🔥 Shaping Design Spicy Sunday #001
🔥 Shaping Design Spicy Sunday #001
The design industry needs a little hot sauce poured on it
The design industry needs a little hot sauce poured on it
What do I mean? Let me explain.
I'm sure you've seen the "OMG LoVe tHe CoLoRs" tweets that only stroke the ego (and other things) of designers pumping out subpar work that barely hits the target of defining a great user experience for their customers, and instead gets clicks/likes/retweets and garners only empty fame.
These tweets and posts and threads don't help anyone, except grow the ego creature developing in mentioned designers' stomachs, eagerly awaiting their next fictitious compliment meal.
Rarely do we see critical writing that depicts good design (Thanks Rauno for holding everyone's weight).
Let's change that.
I'm going to use this new weekly edition to the Shaping Design newsletter to give you succinct, unfiltered, extremely spicy—Scoville level 100,000—critiques and opinions of the design industry's latest and greatest. My hopes are, we can learn together as what constitutes a great piece of design and improve all our skills together.
Also, I hope I make you giggle a bit.
You should use these newsletter articles as a weekly exercise to look at your own work honestly and improve it. To shape your aesthetic, taste, mindset, and career for yourself. To become a better designer by trade and craft and elevate your fellow constituents.
Basically, you'll take away from reading this every Sunday:
How to look at designs and critique them.
What to look for when crafting your own work.
The steps it takes to shape a strong designer mindset.
And, as this addition is released near my birthday, I intend to hit you with a banger.
Shall we get started? 🔥
Before we continue, check out our podcast on YouTube where you can see me interview top tier designers and hear their stories, strategies, and tactics that make them successful so you can be too.
Also, I hear that the best designers subscribe to this newsletter and share it with their friends... Just sayin.
Coming up
1. X.AI: Elon launches another wold-changing side project called X.AI and its goal is to answer life's hardest questions... *without* figuring out how to launch with a decent, forward-thinking brand.
2. Invisible Details of Interaction Design: an article by Rauno about what constitutes a great interaction from common experiences we don't even blink an eye for.
3. Paul Lapkin: a designer who crushes it with his type game.
4. Nostalgia: and why it isn't the best design strategy.
I'm still tweaking the format, but I plan on including a combination of a website design, an article, a designer, and a concept to think about.
1) X.AI
It's shocking to me how bad this website design is for a number of reasons.
Of course, I'm sure X.AI isn't going to fail because their Wordpress looking template launched without a dark theme.
But the important thing to note: this is the face of what our future looks like—an AI company to transform our world, and with it a cold, unimpressive reflection of our reality.
Move fast and break things seems to be the motto of X.AI. And while I applaud that strategy as a startup, it's hardly an excuse to ask others to join such a grandiose pursuit.
Does this site build trust as the future? → No
Takeaway
A brand has a duty to uphold the mission through an ethos that isn't only visual. But visual is how many of us interact with it. This is a complete fail on the part of X.AI, but I do have high hopes they'll eventually get it right.
After all, Elon funded Open.AI, which has a decent visual language.
Good news though: Their logo isn't bad and it's quite memorable.
2) Invisible Details of Interaction Design
Rauno's article depicts the micro-interactions that guide our physical world and how they wonderfully translate to great software. He does a stellar job educating the community and I’m excited to see how others react.
Not every day do experts shout quietly about how we should pay attention to a very specific thing. I find Rauno Freiberg especially correct in this case.
Scientifically or intuitively, there are hundreds of design decisions made by someone obsessesing over the tiniest margins so that when they work, no one has to think about. And many of them tap into our instinctive behaviors.— Invisible Details of Interaction Design, July 2023.
Takeaway
Follow Rauno's breakdown closely and investigate for yourself—do the interactions digitally of your favorite experience match those of the real world or stem from them? Chances are they do and more so you can pull similar experience and use them in your work! That's what makes great design great—the design details aren't extras... they are the design.
His full article can be read here.
3) Paul Lipkin
This designer is on fire right now 🔥
What you can learn from watching Paul:
His type skills are legendary. I can see him becoming one of the top designers based on his use of typography. I admire and would love to emulate his skills.
He implements designs into Framer elegantly. I am always excited to see a site he makes so I can steal implementation tactics.
His humble self-promotion never comes across as egotistical. You can develop your own brand, like Paul, without sacrificing your kind nature.
Follow Paul on Twitter and give him a like.
4) Nostalgia
Many of us have a special relationship with the idea of nostalgia in design and many also choose to implement it as a means of aesthetic, and sometimes designers even synonymize their personality with it.
This is a bad strategy to execute on and here's why.
We know nostalgia to be something along the lines of "an old-timey look and feel of a previous generation". And, while many benefits come with nostalgia such as prior trust, brand loyalty, simpler times, we do not live in such an era.
I reject the notion of "timeless design". Because design relies heavily on aesthetics of the time (all senses including visual, tactical, and scent). Too few realize that when they say "design" they are now also referring to the engineering that actually drove such products and services.
Great engineering can be timeless because it's the core function that serves a greater purpose. Clocks and watches, for example, have served us for hundreds of years and, if not a smart watch, it's a pretty universal design: 3 lines and a circular face.
Clocks are universally good design:
Recognizable: It's incredibly recognizable.
Consistent: Everyone knows how to use it.
Adaptable: It works not just on your wrist but can even work on walls.
If we use design to replace engineering in-that engineering forms a useful intent of purpose, then it's a legal synonym (AKA anyone can be a "designer" if it's not limited to just pixel-pushing or decorating the plastic cover of an object).
Otherwise, it's a crime to suggest design was the driving factor behind great products or brands because design, today, is often referred to as what something looks and feels like, not how something behaves.
Nostalgia is OK to use sometimes, like if you're attempting to brand something that holds up an artifact of the past as-is like a restaurant or food item. But if you are trying to brand a restaurant as "a 200 year old, generational experience" but offer brand new, disconnected from heritage food, then you're simply not abiding by nostalgia. You're faking your way to getting people to pay you.
If I may offer a different strategy, attempt to be as forward facing as possible. To describe how to do so, I'll need to write another article for you to read.
— Mitchell 🔥
Hope you enjoyed this week's edition of Spicy Sunday!
If you did, can you reply to this email with what you liked/disliked most?
And if you feel like you took the heat well, I'd love it if you shared this newsletter with a friend.