We put a lot of ourselves into our work, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know much about us. So we’re starting a new Q&A column to introduce ourselves, one-at-a-time, starting with our resident designer…
Who the hell do you think you are?
👋 Hello, I’m Matthew Lettini, but my friends just call me Lettini. You can too, if you want. I’m from the longest island in New York, and have lived in Brooklyn for over a decade. My dog is reeeally trying to get me to move to a place with a yard, though. I’ve been designing things for the web for over 15 years.
What do you do at Good Enough?
Titles are weird on a six-person team; we all do a little bit of everything. Besides generating too many Basecamp notifications, I suppose I was hired as a product designer, but I spend way more time coding than sitting in a design program. I primarily own the HTML and CSS, though I’ve been getting better at JavaScript and Ruby with the help of my teammates and ChatGPT. I’ve been running a Screeni column in our newsletter for the past year as an excuse to talk about movies. Lately I’ve been conducting the Letterbird project.
What tools will we find in your toolbelt?
As I mentioned, I only spend a little bit of time in Figma or Photoshop. My design workflow usually consists of thinking and writing out ideas, wireframing and breadboarding in whiteboard tools like Excalidraw or TLDraw, and then jumping straight into VS Code. I’m a big proponent of designing-in-the-browser when it comes to web design. Other invaluable tools (besides AI) include CleanShot X, Pika, ImageOptim, Acorn, and Klack.
What’s your origin story?
My design journey started with making 100% Dragon Ball Z pixel gif GeoCities back in high school. That inspired me to take a web design class in college which taught that all websites are made by splicing up an image with Dreamweaver. I thought “There’s no way Facebook is made this way,” opened up the Inspect panel, and taught myself the right a better way. To this day I feel strongly that the sites I build need to be easily readable and learnable from the DOM.
What inspires you?
Who says I’m inspired? What inspires you to ask so many questions? Sorry, this is just an intimidating question. The answer is so many things!
What else is up? What’s new? How’s life?
This year has been...something. I started at Good Enough after leaving a long tenured position, I got married to my partner of twelve years, and she also left her job to start a popcorn business. Wild times 🙈
If you weren’t Good Enough, what would you be?
Bad Enough?
What’s your drink of choice?
It’s a tie between aged XO cognac and 40-year-old tawny port, but I mostly drink water and apple cider.
Any parting words of wisdom for our dear readers?
I find Paladin to be one of the most versatile classes in 5e and other fantasy rpgs. You can be the tank, the healer, the single target DPS, you can usually have some AOE, and you can augment lack of utility through magic items. Plus the class has some baked-in role-playing by needing to be lawful, wearing cumbersome armor, and having a code to live by. If you haven’t played a Paladin before, try it! Pro-tip: If you’re the party’s primary healer, Inspiring Leader is the feat for you. For extra flavor, actually give that speech every game.
Where can you be found on the internet?
Besides posts on this blog, you can find me on most social platforms @mlettini:
Want to know other things about our team? Let us know what really interests you!