149 - Allan Grinshtein

Allan Grinshtein is a Product Designer at Netflix. He was previously a Product Designer at Facebook and was the Founder and CEO of LayerVault.

He also recently started a community for designers called Good News that is a great place for collaboration, news, inspiration and discussion.

Here's what's in my office:

• A 16-inch Macbook Pro and a 13-inch Macbook Pro
• Pablo Circa desk lamp
• A red Herman Miller Cosm chair
• LG Ultrafine 5K display with Good News up on the screen
• Tom Dixon Offcut Bench
• Muuto Compile Shelving filled with books and knick-knacks
• A rotation of posters, riso prints, weird layout sketches, and my son’s drawings

My tool stack is almost entirely:

• Things
• IA Writer
• Notion
• Figma
• Slack
• Nova
• and Terminal

Q/A ☕️

What is your favorite item in your workspace?

A blue mug that my son made as a birthday gift.

How do you spark creativity?

Lots of output. Whenever they’re kind enough to pop into my head, I capture ideas in a doc or Figma or on paper. Sometimes I'll return later to massage ideas into a complete thought, but I’ve built up a pretty large graveyard of loose ends.

And espresso, of course.

How do you keep the work-life balance?

Having a wife and kid means that you can't always be at your desk. But I don’t have what you might call “work-life balance”. I don’t even like the idea of it. If I'm not with my family, I'm usually working.