A conversation with Jony Ive
An insightful look into Jony Ive and the purity of his views on design and it's role.
Shared Links
10 things I learned from 10 years at Figma
A love letter to scaling from 10 to 1,400 people over a decade as Figma’s first marketing and business hire
Our interfaces have lost their senses
Just beautiful and so accurate as to how the industry is moving. Time to design for all senses.
Chamberí Typeface
Such stunning lettering with so much character.
52 Things I Learned in 2024
I love this series of internet rabbit holes, each one wildly different from the last.
MacWhisper
For anytime you have to take notes or want a summary of a YouTube video. This does local transcription for sensitive things and an AI fuelled version for everything else.
Wulkan Serif
A seemingly rather standard serif but with alternate characters that make it wildly expressive. Love the mix.
100 useful coaching questions.
Usually when a post starts with a number you should avoid it but this is an exception to that rule. This is a great resource if you're trying to be mindful to coach over manage. You should really be consuming Matt Rutherford's entire back catalogue, go ahead I'll wait.
A course on giving better design feedback.
Such an incredible training resource, even if you believe you're great at critique. This covers so many great elements of giving and recieving feedback on your design work and it's presented in a ridiculously easy to digest way.
Articulating the definition of taste.
In the age of AI, taste is ever more important to cut through the dense noise of AI generated, low quality, six fingered nonsense. This is a level of definition I haven't been able to articulate. (Sent to me by a friend)
The heirloom tomato org chart at Config 2024.
You will always end up shipping your org chart so create a structure that you would want to ship. Great advice here from Nan Yu at Config, so many times we optimise for the wrong thing.
Eleven Labs now reads books and websites.
This is wonderful I have crafted some lovely voices in Eleven Labs and now they can read me websites and books. There's some issues with spiralling loading but I'm sure they'll get past that. I wonder how soon in the future all of these AI pieces will come together for an ever ready assistant that can handle anything.
Bananabin an app that brings joy in it's eccentricity.
More of this please, this app reminds me of the disc burning app Disco it would bellow with smoke. The world and software both need more fun.
James Clear on Creativity
I've tried to read Atomic Habits a few times but for whatever reason it doesn't stick. However this article from James Clear on creativity had me hooked. Creativity is one of those things that is assumed either a divine issued skill or not part of their being. It is a muscle you build by doing creative things and think of this as a way to build your exercise guide.
10 Truths on building design orgs at scale
Rachel Kobetz provides training on Maven and publishes a blog called defining experience, this post about 10 truths couldn't be more accurate. If you're an emerging design leader pay attention to these and prepare for them to be true as you scale.
A bunch of Illustrator Scripts to do all sorts of complex tasks
Whenever I think I have a reasonable understanding of Adobe Illustrator I very much am humbled. I was looking to join a bunch of overlapping paths together and the join tool would take me all day. I saw a reference to one of these scripts and saw Join Reasonably which did exactly the job I needed it to, join all reasonably close paths in a document. This is a must have if you work with vectors.
It's Nice That chats with Mr Bingo as part of Nicer Tuesdays
The first link this week is not for the easily offended, Mr Bingo is a great comedy artist. I have lots of his work and it makes me smile every time. It's a new level of cheeky and edgy, this talk dives into his motivations and process.