Product Design is lost, 100 Figma design tips, Designing with soul, and more ...

Highlights of the week ↘

Product Design is lost - How the field of product design lost its way, and how it can find its way back. - Rune Madsen

100 Figma design tips - I am sharing all my not-so-secret Figma design tips. I believe each of these small big Figma design tips will help to make your Figma design workflow smart, fast, and super productive. - Nitish Khagwal

Product design, UX/UI and PM ↘

4 questions I ask myself when designing - I thought it would be interesting to call out four questions I consistently find myself asking during the design process. - Ben Strak

Designing with soul - This episode is the ultimate design founder story. Dennis shares all of the ups and downs along his journey to build Amie—a new productivity tool that captures your emails, calendar, and to-dos in a single beautiful product. - Dennis Müller

Unlocking icon usability - Unraveling the impact of concreteness, complexity, and distinctiveness on user experience. - Dr. Maria Panagiotidi

A field guide to operationalizing product discovery - The inherent correlation between scope of impact, and level of uncertainty. - Luke Anthony Firth

Design engineering ↘

Design engineering at Vercel - Design Engineer is a new role that is gaining popularity—a role that is both confusing and exciting. Expectations for what good software looks and feels like have never been higher. Design Engineers are a core part in exceeding that expectation. - Glenn Hitchcock, Henry Heffernan, John Pham, Rauno Freiberg, Yasmin Pessoa

The anatomy of a component sprint - The Washington Post’s inclusive process for creating new design system components bridges the gap between design and development to make features that help navigate the news online. - Brian Alfaro, Victor Alejandro Aguila

Modern CSS patterns in Campfire - An in-depth look at how 37signals built ONCE/Campfire using modern features, vanilla CSS, and no frameworks or preprocessors. - Jason Zimdars

Don’t use the maxlength attribute to stop users from exceeding the limit - Have you heard of the “error prevention” heuristic? It means “do everything you can so users don’t make mistakes”. And it’s good advice. - Adam Silver

Tools and resources ↘

Typography variables starter kit - Variables set up for you to start playing with them in your design system. - Luis Ouriach

The right code for your design system - There’s a natural tension between design and code. In the world of design, the focus is deciding what to build—in the world of code, the focus is building it… In practice, they’re partners working to bring a product to life. - Emil Sjölander

The Shape of AI - Exploring how patterns and experiences will change in a world driven by Artificial Intelligence. - Emily Campbell

Inspiration and creativity ↘

Don’t let a linear design process snuff out your sparks of inspiration - Earlier in my career, I would follow the double diamond design process as a series of linear steps: define the problem, explore solutions, test and iterate, then build and ship. - Jeff Zych

Design duels - Create a duel, design your work, winner gets selected by the crowd. - Arsen Kolyba

Last but not least ↘

How to reframe your frustrations - You can reframe any problem to make it more actionable. - Scott Berkun