Standout design portfolio, Iconography in design systems, and more ...

Highlights of the week ↘

Explore the world of research with The Optimal Path Podcast - UX leaders at Figma, Zapier, and more talk to Maze about how user research informs better product decision-making. Listen now. - Maze SPONSORED

How we redesigned the Linear UI - We’ve adjusted the sidebar, tabs, headers, and panels to reduce visual noise, maintain visual alignment, and increase the hierarchy and density of navigation elements. - Karri Saarinen, Yann-Edern Gillet, Romain Cascino, Andreas Eldh

Creating a standout design portfolio: The ultimate guide - The 4 most-common portfolio mistakes: Homepage best practices; How to create a great project case study; 10 example portfolios annotated and explained; Top sites for creating your portfolio. - Erik D. Kennedy

Product design, UX/UI and PM ↘

Design talent is a distraction - On the first day of design school, and in the first page of every design book, there should be a clarifying lesson about human nature. - Scott Berkun

Design is politics - Whether we want to admit it or not, a large part of design work is convincing other people it’s actually good, and the right thing to do in the context of a project. - Dragan Babic

The detail, the quality - We all aspire to higher quality, but we must be committed from the outset. We must reengage with all our design skills, not just focus on the post-it. - Carlos Pariente

The death of craft - Robots, for all of their futuristic aura, are actually totems of the past. Their vision is always backwards facing, and this is especially true for Gen AI. - Joe Alterio

Design engineering ↘

Prototypes, production and fidelity layers - The mindsets for writing production and prototype code are often portrayed as binaries. Production code should be solid, serious and battle-hardened, whereas the fleeting nature of prototypes means they’re approached with a ‘good enough’ mindset. - Trys Mudford

Iconography in design systems: Easy troubleshooting and maintenance - No matter how sick you might be dealing with unending visual inconsistency, design systems are still challenging. They can scare any designer regardless of their experience. - Tatsiana Tarkan

An interactive guide to CSS Container Queries - Learn how to use CSS container queries today. - Ahmad Shadeed

Hanging punctuation in CSS - There’s a lovely CSS property called hanging-punctuation. You can use it to do exactly what the name suggests and exdent punctuation marks such as opening quotes. - Jeremy Keith

Frontend development’s identity crisis - The current landscape of front-end development presents challenges for web designers like me. - Elly Loel

Making room for long list markers with subgrid - When working with lists, it’s typical for list markers like numbers or bullets to overhang the list item content. - Noah Liebman

Inspiration and creativity ↘

Unlocking progress - It’s always been true that the bottleneck to human progress was not the pace of computation on the planet, but the fidelity of interface between humans and tools. - Linus

Design is not art, but do not forget the artist within you - To be a good designer, you must enhance your inner artist and showcase it in your proposals through emotional and visual design to connect and infuse soul into your proposals. - Hugo Bermúdez

Lets talk strategy and success - You cannot control success. You can only create the conditions that will make that success more likely. - Joe Leech

Pursuits that can’t scale - I have a theory that chasing things that scale makes you need therapy, and the therapy is pursuing things that can’t scale. - Anu Atluru

Last but not least ↘

IDDE: The infusion of design and dev tools - It’s time to kill design handoff and create software differently. - David Hoang