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  • Showing only topics in ~design with the tag "ask". Back to normal view / Search all groups
    1. How are you reacting to the current climate in the product design and UX space?

      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...

      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?

      14 votes
    2. Recommend me a version control system for design assets (primarily Photoshop & Illustrator)

      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...

      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!

      17 votes
    3. Looking for more home and building related content!

      I'm really not sure if I posted this in the right place, but I have been watching the Youtube channel "The B1M" and the guy's other channel "Tomorrow's Build" and I really like his type of...

      I'm really not sure if I posted this in the right place, but I have been watching the Youtube channel "The B1M" and the guy's other channel "Tomorrow's Build" and I really like his type of content. I've also been watching tv shows about homes and the types of people who live in what homes in which parts of the country (Denmark). I also watched a couple of episodes of "The World's Most Extraordinary Homes" on Netflix...

      So yeah, I obviously really have an itching for more content along the lines of buildings and especially homes. So, does anyone have suggestion on what to watch next?

      6 votes
    4. Recommended training courses for graphic arts?

      My fiance is an artist who was laid off because he worked for a major employer in the entertainment industry that required him to be in contact with people. So he's been unemployed for a long time...

      My fiance is an artist who was laid off because he worked for a major employer in the entertainment industry that required him to be in contact with people.

      So he's been unemployed for a long time now, but he has been trying to find work, but there isn't really anything available that uses his particular skills. So we invested in a digital art workstation (basically just bought a monitor with a digitizer built in to use a pen with) so that he could work on becoming an independant artist. But he's so bad at marketing and he spends so much time worrying about fine details that it takes him over a week to finish a single piece, so he hasn't had any success.

      So if you combine this with a broken tooth that he hasn't been able to get taken care of because of a lapse in his dental insurance, he's not been in a good place.

      I just bought a Mac and was looking for mac-native graphics programs (I sometimes work on marketing, so I need to do photo editing from time to time. Also I used to do photography as a hobby and want to get back into it), when I came across Serif's Affinity Designer Workbook. And I thought to myself that getting my fiance a training course in graphic design would allow him to shift gears into a segment where there is more work. It'll also give him a bit of a kick in the pants to get him moving and feeling better about himself.

      I'm sure everyone knows there are millions of online training courses available right now, so I'm hoping someone might have any recommendations. I have some money saved up, so I don't mind paying a little bit extra if it'll result in better results. I'd prefer if it were a class that didn't rely on Adobe Illustrator if possible, but I know that it's the 'standard' and he'll probably have better luck if he has experience in it.

      9 votes
    5. What are some examples of good administrative/management UI design to use for inspiration?

      tl;dr What applications (web or desktop) have you seen that have excellent, productive user interfaces that prioritize getting shit done? I am currently developing a moderately complex web...

      tl;dr What applications (web or desktop) have you seen that have excellent, productive user interfaces that prioritize getting shit done?

      I am currently developing a moderately complex web application with a management interface that will be used by non-technical users. It also has a separate interface for technicians to see their tasks and submit reports, but I'm pretty happy with how that's coming together. I have a pretty good idea of how I want to display data in terms of what kind of "widgets" I could use. For example, a calendar view with daily, weekly, and monthly view modes. What I'm looking for inspiration with are the finer details, like filtering data, navigation, data hierarchy. I want to find things I hadn't even considered and aren't part of the typical "flat web UI toolkit" playbook.

      I'd love to steal small ideas from a forgotten tool built for Windows 95, or maybe those paradigms are best left in the past—I don't know. Personally, I find most flat UI applications are almost useless in terms of discoverability, productivity, and general ease of use. Something like the Azure dashboard is what I would like to avoid building.

      I'm also trying to keep my front end stack pretty lean by using Vue.js and rolling my own components based on accessible and keyboard navigable HTML components.

      9 votes
    6. Why are drink coasters flat?

      A drink coaster goes under a glass or cup, and is intended to catch any condensation or spillage from the glass, to protect the tabletop underneath. But most coasters are flat.* Any liquid that...

      A drink coaster goes under a glass or cup, and is intended to catch any condensation or spillage from the glass, to protect the tabletop underneath.

      But most coasters are flat.* Any liquid that gathers on them can roll off the edges onto the table. Some coasters are made of a water-absorbing material, like cardboard or cork, but some are made of materials that repel water, like metal or ceramic or plastic.

