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Design is inspiring. However, the industry is changing incredibly fast and it is sometimes difficult to keep up with all the trends. We have prepared a digest of the best recent cases, fresh news, tips, and funny memes on design to make your day a bit brighter. Enjoy ;) 🦄 Product Design Articles — tips on how to compile a guide for in-depth interviews from the Nielsen/Norman Group. Writing an Effective Guide for a UX Interview — a guide to conduct a design review and discuss the industry in a more “ecological” way. Design review means asking questions — another good article from Nielsen/Norman Group on what makes design aesthetic, namely: consistent typography, clear hierarchy, good color scheme and grid. Why Does a Design Look Good? — an annual review of design trends from behaviorist experts. Behavioral Design 2021 — some reflections on what a modern web designer can learn by analyzing the legacy of graphic design. What Saul Bass Can Teach Us About Web Design — the review of design techniques for mobile that improve UX. Obscure Mobile Design Techniques That Boost UX — a good article on the consistency in icon design with nice examples. Mastering Iconography: The 3 Do’s & Don’ts of Icon Design — tips on how to work with photography in website design with some nice examples of popular Dribbble shots. 7 photography tips to enhance your UI designs — We all pretend to strive for "simple" design. But what does it really mean to each of us? What does simple design really mean? Works is the website of an HR-agency where the grid, 3D, and typography are as minimal as possible. Created by Anton & Irene. true • overview Here is how they presented . their project on their website — a case study of the Museum of Mountain Photography website from Tubik. Case Study: Lumen. Website Design for Museum of Mountain Photography : a clean, simple, and still impressive website. Liquid Crystal : an attractive website with nice fonts and minimal animation. TheRoom : there is something interesting in horizontal scroll, right? :) Bonjour Paris : fonts have never been presented so elegantly before. VJ Type Typefaces — a great work with 3D and animation on the website. Helsedirektoratet — a website-portfolio of the Berlin-based studio in the form of a desktop. You can interact with different elements on the page. MAD from UX Planet. Just a lot of inspiration 👁️ Graphic design Articles and case studies Last month, McDonald’s . Later, Packaging in Europe discussed with the creators, the Pearlfisher agency, . updated its global packaging design with a focus on illustration what exactly stood behind these changes Booking.com designers revealed the details of creating illustrations in products for travelers. The Dieline tells how Pizza Hut expands its consumer experience with the Pacman AR game and pizza packaging. - Creative Review what exactly has changed in logo design over the decade. Another season of logo redesign: automakers ta , jewelry manufacturer and even the venture fund . Renault Peugeot Swarovski Andreessen Horowitz - An article about design trends and what's wrong with them from It's Nice That. Is graphic design too trendy? - a variable font that represents irreversible climate change and, according to the author's description, is based on real data of glaciers in the Arctic seas. The Climate Crisis Font Works — a system of visual brand identification based on the definition of sepia by all possible methods. Concise and complicated. Pasta Sepia . Identity, custom typography, illustrations, and stationery in a minimalistic and elegant style for a restaurant in central Paris from Violaine & Jeremy. Mun Champs Elysées : bright geometric brand identity for the German digital insurance company MORPHORIA. Nexible : brand identity for a geomarketing startup based on thermal maps and interface visualization from Polar, Ltda. Mapfry Visual identity of Sendlane from Balkan Brothers. 🚀 Products and tools Figma Improved prototyping capabilities. . A brief overview of the beta features of Figma Interactive Components. Designing micro-interactions with Figma interactive components , individual accounts will remain free of charge as before. Subscription terms have changed for team work Adobe - now featuring personalized recommendations for project editing from an "artificial intelligence" Adobe Sensei. The new mobile application Creative Cloud Updated work with . cloud documents Plugins, addons — a plugin that adds a 3D effect to vector objects. Fig3D — Figma project with ready-made objects in the style of glass morphism. Glass-Morphism in Figma Other — if you don’t want to search for photos of avatars on Unsplash, you can find them here :) FREE AVATAR LIBRARY FOR FIGMA AND SKETCH — an application that predicts (or at least tries predicting) the popularity of shots on Dribbble. Draftshot — an online platform for creating design and collaborative work. Creatopy — no-code online platform that allows people to create their own mobile applications, providing fast iterations. FlutterFlow — visual website designer from Designmodo. Siter.io — a tool for creating recursive images. Droste Creator — an application for saving workspaces in Mac OS. Freezeframe — pattern generator of geometric shapes. You can change colors, quantity, size. Tabbied 🤔 All at once What to read The Awesomic team has created the . first design community in Ukraine Forbes on the NFT phenomenon and whether you should become an owner. on what skills future leaders need. Adobe research — FastCompany about innovations in design. From blind optimism to sober responsibility: How design has changed since the first Innovation by Design Awards — a new book from A Book Apart. Sustainable Web Design from Helvetica/Objectified/Urbanized movies. Full interview - Google has posted a course for UX designers on Coursera that costs $39 per month after the trial period. Duration - 6 months. There are also courses for and . Google UX Design Professional Certificate Project Managers Data Analytics Lockdown is a good time to make a new home workplace setup. Inspiration can be found . here What to listen — podcast, authored by Rob Johnston, a designer and photographer from New York who seeks to bridge the gap between entry-level creative professionals and the best in the industry. Meet the Creatives Memes Hope you enjoyed it 🤗 Stay tuned for more!

