Welcome back to my weekly digest of cool design-related stuff from around the web. If you missed the first one, you can read it here. I’ve been incredibly busy this week as my wife and I prepare to welcome our twins into the world very soon. But as I’m not working since I got laid off in February, I have enough time to write this newsletter. I hope you’ll enjoy it! But before we get into it…
👔 Registrations for UX Buddy, my UX portfolio course, close tomorrow! With twins on the way in a couple of weeks, I don’t know when the next round of registrations will open.
Cool design things from around the web:
Let’s start with an amazing bespoke font. You know how much I love these, but this one is truly special. I’m talking about Amifer Folio, the bespoke font for Shakespear’s Globe. It’s an upgrade of an existing bespoke font, what’s new is the custom decorations added to the heavy weight of the font. It’s not something anyone else could reuse, but it has so much character and is surprisingly flexible. I mean, just take a look at the examples in the post. It’s amazing!
The next two articles I wanted to share are related to the last newsletter’s topic: the death of UX. The recent evolution of AI is scaring the shit out of people. Amazing examples like GPT-4 turning a sketch into a fully-functional website are now making software developers worried too. So it’s not only designers who are getting worried for their jobs. But is all that fear justified? Josh Comeau in The End of Front-End Development argues that it’s not. Yes, it will change our jobs but will it eliminate them? Will there be fewer software developers and designers in the future? Probably not. AI will augment the knowledge workers, not eliminate them. It might actually lead to an increase in the number of these roles. Think about it: did the introduction of power tools eliminate carpenters? I went through finishing our house recently and believe me, carpenters are in very high demand. I agree with Josh that we shouldn’t be worried.
Kai Wong touches on this topic too in his recent post Product Design is overtaking UX, and it’s because we’re in a weak economy. Touching on the topic from last week, this is the evolution of UX design, rather than death. Kai argues that UX is not enough anymore. It’s not an area of focus where one could have a guaranteed high-paying job. It makes sense, the same thing happened to graphic designers not long ago. Proliferation of skills lowers the overall level of these exact skills. There are many more UX designers out there than there were even just 10 years ago. Not all of them are highly skilled, experienced, or quite frankly, good. I believe the UX industry is immature and flooded with people trying to earn a quick buck. It’s a paradoxical situation that I’ll explore more in the future and write a blog post about. But for now, Kai offers three ways to augment your skills as a UX designer. These will help you become irreplaceable.
The last thing I want to share this week is a really good UX design case study. In The UX Design case study that got me hired Christina Sa explains her design process in details and it consists of all the things that are required. The key thing here is that this case study helped Christina get her first job in UX. This is one of the main problems people who are entering the UX industry have. But she provides a great example of how it can be done. Btw, her process is almost exactly the same to the one I’m teaching in UX Buddy. So I’m glad to see that it works! 🏆
I didn’t blog this week, I simply didn’t have time. But I want to hear from you—what do you think about the new newsletter? What do you think about the format? Is it ok that it’s opinionated? Or would you prefer a simple list of 3-4 cool links?
That’s it for this Monday. Be awesome!
Cheers,
Matej
