Techniques
Tommy Geoco
How to share your design work in 2026
In this post
001. The design room moved
Happy Monday.
A pattern showed up twice this week from two sides of my work:
Design workflows are changing: AI, code, agents, taste, handoff, review. And at the same time, the rooms where creative work gets discovered are changing too.
That overlap is important to designers.
Not because every designer needs to become a creator. Please don't read it that way. It matters because good work shared in the wrong rooms is a dead end.
And designers who are figuring this out are navigating a turbulent market with ease.
– Tommy (@designertom)
TOGETHER WITH LOVABLE
This issue is about building a room for your work, and Lovable makes the room real.
You can go from rough idea to landing page, blog, small app, waitlist, or internal tool by chatting with AI. Lovable generates the frontend and backend logic and connects integrations like Stripe or Shopify.
But the new aesthetic update is the part to pay attention to.
Lovable now turns design into production software for landing pages and blogs:
Pick from three design concept options before you commit
Answer a few design-preference questions so the build starts closer to your taste
Ship on a stronger default baseline so what goes live looks designed, not generated.
So instead of staying in blank-canvas guessing, you get an artifact people can use, test, and share.
The design room moved
The design job is starting to include a distribution job: explaining the work well enough that it can travel through the rooms where opportunity actually moves.
Some rooms are public: X, LinkedIn, YouTube, newsletters, open-source repos, product demos. Some are private: Slacks, Discords, founder chats, team DMs, text threads.
Tiny circles of people sending each other links with one sentence: this person gets it.
That sentence is doing more work than most portfolios.
A portfolio page is still useful. It is just not the room.
Kevin's media lesson is a trust lesson
Kevin Espiritu is useful here because he has spent thirteen years watching the internet punish people who confuse distribution with durability.
He built Epic Gardening into something that could survive a platform shift because people actually gathered around it.
Kevin put it plainly: every true outlier is a one-of-one.
That sounds like creator advice until you translate it to design work.
Most people respond to a new surface by copying the visible tactic. Someone posts a build thread, so everyone posts a build thread. Someone shares a slick prototype, so everyone shares a slick prototype.
But that’s the wrong lesson.
Kevin used a gardening metaphor for audience trust that designers should steal immediately.
If you keep taking nutrients out of soil without putting anything back, eventually nothing grows. Same with an audience. Same with a professional network. Same with a design community.
If every public artifact you make is a transaction: hire me, notice me, validate me, promote me, people stop paying attention. Atrophy.
The private internet counts
The mistake is assuming this all means posting more.
Posting helps. Sometimes. But social media is saturated and algorithms are proving to be a net negative for society.
And a lot of the best work travels through rooms you don’t see:
Someone drops your prototype into a Slack.
Someone sends your essay to a hiring manager.
Someone mentions your prototype in a founder chat.
Someone remembers that you explained a messy workflow clearly.
Think of it more like a campfire.
A campfire is a room where people trust the conversation enough to keep coming back. Sometimes you build it. Sometimes you participate in one. Sometimes your work gets carried into it by somebody else.
But the work needs a storyteller that gathers more people around the campfire.
Kevin had one clean channel rule: same audience, same channel; different audience, different channel. Designers need the professional version: same room, same proof; different room, different proof.
A VP evaluating you for leadership needs a different artifact than a founder looking for a cracked design engineer. A private group chat needs the one-line explanation that makes the work forwardable.
Most designers still treat all of those as the same room.
They're not.
The self-check
So here's the uncomfortable part.
If your best work only makes sense when you're in the meeting explaining it, it does not travel yet.
If your portfolio proves you followed a process but not how you think, it does not travel very far.
If your public work is built for applause from other designers but the opportunity you want moves through founders, design leaders, or product teams, you're performing in the wrong room.
I've been feeling this in my own work too.
We are slowly building a language that we understand, but it is still lost on so many people. That means the job is not only to make better work. It is to make the work more legible without flattening it.
That’s what I’m calling New Media, and this week I’m going to talk about it a few more times.
Kevin is the long proof that durable media and attention lasts by earning trust, not chasing every trick.
Cultural campfires are the distribution proof that the rooms are getting smaller, hotter, and more trust-based.
Designers sit in the middle, and there’s a lot of opportunity for those who decide to do something about it.
If you do one thing this week, pick one room where your work travels.
Public, private, internal, weirdly specific, doesn't matter. Then make one artifact for that room that explains the judgment behind the work, not just the output.
Good work still has to be good. It also needs somewhere warm to live.
See you next time,
Tommy