Design-Forward Companies That Make Me Feel Things

This isn't a quirky blog about a niche product that clearly isn't scalable, or a strategy so unique it can't be replicated. I won't be name-dropping any Japanese stationery brands with outrageously priced pouches that keep showing up on the desks of the work-from-home crowd.

This is about design in everyday life, the things that make my life better simply by using them. It's about how good design often compensates for shortcomings elsewhere. This blog is a love letter to the companies that have realized good design can be a product in and of itself.

Robinhood

Robinhood exploded onto the scene during the COVID era, when many people received stimulus checks and were looking for ways to spend or invest them. It's now known as the app where you can lose your money and still look good doing it. I don't have the numbers to back this up, but I'd bet Robinhood ranks among the top three mobile stock trading apps in the world. Its gamified approach to trading makes the experience so accessible, you hardly feel like you're losing real money.

In reality, Robinhood’s only real edge over its competitors is its design. It's sleek, the micro interactions are incredibly polished, and it avoids the (often essential) information overload that plagues most trading apps. Its design language is unique and instantly recognizable. But as a product, it falls short for anyone who takes trading even semi-seriously. It frequently offers worse trade execution and pricing, relentlessly promotes its terrible Gold program, halted trading during one of the biggest bull runs in history, lacks paper trading, and depending on who you ask, its fractional shares might just be one of the greatest scams of all time. Whether or not these drawbacks personally affect you, and regardless of how much of the online discourse is true, the fact remains: Robinhood has stayed ahead of the curve almost entirely through extensive UX research and stunning UI design.

Vercel

Vercel is a cloud-as-a-service company and the team behind the now-popular frontend framework, Next.js. I've coined a term for a certain subset of modern UIs that all seem to share the same aesthetic: Vercel design. Just visit their homepage and you'll see what I mean, web-focused, built on Next.js, using Geist or similar fonts. It’s clean, modern, and minimalist. Quietly premium, yet highly functional.

There are a few key puzzle pieces when it comes to Vercel's design philosophy. One particularly interesting aspect is that they don't hire traditional UI or UX designers, which is surprising, given the polished, beautiful interfaces they produce. Instead, they hire what they call “Design Engineers”: developers who are equally skilled in visual design and code. Since Vercel is a developer-focused company and relatively under the radar outside the tech world, this approach works well. They understand their user base, fellow programmers, and this has paid off in the form of a design language that feels intuitive and appealing to developers.

Another piece of the puzzle, I believe, is their typeface Geist. It's a truly beautiful font. Designed by Basement in collaboration with Vercel, Geist Sans is a grotesque-style sans-serif, paired with its monospaced counterpart, Geist Mono. The two work together seamlessly, allowing designers to switch between them while maintaining a cohesive aesthetic. Honestly, the Vercel design language feels incomplete without Geist and it's hard to imagine their brand using anything else without it feeling off.

Airbnb

Rent out your home when you're not there, simple enough. Airbnb is one of tech's VC poster children, a success story often brought up when investors are trying to woo new founders with their war chests. Its UI is inviting, warm, and intuitive, largely thanks to Airbnb's world-famous Design Language System (DLS). The DLS is an internally maintained and aggressively iterated design specification that brings consistency and cohesion across all of Airbnb's platforms. There are countless articles on the DLS, so I won't dwell on it too much here.

There are a few aspects of Airbnb's design I want to highlight. They were the pioneers of the map view for booking stays. Airbnb revolutionized the space to such a degree that any new travel service offering bookings now needs a map view to stay relevant (I should know, my last major project was CHN). Even today, they're still the only ones who execute it this well. Their implementation is smooth, responsive, and scales beautifully across devices. It also interacts seamlessly with their hybrid cards.

Speaking of cards, Airbnb's design loves them. They use a lot of them, and they do it tastefully. The soft shadows combined with immaculate information architecture really tie their UI together. Unlike Robinhood, Airbnb isn't a weak product hiding behind good design. But I'd bet their advantage in user experience plays a big role in setting them apart from the competition, which is basically the entire hotel industry.

A little trick Airbnb uses, or maybe just a natural consequence of their platform, is their reliance on beautiful imagery. For the designers reading this: have you ever masked a weak layout with stunning placeholder images? You know the ones, gorgeous product shots that would never actually make it into production. Maybe you used a high-end thumbnail, fully aware the final frontend will show a 360p screenshot of a leaked WhatsApp chat. Well, not Airbnb. Because hosts are incentivized to make their listings look as appealing as possible, Airbnb gets a built-in design boost from all the professionally shot, perfectly lit interior photos. Just pick any location and browse the cards, nearly every image showcases immaculately maintained homes that make you want to book on the spot.

Apple

One of the largest companies in the world. The poster child for consumer electronics and personal computing. The brainchild of a ruthless creative force. While Apple still manages to divide opinion globally with its design decisions, one thing is undeniable: for the scale they operate at, they are exceptionally good at design.

Let’s go back to the beginning, when a young Jony Ive rose to the role of VP of Industrial Design at Apple during Steve Jobs' second tenure. He worked closely on iconic products like the Apple Watch, iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and even played a role in shaping the UI of iOS. His industrial design philosophy was deeply influenced by the Bauhaus movement, which championed principles like “form follows function” and “less is more.” Ive became such a central figure at Apple that he was even considered a favorite to succeed Jobs after his untimely death in 2011. That alone speaks volumes about how closely people associate Ive, and his design vision, with the very essence of Apple.

Apple is often criticized for prioritizing aesthetics over functionality, sometimes to a fault. Think of the mechanically fragile butterfly keyboards on MacBooks or the bending iPhones. But despite these missteps, the lead that products like the iPhone, MacBook, and their respective operating systems have maintained over competitors for decades has paid off, earning Apple a fiercely loyal fanbase.

Perplexity

The firm behind their branding wrote a fantastic article that's well worth a read. I'd describe Perplexity's design as 'lived', it feels familiar, like something I've used for years, even though the brand is entirely new. Give it a read here.

UmbrelOS

A smaller shoutout, but a worthy one. UmbrelOS is essentially macOS meets home server. If you're planning to spin up some basement storage and like Apple's aesthetic, this might be your perfect companion.

Linear

I have no idea what they actually do, and I've never used their product, but their website goes dumb hard. Think Vercel, but turned up to eleven.

Nothing

They're creating great Android alternatives for creatives who want their tech to be as expressive as they are. I proudly own their smartwatch, bought mostly for its wild industrial design, solid battery life, and impressive price point.

Shop.app

What I wish the Amazon app felt like. Clean, no-nonsense ecommerce UX. Just ditch the AI chat, I don't want to have a full blown conversation with every website I browse.

AllTrails

Airbnb but for hikers. Excellent map interface, great discoverability, and a seamless overall experience. Love using it.

Takeaway

Across all the companies and products I've discussed, one common thread stands out: intent. None of these companies stumbled into good design, they made deliberate choices to prioritize it. They hired intentionally, structured teams to empower designers, and treated design as a core function, not an afterthought. The reasons behind that intent vary. For Robinhood, good design was a survival strategy, they either built a better-designed trading app or faded away. For Apple, it stemmed from the founder's deep love for intuitive functionality. Whatever the motivation, each of these companies made design a key part of their brand, a selling point, a competitive edge.

The takeaway here, whether you're a creative, a developer, or a founder, is to be intentional with your design decisions. Hire a creative firm with a proven track record. Invest in user research. Understand your users. Try bold ideas. For modern companies, the ROI on design might be second only to engineering.