head of product growth @paper
San Francisco, CA
Joined September 2023
- Tweets238
- Following218
- Followers772
- Likes2.3K
Dom Gordon retweeted
I'll be joining Tommy for a live chat about all things design, tools, and new workflows at 12PM Pacific today.
I'd love to answer some questions from chat. Come join in!
We run community-only live streams on the @joindiveclub Discord server.
Today at 12 PM Pacific we're going live with @stephenhaney, founder of @paper, on where the design canvas is going:
1. Modern canvas workflows
2. Paper's upcoming release
3. And why the canvas should start from code
Our community Discord is free but only opens invites one week per quarter.
Today, I'm dropping the link below for the next 2 hours.
Then this post self-destructs. See you there.
Dom Gordon retweeted
it has been wild weekend to see @paper pricing be the topic of design twitter
let me share some of our internal discussions
first: it's really valuable feedback. we want to find the optimal way to price that creates incredible value for the design and agent communities and also supports Paper as a growing team
pricing is hard to get perfectly right. we'll iterate and I'm listening to all feedback
I'm also grateful for how many people are posting about how Paper is worth it. Seriously, you don't know how much it means to me after pouring our lives into this software for the last 2 years.
Paper is a currently 15 insanely talented people who are passionate about design and making the best software we can (we were 5 people earlier this year, growing fast!)
we're going through a transition from "early adopter" stage to being the new default design tool for agentic teams, and some of the decisions we made a year ago need an update
one thing that is good for everyone: the way Paper is currently pricing is mostly working: our revenue growth is off the charts and we're predominantly charging teams who get the most value.
it means your design tool is going to be around in the future. You can invest your time and work in Paper. We can keep funding fixes and new features
so next we'd love to find ways to let Paper be usable for side projects, student work, and dabbling. And only charge for professional work where it's easy to pay for your tools.
So we're discussing:
1. Education program so Paper can be free for students and educators
2. New onboarding flow that shows how pricing works during the wizard so there are no surprises
3. Faster free tier resets - instead of weekly, perhaps it should be daily, or even hourly
You'll see these and other ideas roll out over the coming weeks. Keep the feedback coming!
damn @paper gives you like 10 minutes of MCP usage and then demands payment, what a horrible experience
Dom Gordon retweeted
I wanted to share more about Components in @paper to help everyone plan for the upcoming launch. We've been hard at work and we have something truly next level to ship soon.
1. Components dev is going very well. We don't set hard deadlines, we're a "release it when it's good" kind of product, but I'd estimate ~1 month or so. Certainly before EOY.
2. Creating one shared world from your codebase to the canvas and back is the priority.
We don't want to just repeat the abstractions from existing design tools; we want to fix the fragmented workflow between developers and designers. But we also don't want to add cognitive load or engineering concept while you're designing.
Principle: designing with components should feel familiar, designer-first, and then also happen to align to your codebase effortlessly. No tool has ever pulled this off yet.
3. The initial components release will be mature and include: slots, variants with props, React in, React out, and full agent support. Components from your codebase can also run real code, so components can have logic, dates, and math.
4. Agents can read and write components quickly, accurately, and with low token usage. To your agent, components in Paper just look like React, which means they already know exactly how to use them.
I'm so excited to share Paper components with the Paper community. Thanks for your patience as we do the R&D necessary to ship something next level 🙏
Getting super close on components! It’s a huge system to build. We want to make sure to get the design right so we don’t end up with the same issues that other design tools have, where it’s creating two worlds between the codebase and the canvas.
Paper’s components will be React in and React out, so you can stay in sync without translation (and they can even run their code logic)
Dom Gordon retweeted
The one and only @agusegui giving us a glimpse into the process behind Paper Mono.
Dom Gordon retweeted
so the stack this time was pretty simple:
· WebGL + GLSL shaders for the skins
· @Paper for the tile layouts. They’re parsed on the html canvas and imported from there, and portraits can be sent back to it too vía MCP. Most of the skins also come from the Paper Shaders lib <3 thanks to @uuuuuulala brilliant engineering
· Good old FFmpeg, with basically every encoding decision left to Claude Opus 5.5
· Web Audio API: you can spot some sound design tied to the same semantics. Very WIP, tbh, and something that can keep evolving as new episodes come out
Dom Gordon retweeted
Testing out Pi's new support MCP in @paper
looks to be working great (and fast too)
Dom Gordon retweeted
We just shipped Quiver 2.0 in @paper
This is the best SVG generation possible, it's an incredible leap forward
• Much faster AND better quality
• Cleaner geometry
• New Telos model for detailed work
Next level vector generation -- available today in Paper
Dom Gordon retweeted
The invite and the menu 🍅
There’s being into design, and then there’s the @paper team. Doesn’t get better than hosting a dinner for founders that value design with them. Excited to try and top this with our next one ;)
Dom Gordon retweeted
from last night's @designerfund x @paper dinner. couldn't have asked for better event partners - an unreal amount of love and care put into every single detail, to no surprise.
There’s being into design, and then there’s the @paper team. Doesn’t get better than hosting a dinner for founders that value design with them. Excited to try and top this with our next one ;)
Dom Gordon retweeted
The goats at @paper are now sponsoring recent.design
I was using Paper just yesterday, it's superb for quick iteration.
That's now 3 of 4 slots gone currently.
recent.design/sponsor
Dom Gordon retweeted
This man is 10 years ahead, as always
Guillermo wrote Pure UI in 2015 and never mentioned coding agents once. I mean, who could? Early React: describe the states, let something render them from the spec, good old JSON lol
It's just wild that now the spec is Markdown and an agent does the rendering. Same essay, 10 years later
btw you can just throw Vercel's design.md at @paper and watch the screens land on the canvas... man what a time to be alive
Dom Gordon retweeted
design → dev handoff is slowly becoming a thing of the past.
we recently made the member ID cards for @aiweekendsxyz and the whole thing started as a tiny shader experiment in @paper .
few prompts with claude later, that same exploration became a functional internal tool that could generate IDs for every member, while replicating the original design almost stupidly accurately.
this is why i’ve been using Paper so heavily lately.
i’ve been on it for almost a year, but their MCP has genuinely changed where it sits in my workflow. quick explorations, graphics, random ideas, things i want to visually think through before they deserve a proper “project”.
and imo, Paper MCP is probably the most accurate design MCP i’ve used so far.
the weekly limits annoy me a little lol, but fair.
what’s more interesting though is where this is heading.
the gap between “i designed this” and “i shipped this” is getting ridiculously small.
and i think tools like Paper are quietly changing what it means to be a designer in the first place.
Dom Gordon retweeted
Incredible to see how many people are using Paper daily in this thread.
Paper is growing 30% every month and it's accelerating. Great times ahead!
Who loves @paper?
Who hates it?
Why?
I'm thinking about switching away from Claude Design
