Hey there,
Happy Monday! I have been receiving messages from disappointed and angry designers ever since I pondered whether the UX industry is a bullshit industry in the 17th edition of this newsletter.
“Why does everyone else get to tell me exactly what to do and how to do it?” one designer asked. “I’m a competent designer with years of experience, still every recommendation I make is either ignored or dismissed.”
I’ve been there so many times in my career. There are two things you can do about it. One, it’s on you to own the design side of things in your team. That means that you also need to prove the value of design. And the best way to do that is through UX research. Did you come up with an improvement for a feature that you’re 85% sure it’ll work? Don’t just suggest it to your team, prove it! Show it to potential users and get feedback.
Then when you go to present it to your team you have more than just “fancy designs” as people who misunderstand design like to put it. You have substantial evidence and facts that your design is better. Be proactive, and don’t wait for a UX researcher to do it for you, or for the right step in the process. This has always worked wonders for me.
Two, if you do that and it still doesn’t work, you’ll need to consider finding a better job elsewhere. It’s hard to imagine when you’re caught in a situation like that, but there are companies out there where design is truly valued. They’re UX-mature companies. It’s harder to get a job with such a company and it takes longer too.
But whatever you do, don’t give up and stop caring. Once you do that your job becomes soul-crushing. And work being basically 50% of your life (because you sleep for 1/3 of the day), it’ll crush you completely. You’ll never be able to disconnect and enjoy your private life when your work life sucks so much.
I was caught in shitty jobs a couple of times but always managed to either improve the perception of design or I found a better job with a more UX-mature company. That was the inspiration for my course UX Buddy — to help other designers find their dream, high-paying jobs with UX mature companies. The things I describe in the course helped land a 6-figure paying job and become a design leader.
TASA Explorer & TASA Orbiter
The Taiwan Space Agency now has its own collection of fonts — Explorer and Orbiter. They’re beautiful, variable Sans Serif fonts that look great for headings and body text. If I had to pick one, I’d go with Orbiter because Explorer has a bit too much character.
6.5 most popular UI design trends (And how to design them all!)
This is a great 13-minute video explaining all the major design trends, packed with practical examples that will help you design these trends. My favourites are Bauhaus, Flat, and Neo Brutalism. In that order.
Twitter’s rebrand to X has its website looking like a mess (4 min read)
The butchering of Twitter’s brand and its heritage continues. It’s clear that this wasn’t planned in advance and users are getting increasingly frustrated as Musk’s 10-year-old-boy-like obsession with the letter “X” slowly and painfully kills the Twitter bird.
The future of design systems is semantic (8 min read)
The introduction of variables in Figma will go a long way towards closing the gap between design and code, but what larger shifts in the industry will it cause? It helps designers create fully functional prototypes allowing them to get valuable feedback before a line of code is written. It’ll also help more people, other than designers, get involved with design systems — for example, a content designer can now easily define the terminology of a design system.
Adapting typography to user preferences with CSS (5 min read)
Adam Argyle shows us in this tutorial how to use variable fonts to increase a website’s accessibility. Based on the user’s preference for contrast, the website can use bolder font for higher contrast setting, or a thinner font for lower contrast.
Supercharge your designs with Text Truncates in Figma (4 min video)
A quick guide to show the power and flexibility of Figma’s new feature to truncate text. Text truncation can be set to a specific number of lines and it can respond to the size of the component where the text is located.
Illustrations Universe (Resource)
A collection of illustrations used in most popular digital products, including Wise, Uber, Duolingo, Dropbox, Notion, …
Today’s edition is different on purpose, as I’m still experimenting with the format.
Cheers,
Matej
