Austin Bales

Austin Bales

Designer & advice guy in San Francisco, He/him

About

I enjoy helping great designers do their best work. I keep quiet online, but I have lots to say in real life. Also enjoy making funny things.

Work Experience

2018 — Now
San Francisco

Supporting the excellent product design teams on Feed, Stories, Profile, Direct, Search, Explore & Labs.

2017 — 2018
Product Design Director at Facebook
Menlo Park & Tel Aviv

I led Facebook's Growth, Lightweight Interfaces and Growth Infrastructure teams.

2014 — 2017
Product Design Manager at Facebook
Menlo Park

Restarted the News Feed team, and helped grow our Interfaces (Design Systems) group. Then I led the Messenger design team.

I also contributed to Origami, a free node-based prototyping tool for interaction designers.

2013 — 2014
Product Designer at Facebook
Menlo Park

Played a supporting role in designing the new Messenger for iOS and Android

2013 — 2014
San Francisco

I helped Tilde, the makers of EmberJS, design their first commercial product, Skylight. Skylight is a performance monitoring tool for Rails applications.

2011 — 2013
Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Salesforce
San Francisco

Designed do.com, a now-defunct project management startup.

Speaking

2018

I don't give a lot of public talks, but I thought this podcast gives a nice overall view of how I think about work.

Writing

2021

“Lead with the executive summary. Take a position.

Awards

2020
Nominee: Outstanding Digital Daytime Drama Series from National Academy of Television Arts

For EastSiders

Side Projects

2012
Podium

Restaurant reservations and management software

2010
Presto

A web-based print studio management and billing tool

Education

2006 — 2010
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Studied industrial design, communication design and human-computer interaction.

Contact

Instagram
LinkedIn
Twitter