Are we over-indexing on the process to compensate for lack of trust? It feels safer to trust the process than the designer. A lack of trust can occur between team members as well as between company leadership and their design team. And sometimes we focus too much on the process because we lack trust in our own judgment and skills.

Why following a framework doesn’t guarantee good results →

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Editors’ picks

Genderless design is a myth →
Can design be truly free of culture, gender, and bias?

Beyond technology →
The intersection between society, technology, and design.

E-commerce fail →
Why e-commerce design is failing people and the planet.

This beautifully designed tool lets you generate city maps algorithmically.

Make me think

Functions and the future of design systems →
“The most sophisticated design systems can provide instructions in multiple coding languages, with detailed documentation, with orderly, regular updates. But they’re still relatively static, needing a designer or engineer to interpret the documents and use them in the correct context. Today, when we put a design system to work, there’s no coupling; pushing one part doesn’t cause another to pull. There’s no interlocking or interconnection; no networks, feedback loops, or forces at play. And without those mechanisms, there’s no leverage, no simple machines multiplying force, no power in the output.”

Material You: Designing harmony into dynamic color →
“Material’s new color system is algorithmic. This means that all colors that Material provides are generated from a set of rules, rather than the manual process of hand-picking colors that designers are used to. Even so, designers on the Material team explore colors by hand and evaluate them by eye before turning the colors that we like into an algorithm. This way, we preserve the human touch and sometimes unexpected decisions that create the best visual results.”

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Little gems this week

Boxmoji: the trending new aesthetic →

Everything macOS has gotten right in the past 25 years →

The Tinder Swindler on Netflix: learnings for a better dating UX →

Design for the subconscious →

Tools and resources

UX Community on Twitter →
Twitter is introducing Communities and invited the UX Collective to join.

Hue Tools →
An open-source toolbox for everything-color.

Archetypes in design →
Understanding behavior as a network.

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. So we created the design newsletter we have always wanted to receive. Feel free to forward this to your friends.