Design is everything but everything isn’t design
Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.
Aesthetics are an expression of purpose. What we believe, the choices we make, and the products and services we choose to use are bound up in our individual worldview and belief system. Our choices in life are a reflection of how we see the world. The same goes for brands.
So why do brands put aesthetics ahead of everything else when in reality they need everything else for design to truly succeed?
Design is everything but everything isn’t design →
The UX Collective is an independent ad-free design publication that elevates unheard design voices, reaching over 412,600 designers every week. Curated by Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga.
Editors’ picks
The perfect search for Wikipedia →
Making discovery more intelligent, personalized and efficient.From scientific racism to inclusive design →
Where does bias come from and where does it lead us to?The precipitous rise of Figma and fall of InVision →
How product focus and strategy can flip the market upside down.
Jessica Hartley’s “How industries can make transformational change for black professionals”, animated by Titus and friends.
Food for thought
How to eat an elephant, one atomic concept at a time →
“Companies like Figma, Sketch, and Canva are examples of products that have been able to become top products despite Adobe’s ubiquity in all things design. (…) These companies have distinct atomic concepts from Adobe. The primitives that their products are built around are fundamentally different from those of Adobe’s product lineup. It’s these different fundamental atomic concepts that turn Adobe’s advantage of an established product and existing userbase into a weakness that hinders their ability to counter these upstarts.”
The future of web software is HTML-over-WebSockets →
“The dual approach of marrying a Single Page App with an API service has left many dev teams mired in endless JSON wrangling and state discrepancy bugs across two layers. This costs dev time, slows release cycles, and saps the bandwidth for innovation. But a new WebSockets-driven approach is catching web developers’ attention.”
Against performative positivity →
“I am considered a pessimist—the ‘Daria’ of design—whose standards are too high and too critical. Designers, I would argue, are afraid to embrace dissent because it disrupts the positivity bubble. I would describe designers as the very embodiment of the motivational posters in bad typefaces that we constantly critique. We are performing optimism. (…) Optimism hinders the politicization of designers. If design is going to contribute to tools that can change the world positively, it must begin to embrace pessimism.”
Experience Japan Pictograms are a novel set of visual symbols developed for people of all cultures and ages to enhance their tourism experience in Japan.
Little gems this week
10 publications that contextualize design in South Africa
Is Apple capable of designing a usable mouse?
Tools and resources
Type dictionary →
A brief visual exploration of a dictionary of typography.Notion to website →
Turn your Notion page into a website with custom domains, analytics, and more.Hiding content responsibly →
All the ways to hide something in HTML/CSS, and when to use which.
