Welcome to the very first edition of my new newsletter: my weekly roundup of noteworthy things in design. I’m generally quite busy and always run out of time to regularly check up on new things in design. I’ve been desperately trying to keep up with some daily aggregators but I always get overwhelmed. Do you have a similar problem? Anyway, I decided to block out a few hours every week to go through some of my favourite sources and pick a few items I think are the best and share them with my audience.
I’m glad to be doing what I love again and I hope this email finds you well. I’ll try to keep the number of items to a minimum because I don’t want to overwhelm you. I’ll be sending these out on Mondays to help you ease back into work. I’ll add my comments to the things I link and I hope to hear from you too! Just reply to the email, or post a comment on my website.
👔 UX Buddy registrations are open for a few more days! Grab your seat at a discounted price while you can ($149 instead of $199)!
🎁 I’m giving away 2 seats to the UX Buddy course, sponsored by Bryan David Kearney who already completed it and loved it so much that he wanted to gift it to two other designers. The giveaway is happening on LinkedIn and on Twitter.
Cool design things from around the web:
Do you need a better Comic Sans? You know, a handwritten looking font but not actually Comic Sans? I recently found an awesome font called Shantell Sans, which in a way aims to be exactly that but even more. It’s a variable font and it showcases really cool things that can be done with variable fonts. It can be configured how informal and bouncy it looks, for example. So if you need a bit of an informal look but Comic Sans is a no-no (as it should be), try Shantell Sans!
I’ve been reading a lot about the so called “death of UX.” The authors who call it that do so to invoke anxiety and make you click the link. A clickbait basically. But are these articles shit? Should UX designers just ignore them? I think it’s safe to say that yes, some of them are shit. But there are a few that warn about coming changes to the UX design industry. The many deaths of UX design is an interesting one. It argues that designers need to design with passion and that that passion was lost through the proliferation of designers in the industry. How designers are introduced to the industry has a tremendous impact on that too (tl;dr: bootcamps suck). I have to say that I agree. There are too many designers out there who got into the design industry because of promising high-paying careers and prestige. They do the minimum amount of work, based on a prescribed process, and feel good about themselves when they tell strangers that they’re designers. Product design is going down a weird path, but we can still save it is another interesting article. It addresses exactly that: don’t just do things as they’re supposed to be done. Learn the rules properly so that you can fucking break them properly. But if you don’t learn them, you’ll never even come to a point where you’d think about breaking them. It’s something I’m quite passionate about so maybe I should write an article on this topic too? 🤔
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. I wrote a blog post: The disastrous mistake UX designers do in job interviews. Another blog post on the topic coming in a week or so.
That’s it for this Monday. Have a productive week!
Cheers 👋
Matej
