Designer Of The Week - Derek Brown

Derek Brown (@derek on Farcaster, @derekbrown on Twitter) is the founder of Birthday Labs, a company focused on building digital economies that expand human freedom. He is best known for launching Native ($NATIVE - /nativefun), a digital city inhabited by both human and agentic citizens who co-create entertainment and economic value. Derek has experience building and leading companies of all sizes, from major players like LinkedIn and Addepar to various startups across both on-chain and off-chain spaces.

Outside of work, Derek is a Christian, a husband, and a proud father of three girls. He’s a leader, a reader, and a devoted taco enthusiast. He also enjoys /food, /music, /whiskey, and sports—often all at once. Go Birds!

Can you tell us a bit about your current project and the design process behind it?

ON NATIVE AND ITS CHALLENGES

Like I mentioned earlier, Native is a digital city of both human and agentic citizens that co-create entertainment and economic value. But it’s so much more than that.

Native is a massively ambitious project, which introduces significant design challenges.

Not just the obvious ones like "what does the world look like?" or visualizing AI citizens in a digital city. But meta-challenges like distilling Native's complexity for easy user consumption. Or creating a single overarching brand from a collection of component brands (Prints, Passports, Native Coins, Dots, Plots, and more to come).

And there's the execution challenge: some things currently live in Native haven't been "designed" at all—I shipped them anyway because I needed those building blocks in place to build something else.

ON COMPLEXITY & SIMPLICITY

Complexity should emerge from a chain or network of simplified steps. By walking users through these simplified steps, complexity emerges over time which leads to surprise → user delight → product attachment.

Design is largely about simplifying complexity. Taking a massive concept like Native and making it actionable for a general audience—that's design's job.

In projects as large as Native, concepts like progressive disclosure and information architecture hierarchies are critical. I think about these things much more than Native's look or aesthetics.

I'm constantly considering what the user needs to do next and how to give them the information and tools to accomplish that.

ON THE NATIVE BRAND

I'm just now becoming more intentional with design, and I'm grateful to have folks helping me. @fffflood and $OPSYS have been crucial execution partners, and you can see their work in the overall Native brand system.

I draw from inspiration regularly, and curate it here on the Native Design are.na board.

For those that want a full look at this process, Operating System and I are giving folks a peek into the design process for the Native brand here on YouTube.

From a design philosophy perspective, I tend to keep things super clean and simple, while thinking systemically. The use of dots in the Native Brand is a perfect example of this: not only are Dots a critical component of Native, but they also make up a critical component of the visual brand while remaining very basic in isolation.

If it doesn’t feel like a billion dollar brand, it’s not for Native.

When designing, I think about things like the kid test: could an 8 year old draw the Native logo from memory?

Native is a new modern classic, and the brand should reflect that.

ON TYPOGRAPHY & VOICE

I focus on typography a lot, and most designs start with typography.

Native uses Satoshi Variable, a variable weighted sans-serif font as the primary brand type and Fira Code as a secondary monospaced font.

Typography isn’t just “what font should I use” but how that font is utilized to communicate with users. It encompasses everything from font selection to spacing to information hierarchy.

I also include voice and tone in this category of information communication. Things like casing, person (1st, 2nd, or 3rd person prose), formality—all matter for communicating both information and culture.

I spend a lot of time thinking about type in the context of information hierarchy: the glanceability of headings, the use of black or bold fonts, the use of monospaced fonts, etc.

With Native being as complex as it is, the way that the information is conveyed should at least be clear, and 95% of the time, that information is conveyed via text.

When you communicate with users, you’re building both brand and culture.

And text is the primary way that we communicate with users.

Typography matters because text matters.

ON COLOR

I use color intentionally and sparingly, reserving it primarily for either CTAs (calls to action) or delight.

Native is primarily monochrome (with a sand/stone/grey palette), using Native Green as the action color. There are tertiary colors that are used for Dots and more, which you can see in the images below.

In thinking about color, I tend to avoid premade associations (like rainbows or red as error states or existing social network colors like Farcaster’s purple or Instagram’s gradient). Building a brand is hard enough; having users unlearn a pre-existing association is near impossible.

I also think about accessibility (for instance, don’t use red and green as alternating brand colors – not only does it have the premade association of Christmas, but it’s also a PITA for those who are red-green colorblind), and try to avoid muddling clarity with color.

ON PEOPLE-FIRST DESIGN

I don’t design first, at least in the traditional sense. There’s not a Figma for the Native product. The closest I get is an occasional shower or hot-tub sketch.

