Randy Hunt: Notion and Etsy design leader on why the best design teams stay small

In graduate school, Randy Hunt poured his heart and soul into a poster for Milton Glaser’s class, a picture built entirely from hand lettering that read as an image from across the room and as words up close. Glaser glanced at it, said, “Well, that’s not very good,” and moved on to the next student.

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Randy tells that story fondly. What stayed with him wasn’t the sting but the standard: keep the floor high, and the ceiling keeps rising. He carried that idea from Glaser’s studio, where he apprenticed, through a career leading design at Etsy, at Grab in Singapore, and until recently at Notion.

At Notion, that standard meant a design team smaller than anyone would expect, on purpose. Randy argues that limited bandwidth forces a company to prioritize, and that great people have little patience for what he calls “the work around the work.” The team doesn’t talk about titles or levels. Designers ship code in the production app, something Randy built teams around at Etsy in 2010, long before “design engineer” came back into fashion.

We also get into what he calls “whole design,” which means treating a push notification with the same care as the main dashboard. He explains why hotels and restaurants inspire him as much as any software, and traces that back to growing up near Disney’s carefully spaced trash cans in Orlando and to the bowl of fresh fruit that always sat in Glaser’s studio.

Bio

Randy J. Hunt is a designer, artist, and author based in New York City, with more than 20 years of experience building products, brands, and businesses. Most recently, he was Head of Design at Notion. He also chairs the MFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts, a graduate program focused on entrepreneurial designers. Earlier, he led design at Etsy, Artsy, and Grab, co-founded the designer-made marketplace Supermarket, and served as Chief Product Officer at the coffee-tech company Morning. He apprenticed at Milton Glaser's studio, founded the design studio Citizen Scholar, and wrote Product Design for the Web (New Riders, 2013).

Books & Links

Randy Hunt on LinkedIn

randyjhunt.com

The Hunt

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