Design Digest: Trends, Logo Redesign, and Fresh Memes [Part1]

is a typical term we like to throw around when thinking about . The parallels are plenty if you think about it wizards are thoughtful, have long beards and are generally considered to be the wisest of the bunch. They also are considered to be cryptic, hard to understand and quite irritable. Of course not all developers are like wizards but it is something we can talk about. Wizard developers When I started working I saw architects the most developer-y developers there are. They held complex models of the systems we built in their heads, they had technical knowledge that they could summon on demand and they had nice fancy offices with good views. They also weren’t a part of any team, instead they were individual contributors who we’d call to for help or they would come down from their office to lead technical meetings, talk to lead developers then disappear until they’re needed again. That for me was what it meant to reach the pinnacle of being a developer. I spent my first few years trying to be like them, I focused solely on my technical growth, I kept reading, studying and experimenting. Like the architects I knew I developed a “they’re not technical they won’t get it” mentality and I was quite productive.. until I wasn’t. Apparently it didn’t matter how fast and well I could finish coding things if it wasn’t tested and deployed. I always spoke in technical terms to be more wizardly and it helped me impress my more tenured developer peers but it made me less approachable to everyone else. I realized things had to change I couldn’t be a wizard but I could become a squire. Squires have a funny reputation, they train in sword fighting but they also do anything and everything their knight requires. They feed the horses, pitch the tents, cook dinner, polish the armor and train in sword fighting. That’s what I needed to do to be a better developer. Coding is my sword fighting, I had to get better at that and I would continue to practice that but it wasn’t my only concern. I also had to work with testers, project managers, designers and requirements analysts. I shifted my focus from trying to be a wizard to doing everything and anything the team needed. I’d talk to testers to learn about how they do and organize tests and I’d sit down with designers to see what they were working on. In time I learned a little bit from everyone and I started being able to help out in things that didn’t involve writing code. Little did I know that what I was doing back then would be what pushes my career forward. Since then the teams I was on would often do well. It turns out having the ability to talk to and relate to the different roles people had on the team was pretty useful. I could talk about tests with the product owner then switch hats and refine requirements with our product owner. I still grew as a developer but being on teams that did well also did wonders for my career. Several years later I still consider myself a squire. I’ve discovered that doing whatever my team needed (whether it required me coding or not) was actually the secret sauce to being successful in my career as a developer. See not everyone will have the sheer intellect, grit and ability to become a wizard in the way that we like to imagine the wizard level developers to be. Not all of us will be working on the bleeding edge of technology and research where solving the unsolvable problems is the most important thing. What most of us will be doing are working on products and projects with teams of different team members and that’s when being a squire is most useful. That’s the advice I give to everyone starting out in their career. Stop trying to be a wizard, instead be a squire.

