Rafa Conde - Make your designs memorable

2026-05-05 - 59 min - source - Read full transcript

Red (host)Rafa Conde

Key insights

Sell design ideas with an ad, not a mockup.

Rafa's central argument: don't just share static mockups or a plain screen recording of a feature. Make a short, entertaining video with music, humor, and narration that sells the idea the way advertising sells a product, because that's what actually gets buy-in.

video-storytelling-for-design-pitches

Video is the format with the least information loss when transferring an idea between people.

A static mockup drops motion, flow, and emotional context; a full interactive prototype communicates more but takes far longer to build. A well-made video sits in between - it shows motion and flow while letting Rafa narrate live what to pay attention to and why it matters.

video-storytelling-for-design-pitches

Filming yourself physically holding and reacting to a device adds emotional weight a screen recording can't.

Rafa found that recording someone's hands and face using a phone at a slight angle reads as more real and resonant than a bare simulator or screen capture, because it shows a person's reaction to the interface, not just the interface itself. He uses this B-roll technique heavily in his pitch videos.

video-storytelling-for-design-pitches

Retro's onboarding video used haptic pacing, not just visuals, to physically slow the viewer down.

Rafa built a slideshow-plus-haptics intro that starts with fast buzzes and gradually slows, mirroring its message about slowing down in a noisy, ad-filled world. The pacing structure wasn't planned upfront - a coworker noticed the haptic rhythm during a daily team review, which then became the organizing principle for the soundtrack and visuals too.

onboarding-craft-and-risk

Designing for everyone caps how bold or targeted an experience can be.

Big companies must generalize for scale and accessibility, while indie projects can take emotional risks because losing a slice of users doesn't matter as much. Rafa points to Apple quietly removing the iOS 16 home-indicator label with no backlash, and to Metal Gear Solid's deliberately frustrating puzzles, as cases where trusting users to figure things out paid off.

onboarding-craft-and-risk

A/B testing an emotional onboarding video revealed a real but overstated cost.

Playing Retro's video before sign-up dropped top-of-funnel conversion 20-30%, but the effect softened by the end of onboarding since many of those users likely would have dropped anyway. The team's fix wasn't cutting the video but adding a tap-and-hold-to-skip affordance, and later respecting the phone's mute switch instead of forcing sound.

onboarding-craft-and-risk

Chase small 'wouldn't it be funny' or 'wouldn't it be cool' impulses without forcing them.

Rafa's method for injecting humor and delight is to notice the impulse, prototype it fast (a joke subscription-toggle took him 30 seconds to build), and keep it only if it still feels good on a second look. He explicitly says you can't manufacture humor or meaning on demand any more than you can order a comedian to 'be funny now.'

humor-and-humanity-in-ux

Keep a running swipe file of small delightful UI details you encounter.

Rafa recommends saving screenshots or short notes of small moments in other people's products that made you feel something - a hover state, a wave animation, a hand-drawn signature on a blog post - so they resurface as reusable inspiration. He reused a blog signature idea he'd admired years earlier on his own Apple Watch project's case study.

humor-and-humanity-in-ux

Recreating designs you admire teaches craft the way forcing a smile can lift your mood.

For designers without an established style, Rafa suggests literally rebuilding a liked design in Figma or Sketch. The physical act of tracing layout, spacing, and alignment decisions imprints those lessons even without original creative intent, similar to how the act of smiling can make you feel happier regardless of intent.

humor-and-humanity-in-ux

Formative emotional peaks in software and games set a designer's lifelong bar for what 'cool' feels like.

Rafa traces his drive to evoke feeling in software back to his first glossy MacBook unboxing and to Metal Gear Solid's fourth-wall-breaking Psycho Mantis fight, where the game tells the player to unplug their own controller to beat a mind-reading boss. He calls these moments of surprise mixed with frustration 'forever memorable' and says that's what he still tries to recreate.

humor-and-humanity-in-ux

Side projects work because they start from genuine personal need, not a market opportunity.

Rafa's rule for his own apps is to build only things he personally wants to exist - he built Hand Mirror because he was annoyed Spotlight kept promoting Photo Booth over Photos when he typed 'PH'. He says the fun and momentum of building is his actual motivation, and if he doesn't want the thing himself he either won't finish it or will do a bad job.

personal-side-projects

A self-imposed design constraint can become a joke instead of a problem to fix.

