Weekly Roundup - Issue #10
I can’t believe I’ve done 10 of these and still do not have a name for the newsletter. ‘Weekly’ seems a misnomer given my publishing schedule but I can’t seem to think of a better one. I’ve started realizing a biweekly format fits well with me. It gives me time to reflect and frame what I need to write, in fact I feel naturally inspired to write about the 10 day mark.
Anyways, lets get to it…
Talking about design
While this is a masterclass in experimental typography which leaves you in awe and makes you want to get back to doing craft, I found this article on a particularly low day and it helped me feel better.
I need to get this quote framed
And of course the article is an illustration that the design process can’t be presented neatly like ‘a double diamond’ but it’s way more complex than that.
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A slide from Marc Stickdorn's talk – Doing is the hard part |
Further reading:
Marc Stickdorn’s talk – Doing is the hard part
Platforms and Platform Designers
I’ve somehow ended up being part of platform teams for most of my career as a designer and I resonated with what Gergely writes below in a tweet thread.
What are Platform teams, why are they important, and why do (almost) all high-growth companies and big tech have them? A thread.
— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) September 8, 2021
1. The easiest way to visualize Platform teams is blocks of specific types. Other teams (called Product/Program) use these “blocks” to build. pic.twitter.com/juBQLrskc6
Platform teams are usually created to solve engineering problems and like everyone else staffed on them, the designers need to have some understanding of how engineering works. Yes, it’s not a glamorous role like building a product but often these are crucial pieces to a user’s experience. Every ‘user’ on your product would experience the scope of a platform designer’s work. A ‘user’ would experience it when they signup, when the app is working smoothly, when they don’t get flooded with spammy notifications and when they want to secure their account.
Platform designers are service designers catering to all kinds of users including the internal ones and I strongly feel this is where the design systems team should be sitting given that it’s goals are about accessibility, reliability and consistency.
Further reading:
Andrey Gargul’s 7 things I learned from my 7 years at Shopify
I was able to frame my thoughts around this thanks to a conversation this week with Abhinit around platform teams.