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AMA: Christopher Downer, Designer at Sketch

almost 8 years ago from Christopher Downer, Designin’ Sketch

  • Philip AmourPhilip Amour, almost 8 years ago (edited almost 8 years ago )

    Hello Chris, thanks for doing the DN AMA. It must be an exciting challenge to work at Bohemian Coding and build a very powerful and focus, yet simple tool for other fellow designers. I think that it goes without saying that everybody here appreciates your efforts as you guys really do make designers' lives much easier and help us focus on designing great products rather than figuring out workarounds and get frustrated over tools that are not working properly or were not designed by designers for designers with focused user experience in mind.

    I have a couple of questions to ask.

    1) What's the most challenging problem you are currently tackling? :)

    2) I am not sure if I am correct but I heard that the Bohemian Coding team is made of a distributed team that works remotely. How do you guys communicate? Have you ever experienced any issues of working remotely? If so, how did you go about solving them?

    3) What are your highlights from working at Realmac Software?

    4) Are you coming to London anytime soon?

    12 points
    • Jack ReidJack Reid, almost 8 years ago

      Question one is really great. I'm going to ask this of more people I admire.

      9 points
    • Andy MerskinAndy Merskin, almost 8 years ago

      +1 to question 2. Working remotely's always been so fascinating to me.

      1 point
    • Christopher Downer, almost 8 years ago

      Thanks for the kind words, Philip! Definitely is exciting, and I love what I do. As a designer, I’m aware of the pain others go through, so I totally want to alleviate some of that and make things easier for them, and of course myself.

      1) Nice try, I’m not going to reveal stuff that easily! I do want to share the features I’ve been working on though as I’m really excited about it, but let’s just say it’s uncharted territory. Something that’s not really been done, so there’s nothing really to take any references from.

      2) Correct! We’re all spread throughout Europe, and now have a member in the US with no main office. We’ve tried a lot of apps, but like HipChat, and we use GitHub for everything else (also, Waffle) I miss working in an office, but do enjoy working from home. Certainly there’s times where you just want a big whiteboard, and be able to talk to each other, than typing stuff out when you’re in a hot discussion, but I think it’s just something that just works for us. We all do try and meet up annually which is a lot of fun!

      3) It was my first real design job out of university (I dropped out) so it was an amazing place to go to where everyone was so passionate about making and shipping great software. I learned a tonne, from everyone I worked with, and the experience I got from there will last a lifetime.

      4) November 23rd at http://beyondconf.co! (I live an hour outside the Big Smoke)

      5 points