After shipping a 'Hand Mirror Plus' subscription toggle with no way to unsubscribe, Rafa didn't build real unsubscribe logic - he made the toggle shake and refuse with 'sorry, no take-backsies' when a user tries to turn it off, turning his own shortcut into a bit rather than hiding it.

personal-side-projects

Media referenced

Metal Gear Solid - other - Rafa's formative example of software breaking the fourth wall - the Meryl call-frequency puzzle (hidden on the box art) and the Psycho Mantis fight (defeated by unplugging the controller) are the memorable, frustration-then-payoff moments he still chases as a designer.
Draw Something - other - The host's own origin-story moment - the iOS game that broke his sense of what software could be and function as.
Up - movie - Rafa references Pixar's opening piano theme as an example of a soundtrack instantly invoking emotion, a trick he borrows for the sell-videos he makes to pitch design ideas.
30 Rock - show - Source of the 'Rural Juror' joke Rafa riffed on ('Hand Mirror Rural Juror') while inventing absurd fake subscription-tier names for Hand Mirror.
The Layout podcast - podcast - The podcast Rafa was previously known for before joining Retro; the host introduces him as 'Rafa from Layout.'

Companies

Retro - Rafa's current employer - a small (6-7 person), ad-free private social network for friends and family; he designed its haptic-driven onboarding video.
Splat - A second app from the Retro team's small app-studio side portfolio - uses generative AI to turn a photo of your kids into a printable coloring-book page.
Sketch - Rafa's previous employer, which he joined for the same reason as Retro: he was already a genuine fan and daily user of the product.
Netlify - A previous employer; a former coworker there, Marissa, sent Rafa the green screen he used to film the video hero section on his personal website.
Maven - Source of a lesson Rafa internalized from a co-founder there: stop over-optimizing for every edge case at the expense of the core experience for the users you actually care about.
Apple - Cited twice: for quietly removing the iOS 16 home-indicator label with no backlash, and for no longer showing a setup video on new Macs because it doesn't scale to bulk enterprise deployments.
Panic - Indie Mac developer Rafa cites as an early influence - full of delight, Easter eggs, and visible personality behind the software.
Perplexity - Maker of the Comet browser, cited for its bold, sound-and-visual-heavy onboarding that raised the bar for browser first-run experiences.
Arc - Browser cited for its unusually ambitious, widely talked-about onboarding experience that other browsers had to compete with.
The Verge - Media outlet that wrote about Rafa's side project Hand Mirror during COVID, which is what made it go viral.
InFlight - The host's own feedback tool (sponsor segment) for sharing prototypes and video walkthroughs and collecting structured feedback.
Desyn - Sponsor segment - a prototyping tool that lets teams prototype directly against their real codebase and design language without opening an IDE.
Paper - Sponsor segment - an AI design tool with a canvas that generates many concept variations at once from a spoken prompt, exportable straight to HTML/CSS.
Tolen - An AI-companion app Rafa cites as a recent product that made him feel something from the first interaction, thanks to its branding and game-like onboarding.

Techniques and frameworks

Make an ad, not a mockup - Rafa's core pitch technique: instead of sharing a static mockup or a plain screen recording, cut a short video with music, narration, and humor that sells the idea the way an advertisement would.
Start fast, end slow (haptic pacing) - Retro's onboarding video paces its haptic buzzes, visuals, and soundtrack from fast/noisy to slow/calm to physically communicate the message 'slow down' - a structure that emerged from a coworker noticing the pacing during a team review, not from an upfront plan.
Film the phone in your hand, not just the screen - Rafa records himself physically holding and reacting to the device at a slight angle instead of capturing the simulator screen, because seeing a person's face and hands reacting carries more emotional weight than a flat screen recording.
Chase 'wouldn't it be funny', don't force it - Rafa's rule for injecting humor and delight: prototype the impulse fast (a joke toggle took him 30 seconds), keep it only if it still feels good, and never manufacture whimsy or meaning on demand.
Keep a swipe file of small delightful details - Rafa recommends saving screenshots or notes of small UI moments that made you feel something, so they resurface as reusable inspiration later - he reused a blog post's hand-drawn signature idea years afterward on his own case study.
Recreate designs you admire to learn craft - For designers without their own style yet, Rafa suggests literally rebuilding a liked design in Figma/Sketch - the physical act of laying out and aligning elements teaches spacing and structure even without original intent, comparable to how forcing a smile can lift your mood.

