Thread by @figmadesign

Hi! This is Marcin.

For the last year or so, I have been obsessed with Sutro Tower, a TV and radio tower that’s almost exactly in the center of San Francisco. It’s 300m in height, and sitting on a hill that’s just as tall itself. ⁝ MW

The tower has been there since 1973, and it’s become a weird icon – a thing you must acknowledge is not beautiful in any traditional sense, but you grow to like over time as an almost-constant skyline companion in SF.

I am still figuring out why I love it so much. Partly, I think, it’s because it is so weird and technical… or, perhaps, that its beauty is not the kind of traditional designed beauty I’m supposed to love and promote as a designer.

But I love that kind of stuff. I once went on a trip just to check weird, old moving bridges in Chicago: medium.com/urban-explorat…

Another time, I literally invited myself to a decrepit bus yard (I went to a writing class with a guy who happened to be its manager), perhaps the first person to do so for that particular decrepit bus yard: medium.com/urban-explorat…

As for Sutro Tower… I’ve not only been taking constant photos of it, but also eventually moved to live closer to it.

https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/1236825329865347074

There is a whole lot that I like about Figma the product and Figma the company. But one of those things is that Figma on the inside, when looking at the codebase and all the tiny and big design considerations, also feels beautiful in its technical and systemic complexity…

…particularly since it’s connected to other really complex things I love to figure out, too: the web platform, the history of graphic design tools, the mysteries of typography.

It’s never boring, just like Sutro Tower never is… at least not to me.

So let’s look at some of that weird under-the-hood complexity throughout the rest of the day!