The Playlists of People Who Build Things You Touch Every Day

Something I’ve always been more curious about than I should probably admit: what does the workspace of a person who designs the things I use actually look like? Not the aspirational standing desk with the Muji stationery—the real setup, the one with the empty mug shoved behind the monitor and four hundred browser tabs open and a playlist that’s been running for six hours without anyone changing it.

Interface Lovers is a site built around exactly that curiosity. They interview designers, developers, and illustrators who work on the digital products most of us scroll through without a second thought—the apps, the interfaces, the small interactions that someone spent weeks obsessing over. People like Julie Delanoy from Product Hunt, Helen Tran from Spotify, Karri Saarinen from Airbnb. The interviews are practical and candid in a way that most design press isn’t: here’s what I use, here’s what I did before this, here’s the thing I’m still figuring out.

The side project that interests me most is the playlist component. Every interviewee contributes the music they actually work to, compiled into mixes on Spotify. The range is genuinely strange—Active Child next to Twenty One Pilots next to Maggie Rogers. You build a weirdly intimate picture of someone through what they need playing in the background when they’re trying to make something work.

I think about my own process when I read these—the particular chaos of a design session, the way the right playlist can hold you in a productive state for hours and the wrong one collapses your concentration inside twenty minutes. There’s no correct answer, which is the point. The site isn’t useful because it gives you a template to copy. It’s useful because it shows you how many genuinely different ways there are to actually do the work.