Jordan Singer
Find yours in the Settings dialog
Jordan Singer
Find yours in the Settings dialog
Welcome back to Open Tab - a series of stories about Arc members, their projects, and their favorite places on the internet. Real Open Tab heads know that no two stories have the same intro because just like our guest today, we love to experiment. Jordan Singer is a New York-based designer, developer, and very possibly a part-time magician with a whole lot of visual delights and clever ideas up his sleeve. In 2021, he founded Diagram where together with his team, he built AI-powered tools for designers. Earlier this year they were acquired by Figma where they now work on AI.
If you know Jordan, it's likely because you've come across his posts about the whimsical apps and tools he's been ideating, building, and writing about online for the past few years. Jordan himself credits the wave of creativity that inspired a lot of his latest projects to learning SwiftUI early in 2020. It was during that time that he started making lots of small apps - from this homage to the iPod and an internet browser called ChatHTTP to a whole suite of "lil apps" that eventually evolved into lilOS.
The toughest part about building all of these apps was finding and managing people who wanted to test them which prompted one of Jordan's favorite projects - the Airport app that allowed users to distribute and discover Testflight apps. The inner workings of the Airport app were both delightfully straight-forward and fascinating. The app ran on Airtable that allowed Jordan to accept and publish app submissions from developers, and a custom API that connected it to the Airport app built with Swift UI. But the secret sauce that really pulled all of the parts together was likely "All I Need" by Drake which Jordan confessed to streaming 184 times while working on the app.
When in early 2022, Jordan introduced his followers to Diagram, it wasn't a huge surprise - his experiments with building creative tools powered by AI trace all the way back to 2018 when he tried bringing natural language processing into Sketch. It was around the same time that he saw the early iterations of the Figma API and started jotting down Figma plugin ideas and building them out. The turning point for Jordan's interest in AI tools for designers was in the summer of 2020, when he saw the mind-blowing things people were doing with GPT-3. When he finally got his hands on it, he took his early Sketch NLP prototype to the next level and built a Figma plugin called 'Designer' that built screens based off of text prompts.
Jordan's most recent explorations, like turning hand drawings and word prompts into neat wireframes, are truly mind-blowing but here is a whole Arc Folder of his projects and self-reflections that were stepping stones towards where he is today. And if you take anything away from browsing through it, let it be the importance of consistency, pushing boundaries of what's possible, and maybe blasting a little Drake.