Manager by day, designer by night
Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.
“I got it; this is it! It will save my team and me a significant amount of time. Damn, it’s already 11 PM. Should I start now or leave it for tomorrow. Well, tomorrow I’ll spend 6 hours on the zoom call with the client, so there’ll be no time to work on the design. Or shall I work on the design while listening to these meetings? No, let do this right.”
Manager by day, designer by night →
The UX Collective is an independent ad-free design publication that elevates unheard design voices, reaching over 400k+ designers every week. Curated by Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga.
Editors’ picks
From systems thinking to systems doing →
A primer to applying systems thinking in product design.Rewilding your attention →
Step away from the algorithmic feeds of Big Tech.The designer’s gaze →
The power dynamic between designers and users.
Stripe Press is a collection of books with ideas for progress.
Make me think
Facebook Is weaker than we knew →
“Not financial trouble, or legal trouble, or even senators-yelling-at-Mark-Zuckerberg trouble. What I’m talking about is a kind of slow, steady decline that anyone who has ever seen a dying company up close can recognize. It’s a cloud of existential dread that hangs over an organization whose best days are behind it, influencing every managerial priority and product decision and leading to increasingly desperate attempts to find a way out. This kind of decline is not necessarily visible from the outside, but insiders see a hundred small, disquieting signs of it every day — user-hostile growth hacks, frenetic pivots, executive paranoia, the gradual attrition of talented colleagues.”What happens when the experience of celebrity becomes universal? →
“This is, of course, not a new contention: the idea that dumb media make us all dumber echoes from the very first critiques of newspapers, pamphlets, and the tabloid press in America, in the late eighteenth century, to the 1961 speech by then Federal Communications Commission Chair Newt Minow, in which he told the National Broadcasters of America that, basically, their product sucked and that TV amounted to a “vast wasteland. I thought, and many of us thought, that the Internet was going to solve this problem. The rise of the liberal blogs, during the run-up to Barack Obama’s election, brought us the headiest days of Internet Discourse Triumphalism. We were going to remake the world through radically democratized global conversations. That’s not what happened.”
Little gems this week
What creating a simple font taught me about font design →
Design detail: crafting better shadows for interaction →
Working for Exposure: visual identity for a storytelling company →
Tools and resources
Rapid color palettes →
Across-the-rainbow palettes for your delight.Dark Figma →
A Figma plugin that automatically generates dark themes.Accessibility series →
How to start designing for all.
Behold, the Book Blob: the book cover of the current literary zeitgeist.