Mike Matas

A product design studio website built with Next.js.

Number: 083
Category: Studio portfolio
Discipline: Product design
Built with: Next.js
Type: Lab Grotesque
Colour: #F8F8F8
Website: mikematas.com
Added: 9 May 2023

Design notes

Mike Matas is a product design studio website. Typefaces detected: Lab Grotesque. Headings and text share a sans-serif voice. The first screen is a light page built around off-white (#F8F8F8). It is built with Next.js. It opens with the line “Instant Articles”.

From the site: “Mike Matas is an entrepreneur and interface designer based in Healdsburg, California. His work can be seen in products from Apple, Nest, Facebook, Microsoft, and his startups Delicious Library, Push Pop Press and Lobe. He is currently working on some new projects with LoveFrom. Outside of design, Mike is a passionate photographer, gardener, husband and dad. — Hi, I’m Mike Matas. Growing up in Seattle, I loved making movies. In 2000, when I was 13 years old, I managed to get an internship editing videos at a local movie production studio. Video editing was just then making the leap from large complex AVID editing suites to simple personal computers running Final Cut Pro. During that internship, I learned to admire the power of a thoughtfully designed computer. I began to fall in love with not only what you could do with a computer, but the computer itself. In 2001, when I was 14 years old, I got a job working at one of the early NextStep software companies called The Omni Group. After some persistence, they had reluctantly agreed to let me come in after school and help answer customer support emails. But after a few days on the job, it became clear my mild dyslexia and awful spelling was not compatible with customer support. But instead of showing me the door, they generously let me stay on and help design the user interfaces for their new Mac OS X products. And I have been practicing user interface design ever since. High school became less interesting to me, and at 17 years old, I dropped out to start my own software company. The app we created called Delicious Library allowed people to use their iSight camera to scan the barcodes on the books in their home library and add them to a digital catalogue presented on a realistic wood bookshelf. To my parent's relief, it was well-received. Delicious Library won Best User Experience at WWDC 2005, and I was asked to come work at Apple. So at 19 years old, instead of going to university, I moved to San Francisco and joined the then six-person Apple HI Team. My first assignment was creating what turned out to be PhotoBooth, a fun app designed to show off the new built-in iMac camera. I also worked on some Mac OS X features like the cosmic TimeMachine interface. But most of my time was spent on a little project that was just getting off the ground that turned out to be the first iPhone and iPad. It was a real education collaborating with the team to design the first version of iOS and apps like camera, photos, and maps. When people ask where I went to university, I like to say Apple. After leaving Apple in 2009, I helped design the first Nest Thermostat. And soon after that, I founded a new digital publishing company called Push Pop Press. The first book we published with Al Gore was called Our Choice. Delivered as an iPad app, the immersive 400-page book presented the solutions to the climate crisis through text, images, videos, and interactive infographics. The design of the app did away with conventional navigation buttons and toolbars in favour of natural pinch and swipes that allowed the book to be browsed seamlessly without any visual distractions. After Facebook acquired the company in 2011, I led the design of its publishing platform Instant Articles and its Creative Lab that reimagined the Facebook mobile experience with an app called Paper. In addition to designing user interfaces for products, I have also worked in parallel to create the underlying tooling necessary to allow myself and others to imagine new designs. At Facebook, I helped develop the interactive prototyping tool Origami, which allowed the team to design rich physics-based interfaces without coding. Origami is still one of my primary design tools today. In 2016, after finding myself curious about some machine learning ideas, I started a company called Lobe that created an easy-to-use visual tool for training machine learning models. Microsoft recently acquired the company to help non-technical people like designers, educators, and scientists tinker with and harness machine learning in their work. Seven years ago, my wife and I moved two hours north of San Francisco to live in an off-grid house in the foothills of Dry Creek Valley just outside of Healdsburg. We love life up here with our two young daughters, ten chickens, honey bees, and hearty vegetable garden.”

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Mike Matas

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