Whether it's a loading bar on the google play store, the metronome on a guitar tuner or the progress bar of an offline audio player downloaded from F-Droid... everyone seems to have adopted the squiggly line loading bar seemingly overnight, and I can't fathom why, as it can be really distracting at times to have multiple moving things on screen.

I can understand wanting to renew the look of an otherwise boring loading bar on the app store, but does a music player really need to have a progress bar with a wave animation? Is this a new trend or design choice in the tech world? It's driving me insane...

The European Central Bank is giving people the chance to vote on the design of future banknotes.

You can find more info and an overview of the designs on this page.

And you can vote directly on the survey here.

I'm quite touched that they picked birds for half of the designs. One design even has the migratory path, footprints and sonogram for each species, which I think is pretty cool. Not trying to sway anyone to vote for a particular design, just happy birds are getting some *more recognition :)

I always loved magazines. Like, real paper magazines. Lately I realized that I can find digital versions or scans somewhat easily and it sparked a new obsession. I'm weird, I know. But there are so many beautifully designed magazines, such as the Japanese travel-related Transit or the men's lifestyle Brutus. Even their websites are beautiful and worth visiting. There's also this independent Brazilian retro gaming magazine called Jogo Véio that is almost like a love letter to the classic video game magazines.

I think I've been craving creativity lately, in a World of AI slop and "content" creators. So any magazines you like? What do you like about them?

hey there tildes—

the job i’ve had for the past year has included heavy graphic design. i’ve never really done graphic design before so i’ve just been winging it and learning as i go. as time has gone on and the projects have become more complicated, i wonder if there’s a standardized way of organizing complex (or complex to me at least) projects in Illustrator (or for me, Affinity Designer).

one example— i create labels with 3-9 slight variations to be printed and attached to physical items (jars, in my case). these variations of the same design are roughly 75% the same, with the 25% being the “flavor” and associated text/colors. i also have to export as a layered pdf for the printing company since we don’t have the necessary equipment in-house.

another example (more related to InDesign or in my case Affinity Publisher)— a product catalogue. there are something like 30 pages and it’s just a huge click-fest of layers and nested groups.

are there any graphic designers here that have any insight on best practices when organizing large files or even practical ways to split up files?

Hey there, I am asking for a friend who is interested in transitioning from their career of designing print ads (Photoshop and InDesign) to web design.

I would imagine they would need some courses on responsive design and Figma? But I'll let the people with experience talk if they're here.

Free is preferred but willing to pay if needed! And if you have links or specific online courses you really like and helped you, that would be great!

Thanks in advance!

Unless I'm missing something in my search queries, Google ain't coming up with anything. I'm trying to look for samples of printouts from emails (hosts are irrelevant) made in the early 2000's. It's for a novel project. While I have a vague idea of what kind of layout is needed, it's one thing to guess, and another to actually see it. Any leads?

As a railfan and a graphic designer, the first thing I check out when in a new town with public transit is their transit map. You can tell a lot about a city by how they represent themselves on a transit map, and I myself have designed more maps than I can count. What's the map of your city look like? Do you have a personal favourite you think is really unknown? Any maps that you just want to rant about because of how terrible it is?

My personal favourite transit map is Constantine Konovalov's Paris Metro Map, I just love how effortlessly it weaves the lines throughout the Peripherique, and how it's not afraid to break its own established rules on angles and circles. Honorable mentions go to the London Tube and Rail map (an absolute classic), and the Mexico City Metro, which assigns a unique symbol to every station for the benefit of passengers who can't read or write.

Also, designers, feel free to share your transit diagrams! I miss r/transitdiagrams a lot and would love to see your work, fictional, redesign or otherwise!

Where do you share the art that you make with the world? Do you use a social media site? A personal website? Do you keep it all to yourself? Is your art something that can't be shared online so easily?

I have been a product designer and experience architect since before “UX” even meant anything.

I’ve never wanted for work, and I’ve always been confident in my skills as a leader both on the product and business strategy side.

But especially recently, I’ve started to feel some tremors I’ve never felt before:

1. A massive amount of young talent has flooded the industry via UX programs and boot camps - and much of them are quite talented!
2. Layoffs have further upped the available workers
3. AI and Automation have made good designers even more efficient, and even inexperienced designers can now move at the speed of light.

I also have some personal situations at play:

1. I took the last few years to launch and grow my own product business - scaling that eventually to an exit. So I’ve been out of the “product designer” game a bit - as I’ve been immersed in everything that comes with being a founder and startup growth.
2. I now have a family - I can’t grind as hard as I used to.

All this gives me some qualms about the ability to find work in the future.

With an industry now flooded in talent, and AI that commodifies and democratizes UI design - making it easier than ever to spit out good design - is there job security for product designers the next few years?

What does that look like? How will pay be affected? Where will the opportunity be?

I'm a software developer working with a small team, and our Google Drive folder tree of UI assets/illustrations/app icons/etc. is becoming increasingly difficult to deal with. Aside from proper versioning, symlinks would be a major plus. Both are kinda-sorta possible with GDrive, but not in a reliable way.

I'm happy to take on a reasonable amount of management myself, although the easier it is for the designers themselves to work with the software, the better. Paid solutions are fine, although open source would be preferable (even as a hosted service) to avoid vendor lock-in down the line.

My instinct is to go with git/GitHub on the basis that we're already deeply familiar with it from the dev side, the GitHub desktop app isn't too onerous for non-techies, and we're already paying for it. That said, I'd be very interested in anyone's real-world experience of git for multiple gigs of 10-200MB binary files. I've heard that it's not especially well suited, although that might be out of date knowledge?

Beyond that, I'm open to almost anything. I'm kind of surprised that I haven't been able to find a single "gold standard" piece of software here, in the way that git is for developers, but maybe I haven't been searching well enough? Any pointers in the right direction or stories of what has/hasn't worked for your teams would be a huge help!