      I ask this because I recently discovered a small coaster-like tray with an upraised lip around the edge. Strictly speaking, it's not a coaster, but it's exactly the right size to be used as a coaster - and, with the upraised lip around the edge, it actually prevents liquid from escaping onto the table.

      So why are coasters flat?

      (I bought some of the lipped not-coasters to use as coasters. This design makes sense to me. And they happen to look nice as well.)

      * It was only while researching coasters online prior to making this post that I discovered that some coasters have lips. Every coaster I've seen in real life is flat.

      20 votes
    7. Share your favorite oldschool wallpapers!

      I've been in a bit of a late 90s, early 00s aesthetic and was wondering what people's favorite oldschool wallpapers are. I'm partial to crystal, clouds, Cheetah, carved stone, and Dapper Drake....

      I've been in a bit of a late 90s, early 00s aesthetic and was wondering what people's favorite oldschool wallpapers are.

      I'm partial to crystal, clouds, Cheetah, carved stone, and Dapper Drake. I'm probably forgetting a bunch.

      Note these don't need to be default OS wallpapers, those that reflect the aesthetic of the time are fine too.

      Edit: Might as well share my current desktop.

      19 votes
    8. Clothing - linen, merino, cotton, polyester?

      I personally am not a big clothes shopper, I pretty much replace underwear/socks when they break or I lose them, and once per year, I buy some clothes. Yesterday I bought my first linen T-shirt....

      I personally am not a big clothes shopper, I pretty much replace underwear/socks when they break or I lose them, and once per year, I buy some clothes. Yesterday I bought my first linen T-shirt. And it feels so airy and comfy, it's amazing and not itchy. What do you guys prefer to wear?
      Where do you guys source your clothes, also in regard to ethics - no child labor. I guess second-hand clothes are the best in that regard?
      Does anyone here feel strongly about a specific material? I heard merino is supposed to feel amazing, but the price tag keeps me from getting a shirt haha.

      11 votes
    9. Suburbs and car centric urban design is the worst mistake in modern history

      Designing our countries to accommodate cars as much as possible has been one of the most destructive things to our health, environment, safety and social connectedness. The damage has spread so...

      Designing our countries to accommodate cars as much as possible has been one of the most destructive things to our health, environment, safety and social connectedness. The damage has spread so far and deep that it has reached a crisis point in most developed cities in almost every country. The suburbs we live in are subjected to strict zoning laws baring any form of high density building and any form of mixed zoning. As a result our houses are spaced so far away from each other and from the essential services we need that unless you own a car you are blocked from having a normal life. The main streets full of independent stores and markets have all been killed by megamalls 30km away from where people live with carparks bigger than most park lands. All of this was caused by car usage pushing our societies further and further apart to the point where many people find it acceptable and normal to drive 40km each direction to work each day.

      One of the more devastating effects of this urban sprawl is the supermarket has been moved so far away that most people avoid going as much as possible and limit it to a single trip every 1-2 weeks. Fresh food does not last 1-2 weeks which leaves people throwing out mountains of spoiled food that wasn't eaten in time as well as the move to processed foods packed full of preservatives. As well as a shift to people buying dinner from drive through takeaway franchises because their hour long commute has left them with little time to cook fresh and healthy foods.

      Owning a car in many countries is seen as the only way to get a job. This locks the poor from ever regaining control of their life because the cost of owning and maintaining a car is higher than most of these people get in an entire year. Our city streets which should be places of vibrant liability have become loud, unsafe and toxic.

      Elon and his electric cars solve none of these issues. Electric cars are not the way of the future. They don't even solve air pollution issues entirely because a large part of air pollution is brake pad fibres and tire wear which is proportional to the vehicles weight. And these Teslas are not light.

      The only solution is reducing personal vehicle usage as much as possible in urban areas. Of course there will always be some people who will genuinely need vehicles such as in rural areas but there is simply no reason to have the average person drive to and from their office or retail job every day. Its wasteful and harmful in so many ways.

      There needs to be a huge push to reclaim our cities and living spaces to bring back the liveability that we could have had. In my city some of the side streets were closed to cars and the change was incredible. Plants and seating filled the spots that would have once been a row of free parking. The streets are filled with the sounds of laughter instead of the roar of motors. The local pubs and cafes have benefited hugely. They didn't benefit at all from street side car parks that were always filled by people who have done 5 laps of the city looking for an empty park and do not intend to shop there.

      What is everyone's opinion on this topic and what can we do about it?

      64 votes