Welcome to the 23rd edition of Designer’s Digest — my weekly roundup of cool new stuff in design. And welcome to 70 new readers this week! 👋
Happy Monday! Last week I announced that I’m opening a new round of registrations for my course UX Buddy again. It’s my course to help you create your portfolio and find a UX-mature company to work for. It can help you find a better job where you’ll be respected more and earn more. In fact, my students so far secured a 30% salary increase on average when they got a new job.
I’m really excited about this because I can finally change a few things. Because I now focus on my business 100% of the time (no full-time job distraction), I can introduce a 1-1 mentoring plan (with three 60-minute Zoom calls) for 3 designers and 1-1 instructor feedback via email for the other designers. But because of that, I have to limit how many designers get access in each round of registrations. The limit is 20 seats. Once those are sold the registrations will close automatically.
So if you feel stuck in your career, but are too afraid to make the job switch, my course makes it a lot easier for you. Registrations start tomorrow and I offer early bird prices in the first week of registrations. But once those limited seats are out, that’s it!
Check it out and reserve your seat here →
Bricolage Grotesque
This is a really interesting font. Lots of character in this one so I’d only use it for headings and larger type. But here’s the interesting part — it’s a variable font with 3 axis: weight, width and optical size. And when you try it in Figma, it even has a “Set optical size automatically” setting. I tested it, and to me, it looks like the larger the font, the larger the optical size setting should be. It condenses the type a bit and changes the designs of some of the characters.
Golden age of UX is over?
Another article trying to scare the designers, this time claiming that the golden age of UX is over. That there’s nothing but decline from here on. And yeah, some of the things covered in the article are true. But is the UX industry dying? No. Is its golden age coming to an end? My answer is: Were we ever in one? What would we say the golden age of UX was? When it was easy to get a job as a UX designer? When the acronym “UX” was hyped up? Designers have existed long before that, the age of design didn’t start with UX. “UX” was just a cool, hyped-up term that people picked up, just as everything is “AI” now, all of a sudden. You can read the original article and form an opinion for yourself (it’s on Medium and members-only, so if you can’t read it, here’s an interesting, more rational thread on Reddit).
UX Job Listings Plunged in 2023
No surprise here is it? With the amount of (in my opinion mostly unnecessary) layoffs at the beginning of the year, the UX jobs market is in a really poor state. But I think this is a good thing. Maybe it’s a bit harder to get a job in UX, but perhaps the companies hiring UX designers right now are those that appreciate design more. Think about it: they’re hiring at a time when everyone else is cutting their UX budget. Among those companies are the Facebooks and Googles of the future. Combined with an increasing ability to work remotely, it’s a time of great opportunities.
Resources & Tools
Untools — a really cool collection of tools for better thinking. Great for designers solving hard problems.
DoodleIpsum — Need a quick illustration as a placeholder for your mockups. Use this tool, it’s perfect for that.
The Good Line Height — an awesome tool for calculating the perfect line height based on your baseline grid, your font size and line height multiplier. Comes with a Figma plugin too.
If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.
That’s it for this Monday, have a great week! 👋
Cheers,
Matej
