Ep #17: Frank Bach (Anthropic): Building Your Own Design Tool, Beginning Anywhere, and a Swiss Army Knife Career

Tom and Jonny sit down with Frank Bach, a product designer at Anthropic who built his own design tool during onboarding week. They dig into why he prototypes in HTML instead of Figma, unpack his Swiss Army knife career from Red Bull to Headspace to Instagram, and get his advice for designers feeling the AI squeeze.

Key takeaways

1. Build the tool while you build the work. Frank made his design tool feature by feature during his first project at Anthropic, adding each part the moment he hit the need for it. A share function when he wanted to show his PM, then a Loom-style recording feature the next day, camera feed and all, in about three prompts.
2. Load a control and a variant side by side and click them in sync. The most unusual thing he built steps two prototypes through the same screens on a single click. He is hoping Figma steals the idea.
3. Most people inside a company have never seen the screens they own. Everyone at Headspace got the app free, so nobody had laid eyes on an upsell screen in years. A live side-by-side of current state and proposed state is what gave leadership the confidence to green-light the work.
4. Begin anywhere. Frank has turned John Cage’s line into a working design principle. What matters is having something to click, see and feel, and the details get figured out along the way.
5. Variety compounds differently to mastery. Energy drinks at Red Bull, meditation at Headspace, then social media at Instagram: every jump was chosen on purpose. He calls himself a Swiss Army knife of design, and reckons it is what makes someone stand out in an interview panel.
6. Learning the tools on the company dime is a real benefit worth asking for. DoorDash set a goal it called Design 2028, where every designer becomes a design engineer, and gave people the time and space to get there. Frank admits he complained about it at first and is now grateful he did not have to learn it in his own hours.
7. A lot of people working hard on something is a reason for empathy, and the metric still decides whether it worked. Frank got pushback from a former colleague for publicly critiquing a feature. His read: designers who want to talk business have to be able to talk about failures like adults, because there is not a lot of emotion in business.
8. Do the next project’s pre-work before you get to it. Frank queues up a foundation on the Tuesday so that Monday’s project starts from something rather than a blank page. Half of it may be throwaway, and a PM running agents can now come back in a morning with what used to take a two-week sprint.
9. Solve one of your own problems and it becomes the standout project in your portfolio. For anyone in an organisation with no AI budget and no guidance from above, that is Frank’s route through. A grocery list app or a plugin for a digital guitar amp both count, imperfect included.
10. Old, slightly bad technology is a good counterweight to this pace. Frank keeps a five-inch black-and-white Quasar countertop television on his desk, one channel and a radio dial. He calls it poorly designed and perfectly designed at the same time, the same pull that took people back to vinyl.
11. Close the 100 tabs and learn one thing today. His answer to feeling overwhelmed in an AI-first company. Nobody has landed on a perfect process yet, which means the process is still yours to shape, and he found that anxiety and excitement flipped over into each other almost overnight.

Chapters

• 0:04 — Bureau, Edenspiekermann, Headspace, Instagram, DoorDash: the run-up to Anthropic
• 2:18 — A day at Anthropic, where a 12-month roadmap makes no sense
• 4:32 — The LinkedIn post that started all this
• 5:03 — A quiet onboarding week and an enterprise Claude account
• 7:46 — “How do I share this?” A share function, then a Loom feature, in three prompts
• 9:14 — Shortcut keys, screen glimmers and museum wallpapers
• 10:18 — Accidentally rebuilding Claude Design, backwards
• 11:24 — Sunshine Shop, WooCommerce and total cowboy mode
• 12:33 — Will the Frank tool still be around in 12 months?
• 13:37 — Two prototypes side by side, clicking in sync
• 15:41 — Where the line sits between human and AI
• 16:43 — Mega tools, workspaces and a live command line
• 18:54 — Energy drinks to meditation to social media: the Swiss Army knife career
• 21:07 — Mastery versus invention, and naming the Frank Mega Tool
• 23:52 — DoorDash’s Design 2028, and a quarterly meetup as a forcing function
• 27:30 — Accountants, lawyers, and doing your taxes with an AI tool
• 29:19 — The weirdest design processes he has come across
• 32:19 — John Cage: begin anywhere
• 34:13 — Critiquing an old colleague’s feature, and the fallout
• 37:00 — Advice for designers with no budget and no backing
• 41:14 — Mathematicians, art, Spotify and Suno
• 42:55 — Quickfire: AGI takes over, what do you do with the time?
• 43:59 — Quickfire: the five-inch Quasar TV that is perfectly badly designed
• 45:59 — Staying grounded when the pace is this intense
• 48:41 — Close your 100 tabs and learn one thing today

Mentioned in the episode

Frank

• Frank Bach’s website — francoisbach.com
• Frank on LinkedIn — linkedin.com/in/francoisbach
• Frank on X — x.com/zendadddy
• Sunshine Shop, his creative collective and e-commerce store — sunshineshop.la
• LA Design & Dev, the Los Angeles meetup he organises — ladesignanddev.com

Companies and past roles

• Anthropic — anthropic.com
• Bureau, the design studio Frank co-founded and later closed
• Edenspiekermann, where Red Bull was the main client — edenspiekermann.com
• Red Bull — redbull.com
• Headspace — headspace.com
• Instagram — instagram.com
• DoorDash — doordash.com

People

• Jenny Wen, Head of Design at Claude, whose Hatch Conference talk Jonny saw — jennywen.ca
• Andy Puddicombe, the English co-founder of Headspace — headspace.com/content/video/meet-andy-puddicombe/923
• John Cage, composer, source of “Begin anywhere” — johncage.org

Tools and products discussed

• Claude — claude.ai
• Claude Design — anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs
• Figma — figma.com
• Cursor — cursor.com
• Loom — loom.com
• Sketch — sketch.com
• Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop — adobe.com
• WordPress — wordpress.org
• WooCommerce — woocommerce.com
• Dropbox — dropbox.com
• GitHub — github.c...