Max Tanbara | Portfolio

Max Tanbara
Product Designer

Links

About Me

My name is Max and I am a designer based in San Diego, CA. Currently, I'm apart of the experience design team at Ritual, helping shape better subscriber experiences. In my free time, I’m been exploring in-browser AI assistants.

Explorations

Means of Selection

Visual Clipboard

Nested Border-Radius Calculator

TLDR

I always forget the formula to get the proper nested border-radius, so I made a calculator for it.

The Subtle Art of Nested Radii

Ever notice when a button inside a card just feels off, even if you can’t say why? It’s probably the border-radius. When inner and outer curves don’t play nice, the whole design loses its rhythm. It’s a tiny detail that can quietly throw everything out of balance.

A depiction of corner pinch caused by a miscalculated of inner radius.

Miscalculation causing a pinched corner.

A depiction of corner bloat caused by a miscalculated of inner radius.

Miscalculation causing a bloated corner.

Never Forget With a Calculator

Turns out, there’s a super simple formula to fix this: Inner Radius = Outer Radius - Padding. But I kept forgetting it and breaking my flow mid-design to look it up. So I built a little calculator to do it for me. No more guesswork, just clean, satisfying curves every time.

Visual Clipboard

A visual clipboard for collecting various types of assets. Built to explore how people might gather things mid-browse, capturing and curating content as they go. Unlike traditional clipboards that overwrite with every new copy, this prototype allows multiple items to be saved at once, creating a running list of visuals. It offers a lightweight, persistent way to reference what's been collected. Ideal for creative workflows or research. The prototype was built with HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS.

Means of Selection

Text Selection

A few quick explorations on ways to enhance default ::selection. I wanted to find a way to pull more focus to a selected word or phrase without fully removing the surrounding context. The first option in the carousel feels like the right direction, it dims everything else just enough to reduce distraction while keeping the rest of the text readable.

Focus States

This one’s about bringing more intention to selected elements. I kept coming back to the idea of a soft, warm glow. It naturally draws the eye and adds a calming energy. I also tested a subtle pulse animation, but it got distracting when multiple items were selected at once. Likely sticking with the glow on its own for now.

Drag to Select

I was excited to explore drag-to-select as a way to bring a familiar desktop behavior into the browser. Incorporating something we use constantly in operating systems and design tools but rarely see on the web. Multi-select could unlock faster, more intuitive interactions especially for tasks like organizing, comparing, or taking action on multiple items at once.

This site was built with love (and bugs) by me.