Jean Luo

Some art certainly may, but design, I think there's almost always a real objective behind it.

And so for me, it's about understanding what is a product or a service or a new icon, like what is it really trying to achieve at the end of the day?

What is really the purpose of whatever it is that we're making?

And if I can understand that very, very clearly, the design almost like reveals itself from there.

It becomes obvious, right?

So you think about Snapchat, at the core of Snapchat,

was the idea about of sending an image very very quickly right snapchat like picture chat uh and and in order to to message visually sending images back and forth super fast was the foundationally the most important thing so we made very specific design choices we opened to the camera which was different i think still is different than almost every other app out there we made it really easy to pick your friends on the send to page you know and then and then send your

message and we did a bunch of work on the engineering side and Bobby invented a new way of sending images very quickly which at the time was like a big breakthrough because sending a you know an image at the time took a minute or something on your phone and with snapchat it took seconds so I think when you can really understand what something is trying to achieve and understand its purpose then the design kind of flows from there

Professional would be a good word.

It's so important for people to feel comfortable expressing themselves on Snapchat.

And if you take yourself too seriously, it's very hard to feel comfortable sending an image in the moment, right?

And one of the things that we were trying to do with Snapchat is fundamentally change the nature of how people thought about photography.

So prior to Snapchat, every photo you ever took was designed to be saved forever.

So you actually didn't take them very often.

You only took photos at special events.

I mean, it's hard to imagine that this was the case, you know, 15, 20 years ago, but photography was really about saving life's most important moments.

Right.

And that meant that the tools for photography were really different.

You really needed great lighting and the perfect framing and maybe a portrait effect or something like that.

And with Snapchat, we were trying to change the entire nature of the camera and what its core purpose was.