what I learned and where I failed.
https://solomon.io/2018-year-in-review/
This talk covering the history of clip art was originally given on July 16, 2018 at SalesLoft. This article is an adaptation of my presentation.
https://solomon.io/brief-history-of-clip-art/
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I have spent a good portion of my evenings during the last two weeks working with a piece of community software called Discourse.
https://solomon.io/how-to-setup-discourse-on-digital-ocean/
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Last night a friend and I were up into the early hours of the morning talking about philosophy, life and mental health—as one does after several beers.
https://solomon.io/what-can-you-do/
Good marketing get’s whatever you’re selling in front of customers. Great marketing engages them. The best marketing will land you leads.
https://solomon.io/side-projects-and-marketing/
Once a quarter SalesLoft sets aside a few of days for the product and engineering teams to work on whatever they want.
https://solomon.io/team-badge-design-license-to-trill/
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By nature I’m a skeptic. Many people try to apply labels to complex topics that are not black and white.
https://solomon.io/course-notes-the-skeptics-guide-to-american-history/
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Around the holidays I start putting together my yearly review. These reviews are ways for me to reflect on how the year went.
https://solomon.io/2017-year-in-review/
Popularized by iOS settings, the toggle—or switch—has become pervasive in applications everywhere.
https://solomon.io/using-toggles-in-user-interfaces/
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. It had been a long time since I had read either 1984 or Brave New World.
https://solomon.io/book-review-1984-by-george-orwell/
I have spent the last month with the Moto G5s Plus and can say that it is an exceptional phone.
https://solomon.io/moto-g5s-plus-smartphone-review/
Extensions
An average SalesLoft customer has about 10 sales reps using the software. At that size, customers are extremely happy.
https://solomon.io/team-cadences/
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The Breville Boss To Go is a sleek, powerful personal blender with a die-cast metal driveshaft. It easily liquifies leafy greens and finely grinds seeds.
https://solomon.io/breville-boss-to-go-blender-review/
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Photos from my last visit to my grandmother's house outside Greenville, SC.
https://solomon.io/the-abercrombie-farm/
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Some of you already know, but Monday I’m joining SalesLoft as a product designer. From this point forward I will no longer be contributing to Trustfuel.
https://solomon.io/im-joining-salesloft/
Last week I was having a beer with a friend who’s starting a marketing agency. We begin talking about the business and services he’s planning to offer.
https://solomon.io/agency-or-indie-band/
Trustfuel users are primarily account or customer success managers (CSMs). They spend a significant part of their day talking with and emailing customers.
https://solomon.io/trustfuel-gmail-integration/
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Salesforce serves as the defacto CRM for many large and mid-sized businesses. This means Salesforce is often the defacto system for customer success.
https://solomon.io/trustfuel-salesforce-integration/
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In the world of startups many things don’t quite fit into a case study. This is a collection of those messy things. Those odds and ends.
https://solomon.io/trustfuel-sideprize-work/
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Here’s the scenario: You have a subscription business and you know a customer is leaving. Should you offer a discount to entice them to stay?
https://solomon.io/will-offering-discounts-keep-customers/
I’ve been waiting for two years to see what Apple had in store for their new MacBook Pro. After much deliberation. I’ve decided to skip the 2016 MacBook Pro.
https://solomon.io/im-skipping-2016-macbook-pro/
Taking time at the end of the year to reflect is a great exercise. It allows me to think through things that went both well and poorly.
https://solomon.io/2016-year-in-review/
Ash Huang is a designer and award-winning novelist from Silicon Valley.
https://solomon.io/ash-huang-artist-author-designer/
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How do people talk about the profession? Do more people refer to it as client success or customer success? What is the correct post-sales nomenclature?
https://solomon.io/client-success-vs-customer-success/
Understanding Net Promoter Score was among the first posts we published about NPS. Since then it has become one of the most-read articles on this blog.
https://solomon.io/understanding-net-promoter-score/
Clark Valberg is the founder and CEO of InVision. If you are a designer, you have probably gotten an email from Clark at one time or another.
https://solomon.io/clark-valberg-invision-co-founder-ceo/
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Linda Liukas thinks is the author and illustrator behind Hello Ruby, a series of children’s books about technology.
https://solomon.io/linda-liukas-rails-girls-founder-author-of-hello-ruby/
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What is the best Net Promoter Score software? After spending time researching several NPS survey tools, we’ve got some answers.
https://solomon.io/best-net-promoter-score-software/
Jessica Hische is a lettering artist, designer and author. Her clients include Nike, NPR, New York Times, Samsung and many more.
https://solomon.io/jessica-hische-lettering-artist-author/
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Randy J. Hunt Randy J. Hunt is the Vice President of Design at Etsy and author or Product Design for the web.
https://solomon.io/randy-j-hunt-vp-of-design-at-etsy/
Extensions
Rachel Andrew Rachel Andrew is a developer, speaker, author, and founder of Perch, a friendly CMS.
https://solomon.io/rachel-andrew-developer-speaker-founder-of-perch/
Extensions
Tim Van Damme is the founder of Abstract, a company building version control for designers. Previously, Tim was a designer for Instagram, Dropbox and more.
https://solomon.io/tim-van-damme-founder-of-abstract/
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Amandah Wood is a writer, editor and founder of Ways We Work, a publication that dives into people doing work they love.
https://solomon.io/amandah-wood-founder-of-ways-we-work/
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Scott Belsky joins us to highlight his journey from Fortune 500 MBA grad to the creative chaos of the design world.
https://solomon.io/scott-belsky-investor-author-founder-of-behance/
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Aarron Walter is the VP of Design Education at InVision and is the author of Designing for Emotion. Previously he founded the UX practice at Mailchimp.
https://solomon.io/aarron-walter-vp-of-design-education-at-invision/