Scott Belsky on empowering the creative world, and implications of the interface layer

Welcome to episode three of DN FM. Through interviews, news and Office Hours community segments, DN FM aims to spark a meaningful conversation on design.

Scott Belsky joins us to highlight his journey from Fortune 500 MBA grad to the creative chaos of the design world. He dives into Behance's mission to empower the creative world - and his personal journey thereof. Scott also explains the implications of the interface layer, and concludes with his shift into venture capital.

Scott is an investor, entrepreneur and author. Currently a General Partner at Benchmark Capital, he previously founded Behance and 99U, and wrote Making Ideas Happen.

Sponsor

Craft by InVision is supporting DN FM this episode. Craft is a free suite of plugins for Sketch and Photoshop that’ll turbo charge your workflow. Use the Data plugin to design with real data- even pull live web and JSON values into your design. Use the Library plugin to create beautiful style guides and share assets across your team. And coming soon, use the Prototype plugin to prototype your designs right inside of Sketch! Snag the plugins at invisionapp.com/craft

Community Announcements

###Projects

DN has partnered with Crew to connect members of our community with design and development projects. You can apply to work on listed projects or submit your own to Crew’s vetted network.

###Upcoming Meetups:

Seattle is taking place August 25

Toronto is coming up September 15

#Featured Jobs

Joyable needs a Senior UX Designer and a Senior Visual Designer (San Francisco)

Highrise is looking for a Maker of Software (Remote)

Connect Software needs a Senior Product Designer (San Francisco)

Expedia is searching for a Product Designer (Paris)

Episode Highlights

###Top Stories:

Open-sourced photography DN'er Sam Zeller decided to give away all his photographs for free. His photos on Unsplash have been used in Apple campaigns and downloaded tens of thousands of times, inspiring him to set his entire archive of work free, available for private and commercial use.

Airbnb's new Samara design studio: Airbnb is going in-house with a new design studio. This new services-design team kicked off their first project by urban-planning a new community center in Japan. An undeniable link exists between Samara and the Russian design studio Lapka that was acquired by Airbnb last year.

Instagram Stories: Instagram released a new feature called Stories, a controversial dupe of Snapchat’s already-popular Stories feature.

###Interview

How frustration with the creative world drew Scott to design (7:20)

Goldman Sachs to Harvard Business School (9:00)

“Mission-centric but medium-agnostic”: Why Behance was bootstrapped (11:45)

Product roadmapping at Behance (13:30)

One-stop solutions for integrated services (15:25)

What does the interface layer mean for brands? (18:40)

Organization vs. talent (20:15)

Bringing creativity to mobile at Adobe (23:52)

The commoditization of design (27:25)

Design-driven (and founded) companies (28:45)

Feedback

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