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Insomniac CityBook

by Bill Hayes

Who uses, recommends or left Insomniac City, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Head of design for Claude at Anthropic; previously director of design at Figma, where she led the FigJam and Slides teams.
recommended

the second one that I recommend to a lot of people is uh, a book called Insomniac City, which is written by Bill Hayes

Lenny's Podcast, "The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it.", lightning round, asked for the books they recommend most; the guest's own spoken answer (YouTube captions).

2026-03-01·youtube.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.