How to share your work and make it count — Why do some design critiques go really well, while others go sideways and make you wish you never came to work that day? Over the past decade I’ve presented design work hundreds of times. Some reviews left me feeling inspired and energized, ready to take the work to the next…

Our design team’s offsite focused on design polish — The Polishathon is born At a fast-paced startup, we spend so much time designing new experiences that sometimes we ignore the old ones. That’s why last week, the Gusto design team had a two-day offsite to focus on polish. We called it the Polishathon. …

How might we design delight? First, a few principles: — Before we can even think about creating delight, we need to remove frustration. If a product frustrates or confuses, it needs improvement to meet user’s basic expectations. Only when a product meets expectations and is usable do we have the opportunity to provide value in unexpected ways (to be delightful). Basic Expectations …

We’ve been using Figma’s team component library for 7 months now, and it is awesome. — About a year ago at Gusto we were talking about building a component library; the holy grail signifying a design team maturing from a startup to a team that puts value on process. A component library would let us design and build without bickering about consistency. …

Start with the weirdest design — I learned a lot of things in school. However one idea stuck with me, and informs my design process to this day. I’d like to share this idea with you: Imagine a circle. This circle represents the range of acceptable design solutions for a given problem. Within this range are…

Remember when everybody stopped using Photoshop and started using Sketch? It’s happening again. — There’s already been plenty written about why Figma is awesome so I’ll skip that for now. Instead I’d like to focus on how we use Figma to collaborate with our team at Gusto, and processes you can apply to your team. Why should you keep your team’s designs in Figma? 1. Organization and sharing are effortless

If you’ve ever accidentally sent an email before it was ready, you’ll know that familiar sense of dread that sinks from your throat down through your chest into the pit of your stomach, as you writhe in self-loathing and hatred. How could I be so dumb?? — Never again! With ‘Undo Send’ enabled, you can just ‘UNDO’ an email you didn’t mean to send. Bye-bye, embarrassment! Don’t forget to hit ‘Save Changes’ at the bottom.

-webkit-backdrop-filter:blur( ); — Love it or hate it, using selective gaussian blurs is an effective way to create depth in minimal, photo-centric UI designs. And now you can make it happen using CSS! However, this property is currently supported by only ~9% of browsers (but almost 75% of iPhones): As the feature becomes…

Reflect, Plan, Live, Repeat It’s March. If it wasn’t for Resolutions, I would have completely forgotten my personal goals for 2015. Forming new, positive habits can be challenging. It takes time, patience, and long-term commitment. Working on improving oneself, in whatever way, is one of life’s never-ending tasks. …