Summary

Rafa Conde, a design engineer at the private social app Retro and formerly of Sketch and the Layout podcast, joins Red to talk about designing software that makes people feel something rather than just work well. Rafa traces the instinct back to two formative moments: unboxing his first glossy MacBook as a teenager, and playing Metal Gear Solid on PlayStation, where director Hideo Kojima broke the fourth wall by hiding a puzzle solution on the game's box art and having a boss character tell the player to physically unplug their controller. Those moments of surprise mixed with real frustration, Rafa argues, are what stick with people forever, far more than any feature that was merely efficient.

Much of the conversation centers on Retro's onboarding video, which pairs a fast-to-slow slideshow with synchronized haptic buzzing and a soundtrack that strips away street noise as it plays, all to physically communicate "slow down" in a world full of ads and reels. Rafa is candid that the design wasn't planned as a unified concept from the start - it emerged accident by accident, starting from "I know how to build a slideshow" and "haptics are fun," until a coworker noticed the haptic pacing during a team review and the fast-to-slow arc became the organizing idea for everything else, including the soundtrack. When they A/B tested the video, they saw a real 20-30% drop in top-of-funnel sign-ups, but found the impact softened by the end of onboarding; instead of cutting the video, they added a tap-and-hold-to-skip option and eventually respected users' mute-switch setting rather than forcing sound.

This leads into a broader theme about risk tolerance in design: big companies must design for everyone and so tend to over-generalize, softening bold or targeted choices, while indie projects and side projects can afford to lose a slice of users in exchange for a sharper emotional experience. Rafa cites Apple quietly removing the iOS 16 home-indicator label with no user backlash as proof that users can be trusted more than designers assume, and describes unlearning some of his own early "never make users scroll" instincts as computer literacy has risen.

Rafa's practical advice for pitching ideas is to "make an ad, not a mockup" - cut a short, entertaining video under 5-10 minutes with a soundtrack, humor, and narration, because video loses the least information when transferring an idea from one person's head to another's. He details his toolchain (ScreenFlow, CleanShot, Hand Mirror for a picture-in-picture selfie window, Keynote and his phone for B-roll, Final Cut for editing) and a specific technique: filming himself physically holding and reacting to a device, rather than the simulator screen, because a face reacting to the interface carries more emotional weight than the interface alone.

The back half of the conversation turns to Rafa's own side projects, especially Hand Mirror, a joke-filled menu-bar camera-preview app he built out of annoyance that macOS Spotlight kept surfacing Photo Booth instead of Photos. Hand Mirror is full of small absurdist touches - an unremovable "Hand Mirror Plus" subscription toggle that shakes and refuses to turn off, and endlessly re-nameable tiers like "Hand Mirror 3000" - all things Rafa added purely because they made him laugh while building. His broader advice for injecting humor and delight is to chase a "wouldn't it be funny" impulse quickly and cheaply rather than force it, and to keep an ongoing swipe file of small delightful details noticed in other people's work, the same way he reused a blog post's hand-drawn signature idea years later in his own project.

Notable Quotes

"If I have this idea for a feature, don't just design the feature and share mock-ups. Don't just make a prototype and do a screen recording of you using the feature. Make an ad, right? Sell this idea." - Rafa Conde

"You are not designing the screen, you're just tracing over it. You're recreating it, but the act of doing it makes you learn some things. It's kind of like how if you force yourself to smile, you will feel happier." - Rafa Conde

"If you try to design for everyone, then it's harder to do those more targeted experiences. Nowadays we see it in the smaller shops, smaller devs that can make the risks, my own side projects are full of these little things that I don't really do in my day job." - Rafa Conde

"Don't force it. Don't try to do something meaningful here. Just put yourself in a state where you are open to those moments." - Rafa Conde