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Jesse Arnold
Design Lead at Exygy
Professional Background
Jesse James Arnold is an accomplished designer with a rich background in fine art and a substantial career that reflects innovation and creativity. With his education firmly grounded in art, Jesse took his first steps in the professional world by blending his artistic flair with practical applications. As Design Lead at Exygy, he has been pivotal in shaping the design vision to enhance user experiences across various projects. His expertise in the design field has allowed him to lead teams in creating impactful designs that resonate with users and clients alike.
Before joining Exygy, Jesse garnered valuable experience as a freelance designer with Zignage, where he worked on a variety of projects that demanded high levels of creativity and design insight. His time as a Principal Designer and Cofounder at Mister Machine allowed him to hone his leadership skills while working collaboratively with diverse teams. Here, he was able to push the boundaries of traditional design through innovative solutions tailored to the unique needs of their clientele.
Jesse's journey continued with freelance roles at Darling Design, where he further expanded his design portfolio, and as a Product Designer at Brave Space, contributing significantly to the creation of functional and aesthetically pleasing designs. His ability to adapt and thrive in fast-paced environments is a testament to his skills and passion for the field, making him a notable figure in the design community.
Education and Achievements
Jesse's journey into the world of art began with his studies at the University of Florida, where he earned his Bachelor's degree in Fine Art. This formal education provided him with a solid foundation in artistic principles and techniques, which he leveraged in his subsequent career. Pursuing his passion further, he obtained a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the prestigious University of California, San Diego. His advanced studies not only deepened his artistic capabilities but also cultivated a sophisticated understanding of design as a narrative form.
Throughout his educational journey, Jesse has continually sought to blend different disciplines and ideologies, emphasizing the importance of versatility within design. His strong academic background uniquely positions him to approach problems from multiple perspectives, allowing for more robust and innovative solutions in his professional career.
As a designer, Jesse has received recognition for his work, and his projects often stand out due to their originality and thoughtful execution. His commitment to excellence and a keen eye for detail have become hallmarks of his professional identity, making his work not just visually engaging but also purposeful.
Achievements
- Design Leadership at Exygy: As Design Lead, Jesse has successfully navigated complex design challenges, focusing on user-centric solutions that transform ideas into reality.
- Entrepreneurship with Mister Machine: His role as a Principal Designer and Cofounder highlights his ability to merge entrepreneurial spirit with artistic vision, further contributing to the design landscape.
- Freelance Projects: By taking on roles with various organizations like Zignage and Darling Design, Jesse has amassed a diverse portfolio that showcases his adaptive design approach.
- MFA Accomplishments: Achieving an MFA not only reflects his dedication to his craft but also equips him with the theoretical knowledge necessary to inform his practical work in the field.
Highlights
✨ Theming seems like magic when it's done right. Allowing folks to change color sounds great on the surface but... can lead to visual inconsistency and completely inaccessible products without intention.
→ Customer style guides and the palettes they bring you vary greatly → Every component's color needs are different, based on interactivity and contrast → Managing every possible color combination is nearly impossible
Our team has been working on ways to simplify theming that allows color steps to predictably map to specific use cases to ensure an accessible experience. Huge shoutouts to key resources along the way that helped us out!
🎨 The universal color palette by Kevin Muldoon maps out a systematic approach to solving for consistent contrast. He describes tonal categories that map to the contrast needs of specific components and semantic use cases. https://lnkd.in/gxYNKcaV
🚦 How to define color usage through semantic sets for design systems by Katie Cooper dives into how you can then map color steps to a consistent semantic color naming framework for use as variables and tokens in your design system. https://lnkd.in/gHswtck7
🖼 Color contrast grid by Nathan Curtis is our standby tool that we then use to take the resulting colors and produce a color safe mapping for the team to understand all of the possible color combinations and which are accessible. https://lnkd.in/gRNS-2Dd Bonus, there's a Figma plugin version as well https://lnkd.in/gUcATsNU
All of this has allowed our team at Exygy to come up with a repeatable process. We hope that your team might find some of these steps useful: → Create color ramps with a robust tonal scale of shadows, mid-tones, 1/4 tones, and highlights → Determine contrast ratios for various foreground and background combinations → Extract repeatable color steps and map those to known semantic foreground and background colors → Repeat and test across all colors of your palette to ensure consistency and accessibility
#design #ui #color #accessibility #figma #contrast #designsystems
🤔 "What does it look like to practice responsible product development with GenAI in affordable housing?" Last week, Exygy had the chance to invite a group of affordable housing professionals and technical experts to a design sprint to discover if there were potential opportunities to leverage GenAI to solve known issues in the space of affordable housing.
Let me lead with the fact that we knew there would be a healthy amount of skepticism, myself included, about whether we could identify appropriate use cases to leverage the technology.
→ We recognize we are serving traditionally marginalized communities who are more vulnerable to systemic inequities. → We understand that within these communities there is a certain mistrust of government services and new technology. → We respect that we are dealing with a history of scarce, dispersed, and biased data sets.
🙌 Given all of that, I was proud of what we were able to accomplish in the limited time we had.
→ We invited a diverse group of stakeholders representing housing counselors, leasing agents, and city staff with lived experience to speak about what the greatest needs are. → We got to hear from technical experts with experience working in the public sector to explain the promise, risks, and limitations of the technology including Michael Hany Elabd and Neil S. from U.S. Digital Response → Exygy was also able to present our method for how we propose to ensure ethical principles can be maintained with the use of responsible guardrails throughout the product development process.
💎 At a high level, some of what our team presented to ensure a principle-led process included:
→ Start with framing use cases: We need to weigh the need for AI against its risks and sustainability while identifying those who will be impacted. → Staff ethical champions: We need someone who is tasked, from the outset, with measuring any potential negative impacts as we go. → Invest in community partnership: We need to create a feedback loop with our community partners ensuring we are co-designing and continuing to listen to those who are directly affected.
👏 I’ll be posting a series of takeaways for folks who want to learn more about what we discussed and possibly apply some of what we came up with. Big shoutout to our partners at Google.org and Metropolitan Transportation Commission BAHFA for making it all happen.
Thanks to Barry Roeder Gabriel Doss Adam Mansour Melissa Tang(she/her) Morgan Russell (She, Her) Hannah Holloway Ky-Nam Miller Antonella Guidoccio Sean Albert Nick Noreña Caroline Vance Bruister and so many more for making it all happen.
#affordablehousing #ai #design #productdevelopment
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Mesh is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Mesh centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
- Smart Search: Allows you to search using natural language like "People I know at the NYT" or "Designers I've met in London"
- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Mesh is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Mesh as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Mesh offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Mesh takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Mesh encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Mesh work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Mesh is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
Nexus is Mesh's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Mesh isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Mesh instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Mesh is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Mesh can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Mesh's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Mesh has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Mesh a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Mesh's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Mesh's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Mesh has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Mesh's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Mesh as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Mesh eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.
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