Q&A with Paul Stamatiou

Hi! I'm Paul but most people call me by my Twitter handle Stammy. I'm a designer at Twitter in San Francisco and on the weekends I become a developer tinkering on my site. In particular I work on the photos team there which is the perfect fit given my passion for photography. Before joining Twitter I co-founded three startups spanning back to 2007.

Most of my day at work is spent designing mocks in Photoshop for Android and iOS. Typically Android first as I have recently become an Android addict myself.

Hardware

My personal machine is an 11-inch MacBook Air. I've built most of my site on it and have done a ton of Lightroom work while traveling. It's the perfect travel computer. While it may be a lowly 1.3GHz i5 I'm very happy with it. The battery life is fantastic. At Twitter I have a 15-inch MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt display that's more than powerful enough to get things done. Though I have the itch to go to a Retina MBP.

As for devices, I have a Google Play Edition Samsung Galaxy S4 with KitKat, a Nexus 7 tablet and an iPod Touch for iOS testing. The Nexus 7 is a recent addition that I have come to absolutely love. I use it for everything from USB device debugging with Chrome dev tools to watching Netflix while working or reading news on Feedly, Circa, Google Play Newsstand and Pocket in the morning and evenings.

I use a Logitech G500 mouse for every computer I have. At work I have a Fiio E10 USB DAC that I use along with my BeyerDynamic DT770 Pro closed-ear headphones. At home I have open-ear Sennheiser HD 650s as well as Audyssey Wireless bluetooth speakers that are pretty loud for their size. When it comes time to taking a break I play Forza 5 on my Xbox One.

I'm also very fond of a this tiny quadrocopter I bought recently.

Software

Photoshop and Illustrator are always open on my computer, along with xScope, Twitter for Mac, Chrome Canary, Wunderlist and Evernote. Whenever I'm on my home computer I usually have Sublime Text and iTerm open.

I use Authy on my Android devices to manage my two-factor auth needs. I love Snapseed for editing mobile photos before posting online.

Dream setup

That would definitely have to be dual 4K displays and a Mac Pro for my work machine and a quad-core 11-inch Retina MacBook Air.

Inspiration

I'm an aggressive website clipper. Anytime I see something interesting, not particularly an entire site but just a detail I'll take a screenshot. It's interesting, I rarely go back through the screenshots but the act of pausing to take them helps me remember them more. My design style seems to be more on the side of light and airy with huge images and compact type that's not too overwhelming.

Most of my spare time design and development is on my photoblog where I try to weave photos into stories. I spend a lot of my time thinking about that and am in the process of making a collection of posts telling the story of my recent Japan trip. I want the viewer to be immersed, not just carelessly scrolling by. Eventually want to integrate location, weather, time, sound and video into posts. As you scroll various elements become important, video auto plays, et cetera.