Tom Johnson | Product Designer

Tom Johnson

I’m Tom, I’m a product designer living on the road.

I design v0 at Vercel, and make tools, experiments, and the occasional pixel portrait.

Welcome to Tomjohnville.

I design v0 at Vercel. Before that I spent five years as Basedash’s founding designer, and I’ve run my own studio, Tomjohn Design, since 2012.

Projects

Pilgrimage: A medieval city building game
I’m making a game. It’s called Pilgrimage, and it’s somewhere between RollerCoaster Tycoon and Age of Empires II.
What the Port?: See the active dev servers on your Mac
I built What the Port? because I was tired of local servers slowing down my laptop.
shadercam: Use shaders as your webcam
I made shadercam to experiment with electrostatic dithering. It turns a webcam image into moving dots.
Basedash: I spent five years as Basedash’s founding designer, working on the product, brand, and website.
I spent five years as Basedash’s founding designer, working remotely as we went from an admin panel to AI-powered charts.
Macindash: A custom hardware dashboard
I designed and 3D-printed a little monitor for Basedash dashboards. The idea was to send them to people whose software we admired.
Ditherface: Pixel faces of pixel people
I draw Ditherfaces by hand in Figma. Every pixel is a rectangle I put there myself, and every portrait is unique.
Turbo Speedo Video
Turbo Speedo Video was the first thing I vibe coded that actually worked. It just speeds up videos.

Experience

Vercel: Staff product designer · ’25 – now
I’ve been a Staff Designer at Vercel since November of 2025. My main focus has been on unifying v0 with Vercel overall.
Basedash: Founding designer · ’20 – ’25
Asurion: Principal product designer · ’17 – ’20
I spent three and a half years at Asurion, working on getting broken phones fixed without having to ship them away.
Tomjohn Design: Owner · ’12 – now
My studio, where I work on client projects, design tools, and ideas of my own.

Writing

The new design process (2026)
I think I figured out my new design process...
Minimalism (2025)
I used to think minimalism in design was an aesthetic choice, but it's not.
The Vibe Zone (2025)
This is how I feel about vibe coding. Any project I try that has any kind of complication has this immediate burst of progress.
Meant to last (2025)
My oldest son turned seven this year. He shares a birthday week with his Grandpa, so this we decided to go to Disneyworld all together.
What is an AI-Native Product? (2025)
We’ve all seen the explosion of AI features slapped onto products over the past year. Little Copilot buttons in the corner. Chat sidebars. Query autocompletion.
Data is a Design Tool (2025)
Dear designer, Data is a a design tool. Not because you cede your taste to it. Not because your instincts and gut impressions can’t yield amazing results.
How to use Framer AI to make a right click to download logo menu (2025)
Realized that we hadn’t added back the right click to download menu to the Basedash website since our rebrand and relaunch earlier this year.
How to add Code blocks & Markdown to the Framer CMS (2023)
We recently made the switch from Webflow to Framer for the Basedash website.
What's after the canvas? (2022)
Hey you, with the glowing rectangle in your face. Yeah, you. Do me a favor really quick and open a modern design tool, I’ll wait.
Design prompts aren't helping you (2021)
Dear new or aspiring UX or Product Designer, these aren’t helping you get a job — at least not like they could.
Figma's killer feature hasn't even been built yet (2020)
Large organizations are a maze. At each turn, projects are met with the mangled overgrown walls of “who”, “where”, and “what”. Who do I talk to about this?
Design tools are holding us back (2019)
They’ve never been faster. They’ve never had more UI design-centric features. They’ve never enabled more effective collaboration.
What Tesla's Model 3 UI reveals about its vision for the future (2017)
If you’re a designer/car enthusiast this post is for you.
You Are Going to Switch to Figma (2017)
I’ve read a lot of comparison articles about the two, but I don’t think they really do Figma justice.

Elsewhere

Opening the scene…

Loading the scene.