Welcome to the 22nd edition of Designer’s Digest — my weekly roundup of cool new stuff in design. And welcome to 146 new readers this week! 👋
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Today marks 6 months since that traumatic Thursday afternoon when I got laid off. I don’t have a new job and my family’s finances are still unstable. Here’s what happened since.
🚗 I got a cool new car 2 weeks after getting laid off. I had it custom-built and ordered it 9 months before when I still had my cushy job. It’s an awesome, comfortable car but also a financial burden.
👶👶 My daughter and my son were born in April. They’re the joy of my life but also a financial burden.
💵 The financial market went berserk, raising the interest rate on my mortgage by more than 50%
Still, the world didn’t end. I wouldn’t take that job back if they begged me. I’m slowly working on revitalising my once-thriving business. I found my love and passion for design again. And there are opportunities opening up that wouldn’t be imaginable if I still had that job.
Getting laid off was better than quitting because I received several months’ severance. I was going to quit soon anyway, so they did me a favour. And I know it’s better for me long term because I can finally do what really excites me and financially support my family with it.
I was deep in a dark tunnel on February 9. The light at the end of it was just a small speck. Now, I’m about to step out.
TLDR: If you got laid off, it’s not the end of the world. Everything will be all right, and you’ll be better off.
Libre Caslon Condensed
This is a condensed version of the Libre Caslon font, an all-time classic that belongs right next to Baskerville, Garamond, and Minion. It’s variable and comes with the italic style too. I’d use it for headings, especially if they’re a bit larger. If you need that classic look, but a bit more modern, this is a great choice.
Legibility — How and why typography affects the ease of reading
This is a full, really detailed book on legibility by Mary C. Dyson. It’s available for free online. This one went t
How new Twitter X logo fails (6 min read)
My buddy Oliver did an analysis of the new Twitter logo. Or the X logo I guess. It turns out it’s not Unicode after all. What does the symbol stand for? What about the execution? Is it any good?
Scroll-driven animations in CSS are a joy to play around with! (8 min read)
Set to be released in Chrome 115, scroll-driven animations will give us the chance to animate elements based on a scroll, instead of time. Unlike scroll-triggered, scroll-driven animations are blazingly fast, unlike popular JS methods which often cause jank.
Design strategy for design portfolios (6 min read)
Dan Saffer gives practical and really good advice on how you should approach designing your portfolio. In short, you should have two: one online and one for presenting your work in job interviews. This is the most important part. Can you guess why?
‘Doing strategy’ as a product designer (10 min read)
Designers often get lost in their craft and forget the bigger picture. What is strategy? And how can designers contribute to an organisation’s business success? Ted Goas boils it down to understanding the problem domain, the business, defining what success looks like, ruthless prioritisation, storytelling and sales skills.
Icon Buddy (Resource)
I’ve been using this tool a lot lately. You can search numerous icon libraries, customise their colour and background, and download or copy them as SVGs. It saves so much time!
