Heya!

Hope you’re doing just fine – here’s another quick update from your friends at Ponder! ☀️🎷

🦸‍♀️ So – Heroes.

Some weeks ago, German Design Magazine PAGE asked to publish a studio portrait about us. One of the headlines in their questionnaire read “Helden” (Heroes) – literally just that. While all the other sections in our shared document came together quickly, this one was left blank for quite a while. Interestingly enough, the answer we submitted in the end didn’t contain a single classic design legend, actually none of the people we listed is even related to the industry. Here’s what we wrote:

“While ‘hero’ is a big word, we do have great respect for people who work hard to solve big problems. People like Maja Göpel or Aladin El-Mafaalani, who make complex scientific facts easy to understand. People like Marlene Engelhorn or Sebastian Klein, who fight for less income inequality from a position of wealth. People like Tilo Jung, who never stop asking questions. People like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Leonore Gewessler, who maintain their integrity in politics despite all opposition.

But a designer who works hard to promote accessibility in a large corporation is also a hero, as is anyone who points out sexist behaviour to their male colleagues. And our intern who goes to her first workshop on her second day at work is a hero too!”

Maybe this little paragraph is a good indicator of our identity as a design studio: Design (in the widest sense) is certainly our craft, and we can certainly admire the results of that craftsmanship. But what really drives us is the issues, initiatives and people we design for. Design is just the toolset we happen to be good at – just as others might be good at writing or baking. Isn’t it interesting that we still broadly categorise organisations into these skill-based clusters (“design agency”) rather than clusters describing which cause the respective organisation supports?

Anyway – we talked about much more than our heroes and heroines, you can find the whole studio portrait here (scroll down for the English version):

Studio portrait in PAGE magazine

💶 Do you know where your bank invests your money?

No matter if you have 10€ in the bank or 100.000€, no matter if you invest or use a simple savings account: If you don’t actively choose otherwise, your money could end up funding industries you might not necessarily want to support. From fossil fuels to tobacco, weapons, you name it.

One of the players trying to change that, is a new European neobank (whose name shall not be disclosed) that we worked with over the last months: They aim to invest exclusively in companies that contribute towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In close collaboration with their product team we redefined the brand design language and helped set up a scalable design system, laying the foundation for their banking apps and other digital channels. We published some insights over at Instagram:

How we designed for Sustainable Banking

💾 A section for the nerds – we know you’re out there :)

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For the beginner nerd: We shared a bit about the inner workings of Ponder: Which digital tools do we rely on to keep the studio running and do our work efficiently and happily? Go find the 8+4 most essential tools over here.


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For the advanced nerd: Why we went full circle and set up a plain old self-hosted blog instead of betting on other shiny publishing options out there.

📚 Resources

As always, here are some handpicked resources that we can wholeheartedly recommend:

• [DE] “Wir von unten” by Natalya Nepomnyashcha is a great (audio)book on how social background determines career opportunities in our society
• Life centered design: An extensive curated directory of resources to help design more responsibly, sustainably and ethically
• This epic issue of the always great AI Newsletter by Luiza Jarovsky with great analysis of how AI is already hitting the job market across various industries.

🔔 Quick updates

• Just last Friday we joined the Sustainable UX Design Masterclass with Thorsten Jonas – always great to meet so many like minded folks!
  
  
• We finally managed to have new team pictures taken! Go find a first sneak peek as part of the studio portrait – and a big shout out to photographer Julius Gabele!
• We just wrapped up a nice little pro bono project, we can probably share results in the next few weeks :)
• We are also wrapping up our latest work for Grüne Fraktion im Bundestag – we’ll let you know when things can be shared 🙂

We say goodbye with a pretty sunset that Moritz is sharing from his current workation location in the Eifel.

Byeee! 👋