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February 14, 2022

Weekly Roundup - Issue #16

Couple of weeks ago, I took part (as a speaker) in my first Twitter space. Hosted by Obvious, It had a few senior design folks talking about hiring designers and what they look out in designer portfolios. You can read a summary of what we discussed at the link below.

Creating a stand-out portfolio: Advice from design leaders - Obvious
Creating a stand-out portfolio: Advice from design leaders - Obvious
Applying to a design role or revamping your portfolio? Here are some tried-and-tested tips from design heavyweights at Obvious, Razorpay, Jiva, and smallcase.
obvious.in

It’s delightful to see a blogpost from someone who has spent so much time working as a designer in the industry. Catt’s public case studies are good references for IC designers looking to build their portfolio.

4 lessons from my dozen-year design career - The Catt Suite
4 lessons from my dozen-year design career - The Catt Suite
It’s been 12 years since I first became a Junior Web Designer. Here are four things I learned!
cattsmall.com

Based on my career experience of working with PMs as well as being part of PM Hiring panels in the last 4 years, I identify with almost all of what Sidu describes in his essay about ‘Hiring Product Managers’. There can be many other definitions out there but this is the one that describes the PM that I(a designer) would like to work with i.e., a PM that doesn’t gatekeep, understands their team’s strengths and gives everyone the space required to build a great product.

Prior to this, the essay about PMs that I most identified with is this one from GreylockVC. Yes, I have read ‘The hard thing about hard things’ but I felt the PM described there makes sense for a sales driven feature factory of the 90s and not a true product team.

Hiring Product Managers
If you take industry advice at face value, hiring a Product Manager seems to be the de facto solution to 99% of startup problems.
sidu.in

Have you ever wondered why those O'Reilly books had those animals on their covers? Well here’s how that book cover design came to be designed.

A short history of the O’Reilly animals – O’Reilly
A short history of the O’Reilly animals – O’Reilly
How lions, tigers, and tarsiers went geek.
www.oreilly.com

Laura Javier returns to write a hilarious post about Google slides years after she posted about designing Moments. Anyone who has used Slides will identify with this post.. I’ve pretty much given up on it and use images designed in Sketch/Figma if I need to use it. For my personal use, I prefer making presentations on Pitch.

Google Slides is Actually Hilarious | by Laura Javier | Feb, 2022 | Medium
Google Slides is Actually Hilarious | by Laura Javier | Feb, 2022 | Medium
Perhaps like you, I naively started out thinking that Google Slides was just a poorly maintained product suffering from some questionable foundational decisions made ages ago that worshipped at the…
medium.com

Hope you have a good week ahead! ✨

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