Want to be a better developer? Don't be a wizard, be a squire.

Tips on how to eliminate distractions and tweak your environment & time towards less frustrating and more productive deep work. When distractions are everywhere focus becomes scarce Office environments can easily turn into an attention battlefield. Emails, slack notifications, calendar alerts, meetings and casual hallway chats are just a few of the interruptions knowledge workers experience on a daily basis. Followed by frequent context switching and multitasking, these interruptions have negative implications on our brain’s performance. As described in the highly recommended read — , deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s an important skill that you can start to sharpen once you identify and eliminate the origins of your distractions. Deep Work by Cal Newport If you read my previous post on you could tell I’m keen about improving productivity. I’m constantly looking for ways to make my team’s work as smooth as possible. So as such, I’ve gathered a few tips throughout my career as a software developer and later on as a team lead. Tips that might help you get more deep & meaningful work done. communicating tech debt I’ve organized those tips based on their origin under 3 groups: Schedule & time management Communication tools & rules Work culture & environment Schedule & time management Time is an art that involves planing & discipline. When done right it can also become a statement: “I don’t require micro-management, I’m fully capable of managing my own time according to the given priorities”. The next few tips aim to help you achieve this state. management Deep work intervals — split the day to intervals of deep and shallow work and set a timer which reminds you to swap between them. I found that a 75 minutes to 15 minutes ratio, respectively, works great for me. Schedule your deep work periods as calendar events. make sure you reserve at least 4 hours of deep work a day. Write a polite event description such as: “I’m in a deep work state. Please do not interrupt me unless it’s urgent.” Meeting-free morning — late morning (10am until noon) is usually when our brain and energy levels are at their peak. Clear your morning from meetings and dedicate those peaks to get meaningful work done. Plan your day ahead to eliminate friction and allocate focus periods. Consider adopting a “workday shutdown” ritual when you take the last 15 minutes of your workday to plan the following day. Communications tools and rules From PUSH to PULL — Change how you consume communication! Your email, slack, calendar and phone constantly notifications and alerts that beg for your immediate attention. You’re often tempted to leave all you’re doing and check them out thinking you might be missing something important or urgent. If you can identify with this behaviour then the next few tips can help you regain control of your time taken by the . push tools Disable all desktop notifications — the goal is to keep all the communication tools contained in the browser. Prefer web clients/websites over native clients/apps versions of your communication tools. This way you can organize all those tabs inside one browser window and easily ignore or minimize it while in focus. Use Slack “do not disturb” mode before diving deep into a complex task. Silence your phone and disable any notification lights or screen flashes. Need a mental break from your task? Now would be a good time to quickly overview your minimized browser window. However, do not respond to interactions unless it’s important enough, or you’ll risk losing the context of the task you’re working on. Work culture & environment Colleagues and managers can behave in a focus insensitive manner with either loud shared space conversations or badly timed questions. Your work setting can also be saturated with distractions that can easily be avoided. The next few tips can help you communicate the importance of focus to your surrounding and optimize your environment. Headphones — wearing noticeable headphones is the universal sign of being in the zone. Active noise canceling headphones will give you the freedom to just mute the world. The Gateway Keeper — if you’re a team manager, make sure employees outside your team contact you and not your teammates directly. This way you can delegate the communication at the right time and according to the right priority. Static background — sitting facing towards a view with lots of moving people or objects can irritate your brain while in focus. Avoid sitting in front of hallways, meeting rooms or kitchens. Get comfortable — check that your seat is adjusted for long sitting periods, your table is at the right height, get pads for your mouse and keyboard, even consider leaving a pair of comfortable shoes or flip flops in your office. About to dive deep into a task? Make sure that you’re well fed and won’t need the toilet soon. keep a full cup or bottle at reach. Focus is crucial for solving complex issues, inventing creative solutions and delivering valuable work. However, it gets harder to maintain focus as technology, together with culture, keep filling our environment with distractions and stimulations. Deep work is beneficial for your personal development, as well as work satisfaction and so it’s something any developer, or other knowledge worker should pursue.

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