A weird question came across the Dear Design Student desk recently: “What are some things (if any) that designers are incapable of?”
My immediate reaction was, “nothing?!” Why would anyone seek to define limitations to someone’s capabilities? I grew up in a community that assumed anyone from fifty miles out was better, smarter, and more successful. That point-of-view sucks and it took me decades to understand that it’s simply not true.
That said, after giving the question more consideration within the context of my experiences as a designer, I uncovered more than a handful of things designers are incapable of…
File this under: Well it’s about damn time.
The upcoming redesign for the next version Airbag features a blog roll. And I’ve added a blog roll to the next new…
This afternoon I bring you required reading from the intelligent minds of Farnam Street (a smart group of people everyone should be reading). It’s in the form of a list of the biggest reasons they make bad decisions. In my years as a leader in digital, I’ve come to know and council with a few hundred peers. Inevitably we share our victories, but more importantly, our defeats. What brings success for one group will likely not work or apply to the next, but failure is almost universal.
If you want to succeed, learn from those whose success you wish for…
Charis SIL is a Unicode-based font family that supports the wide range of languages that use the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. It is specially designed to make long texts pleasant…
Please share this story far and wide because it’s important, and the digital industry needs to see this.
All-Star designer Stephanie Hagadorn shares a unique and super smart project her team created at Indeed to help build better products through accessibility requirements.
Over the past year, accessibility has become one of Indeed’s top priorities, a massive undertaking. We now require teams to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 ( WCAG 2.1) AA conformance, and go beyond those guidelines to improve the accessibility of the site. This new focus means reexamining our practices throughout the product life cycle, not only to…
I’ve known about Design Issues, but I have to admit that my interest wasn’t strong enough to buy a copy. I don’t think I have ever seen a copy on the newsstand.
My design education has been primarily through self-discovery, so I avoided the cerebral study of my vocation that most university students have to endure. I can think of only two designers I know who study design at this level regularly: Doug Powell and Michael Johnson. And I’m sure they already have a subscription to Design Issues, and/or they are downloading every PDF at this moment.
MIT Press is…
I’m glad we still have Jason Fried around to provide a healthy alternate perspective to the mindset of the rest of the tech industry.
Businesses love to compete. To beat, to win, to go 1–0. We don’t. I have no interest in competing with anyone. And we don’t frame internal decisions in a competitive way. Business has never been about competition for me.
All we have to do is get enough customers to make our business work. That’s it. That’s how we stay alive. Not by taking marketshare away from anyone, not by siphoning off users, not by spending gobs…
If we have worked together or you’ve asked me for career advice, there is a high probability that I have encouraged you to write and hit the publish button often. There are so many benefits to writing that includes processing your thoughts and ideas, improving your ability to communicate, and increasing your thought leadership in the industry (presuming you write about your industry from time-to-time). …
The Society of News Design (SND) posted their awards for work published in 2020. No surprise that the New York Times cleaned house with all of their great work related to the pandemic. And they continued their sweep with many more long-form stories and specials like Who Gets to Breathe Clean Air in New Delhi? and The African-American Art Shaping the 21st Century. The former entry features a side-scrolling interface, but please don’t take that to mean carousels are back! I loved Reuters’ work on Wildfires: A devastated coast because of their use of the screen as a canvas meant…
It’s been a year since we have sat in the studio — less than a year since our team met to move our stuff out. But, what I said in the Twitter reply still stuck in the back of my head, “Our community is still strong.” And then it hit me. Like, hit me with a box of tissues, I’m crying, hit me. The IBM Studios Slack channel received a message from our sister studio in Böblingen, Germany. The studio leader had organized a Box folder of unscripted, personal, and heartfelt video messages from our studio mates. Many of them…
Greg Storey
Constant Observer. Occasional Writer. Operations Chief. People Coach. Design Enthusiast. Type Collector.
