Danny Trinh is supposed to be going into his senior year of college right now, as a Carolina Scholar at the University of North Carolina. Instead, he is a full-time product designer at Path, in San Francisco. 

“I went to one of those high schools that was all about science and math, National Honor Society, full AP schedule,” Danny says. “Design became my release. I was wrapped up in this world in California but I was stuck at my desk in North Carolina; I could just stay up until 4 a.m. every night and build cool stuff and talk about it with people just as passionate about it as me on the other side of the country.”

While still in high school, he arranged to go to Stanford for a neuroscience summer program—“it was a trick play on my parents so they’d let me come out here,” he says. That summer, he went to user groups at Digg and gave them feedback and developed relationships there; the next summer, Digg brought him on as an intern.

He deferred going to college for one year to stay at Digg. His mother called Daniel Burka, his then-boss, in the months before that year was up to warn him not to convince Danny to drop out of school. So Danny then went to UNC for one year, before deciding to put off college for good. 

“I raged for a year at UNC, and was like, this is not fun,” he says. “I wanted to build stuff on the web.” So he went back to Digg full-time, in the middle of their v4 redesign. Then, a few months after his return to the Bay, he decided to leave Digg to join Path in October 2010.

At Path, Danny came up with an iPhone app called With, which takes Path’s success at taking photos and tagging people, but removes the personal network so everything is in the open. He also worked on @answerme with Joe Stump around 2007, which he calls a “poor man’s Quora.” Among the things at Digg he worked on, he’s particularly proud of the Digg search interface; at Path, he’s worked a lot on Path web. Finally, he’s partly responsible for WhereTheLadies.At, an iPhone app that scrapes foursquare and Gowalla data for bars with the highest concentration of ladies.

“I love anything that’s simple, fast, and well-done,” he says, explaining his obsession with his Dyson vacuum, and his design philosophy in general. “I don’t like overdesigned stuff. I subscribe to Dieter Rams’ school of design, optimizing the utility of a product. When you build something, you have a distinct idea of what its purpose is. As a designer, your job is to undesign—to remove away all the unnecessary.”

He got into product design early on: As a high school junior, he didn’t like the class shirts so posted his own design on Facebook. “We basically replaced the junior T-shirt overnight without the student council’s approval,” he says. “That was one of my first experiences of, if you are good at designing stuff, people pick it up.”

He was also into basketball shoes, though he has no interest in playing basketball—“if you go into my closet at home, all the backs of my notes and tests have sketches of shoes all over them,” he says. When Digg partnered with Toms to make Digg Toms, Danny designed the Toms. “I think they were the fastest Toms to sell out online,” he says.

“Our industry is in a weird moment right now where everyone recognizes the value of good design but there are only so many good designers,” he says. “Unlike engineers, there aren’t many schools just pumping out amazing designers.”

Design is hard to learn, he says, because there’s no substitute for raw experience. “When you’re working on a product, people will expand the scope like crazy and give you really vague definitions of what they’re trying to build,” he says. “Experienced designers get really good at figuring out how to optimize the utility of what they’re building.”

He says he learned by doing. “I just threw myself at it, I would look at sites that I liked that seemed flawed and try to redo them myself,” he says. “So when a beginning designer asks how to learn, I’m like, ‘What do you want to build?’” And hopefully they have something in mind. And I’m like ‘Okay, well…start.’”

“I spent most of my time leading up to my Digg internship figuring out my process and where I was inefficient,” he says. “There’s no way you could teach that in a class or textbook, how to get through that frustration. You just have to deal with it yourself, so that when you do it next time, you know the pitfalls to avoid.”

“The thing that made designing on the web really attractive to me is that it’s a meritocracy,” he says. “If you like an app, you use it. It doesn’t matter if it’s some punk 17-year-old kid from North Carolina who made it, or some veteran who’s been doing it for ten years.”