Instead, I design as I build. Part of this is just the nature of being a solo builder. Part of this is laziness. Part of this is experience. Part of this is that “reverse engineering” superpower; I can see the end result when I first start building.

This process isn't perfect and can lead to weird places that need unwinding or rethinking. There's substantial design debt in Native right now.

But the benefits are significant. This design-as-I-build approach keeps Native's design people-first, since I'm designing for a user from the beginning: myself.

As an engineer, you're inevitably using the product as you build it, so if you're intentional, you can spot friction or confusion. When you do, fix it.

I’m far from satisfied with Native’s current design, but people seem to enjoy it even in its current primordial state. I’d like to think this is a direct result from this people-first approach.

What's your creative superpower?

Creative superpower? Pattern recognition.

I think this probably stems from being more curious and learning faster than most. I can take something I’ve learned from domain A and apply it to domain B in order to execute something novel.

Most people probably don’t think of me as a designer, but rather as a full-stack builder, and I do product/design/engineering all at a fairly high level. I’ve been very fortunate throughout my career to exercise and hone these skills.

I can also easily reverse engineer a product, workflow, or feature – I know what steps need to be taken in what order to get to a desired outcome.

From a design perspective, I think people would look at my work and think I do a good job of staying “clean” from an aesthetic point of view. Information hierarchy and architecture on point, clean color palettes, etc. That sort of thing.

Tell us about a project you really enjoyed — what made it special?

This is like asking my favorite child (which they’re a special project of mine lol).

I love building Native. I love working on FML (/formodernleaders) which is a side project of mine that aims to serve leaders with tools and resources.

I loved building Bunches, a chat app for sports fans. Investors didn’t care about our six figures of revenue or half million normie users who all had a crypto wallet, but we built something special there.

I loved building Exeq, a social finance app that used transactions as content.

Might be time to resurrect this one.

Is there a tool, technique, or workflow you can't live without?

When you’re a solo full-stack developer, minimizing context switching and maximizing speed is crucial. So anything that helps me move at the speed of thought would be something I “can’t live without”.
Efficiency is everything.

Not a lot of people talk about this, but I need a mechanical keyboard with a 10-key numeric keypad. Not because I’m an accountant, but because I map them to apps on my computer. This means I can bounce from terminal (iTerm) to code (Sublime Text) to notes and sketches (Obsidian/Drafts) very quickly.

Even simple hacks like using text replacement shortcuts for contract addresses or using my actual Stream Deck for workflow shortcuts.

I keep Post-Its (blue only) and notebooks (Mnemosyne and Pilot G2-10s) around because it’s faster than using tech for quick things.

Where do you go when you need fresh inspiration? (Online, offline, in nature, in a playlist, or somewhere unexpected.)

Depends on what I need. If I’m deep in a problem and need to step away to clear my memory buffer, I’ll head to a local coffeehouse. Nashville’s scene is great and getting better. Hit me up for recs.
If I need creative or product inspiration, I’ll pour a dram of whiskey, grab a cigar, and head to the hot tub. I keep write-in-rain notepads both there and in my shower.

Online? I subscribe to literally 100s of blogs and newsletters across a range of subjects. Shout out to Feedbin for keeping it manageable.

If I need to unplug for a bit, I travel.

If you could redesign or reimagine anything, what would it be — and why?

So much. Hard to pick one. I keep a running list of ideas and things to build/rebuild/redesign/reimagine:

But if you want one that’s concrete: I’d love to design and build a city/network state for a post-AGI world. Native is the first step in this plan. Yes, it’s ambitious, but for me if it’s not ambitious, it’s not worth devoting my time to it.

We have ≈80 years on earth if we’re lucky. Might as well use it well.

Leave a legacy.

What’s something surprising or fun people might not know about you?

I’ve built houses, pastored a church, and ran an actual Bed & Breakfast. I’ve played Magic: The Gathering professionally. My three daughters share a birthday and aren’t triplets. I’m self-taught, thought I was going to go into foreign service/intelligence and instead pivoted to start my tech career while poor ($26k for a family of four).

I can clap with one hand.

What advice would you give your younger designer self?

From a life perspective? Get better at money management sooner. From a creative perspective? Invest in learning video sooner.

Otherwise, I honestly think younger me did alright. I learned a ton of things, didn’t hesitate to roll up my sleeves, made pretty solid career moves, and invested in the right things at the right time, including my family (which I started very early, thankfully).

If there was one thing you would like to improve about yourself.

I constantly battle pride, which manifests in a variety of different ways. When I was younger, it displayed itself as arrogance. As I get older, it rears its ugly head as cynicism. It’s counterproductive and not who I want to be.